The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing. If you look for reasons for why companies do layoffs, the reason is that everybody else is doing it. Layoffs are the result of imitative behavior and are not particularly evidence-based.

I’ve had people say to me that they know layoffs are harmful to company well-being, let alone the well-being of employees, and don’t accomplish much, but everybody is doing layoffs and their board is asking why they aren’t doing layoffs also.

Do you think layoffs in tech are some indication of a tech bubble bursting or the company preparing for a recession?

Could there be a tech recession? Yes. Was there a bubble in valuations? Absolutely. Did Meta overhire? Probably. But is that why they are laying people off? Of course not. Meta has plenty of money. These companies are all making money. They are doing it because other companies are doing it.

Shell is a thing you want to understand and then not use, because you learned to understand it. (in German, from 1998 )

For the rest of this discussion, we assume “Python 3” as an instance of “something else”, but if you are older than 50, feel free to use “Perl” instead.

If you are already doing Python, the rest of this is not for you. You already know these things.

In the past 10 years, the median size for a desktop webpage has gone from 468 KB to 2284 KB, a 388.3% increase. For mobile, this jump is even more staggering — 145 KB to 2010 KB — a whopping 1288.1% increase.

That’s a lot of weight to ship over a network, especially for mobile. As a result, users experience terrible UX, slow loading times, and a lack of interactivity until everything is rendered. But all that code is necessary to make our sites work the way we want.

This is the problem with being a frontend dev today. What started out fun for frontend developers, building shit-hot sites with all the bells and whistles, has kinda turned into not fun. We’re now fighting different browsers to support, slow networks to ship code over, and intermittent, mobile connections. Supporting all these permutations is a giant headache.

How do we square this circle? By heading back to the server (Swiss basement not required).

The concept of radical novelties is of contemporary significance because, while we are ill-prepared to cope with them, science and technology have now shown themselves expert at inflicting them upon us. Earlier scientific examples are the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics; later technological examples are the atom bomb and the pill. For decades, the former two gave rise to a torrent of religious, philosophical, or otherwise quasi-scientific tracts. We can daily observe the profound inadequacy with which the latter two are approached, be it by our statesmen and religious leaders or by the public at large. So much for the damage done to our peace of mind by radical novelties.

I raised all this because of my contention that automatic computers represent a radical novelty and that only by identifying them as such can we identify all the nonsense, the misconceptions and the mythology that surround them. Closer inspection will reveal that it is even worse, viz. that automatic computers embody not only one radical novelty but two of them.

What turns weakness into catastrophe is monoculture. All software has flaws, all systems have weaknesses, and you design around that by having multiple different systems with different weaknesses. If the world's banana crop is a single strain, then a single pathogen can take out the lot.

You're not going to harden your IT infrastructure by rewriting Active Directory in FORTH under VMS, much as such an exercise may appeal to the more perversely creative. But the more experience you have of seeing things done differently, of analyzing and understanding systems that don't make the current industry standard assumptions, the better you'll be at assessing and working with different contemporary options.

The Braille Institute has developed a font - free to download - that's designed to be clearer for readers with lower vision.

An example of one of the aspects of low legibility that they tackled attached.

It's named Atkinson Hyperlegible. Here's where you can read about the font and download it: https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont

On 14 January 2023, we celebrate World Logic Day. In the city of Kurt Gödel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle, mathematical logic and its application to the sciences have a long and rich tradition. This January, we welcome Dov Gabbay (King’s College London and University of Luxembourg) as speaker at the Vienna World Logic Day Lecture.

The third edition of the lecture series is welcoming Prof. Dav Gabbay who will talk about “Logic and Argumentation for the 21st Century”.

Personally, I didn't come to any particular harm by the quarantines.
I had good fortune, they weren't traumatic times for me. What were
those times like? They were "like nothing else," but also they were
remarkably like "nothing." They felt somewhat like a general strike
or a hurricane evacuation, but they also had this novel sci-fi
vacuity to the textture of the days. Huge, surreal absences. The
lack of transport nose and any sky-contrails was a big aspect. The
people were in hiding from one another, but also the big machines
were absent and silent.

In Österreich würde ich so eine Studie ja gerne mal für Accenture sehen ...

Smart cities

This was a hopeful slogan to unite a scattered series of approaches
to urbanism. There's no unifying "smartness" there. Google being
ignominously chased out of Toronto with pitchforks was probably the
Waterloo for this.

Web3, NFTs

It seems pretty clear now that this impressive craze was not so much
"blockchain art" as "lockdown art." It's what art people do
culturally when they're not allowed out of the house. One of the
most entertaining cultural freakouts I ever personally witnessed,
but it was convulsive and in many ways quite sad.

In 02023, people are becoming poorer, their lifespans are shorter;
food costs more, and housing is worse. You'd think there would be
more focussed, radical indignation about such an obvious bad scene
-- a culture in visible decline -- but the temper of the times seems
to welcome it, somehow.

...

I don't like begin a year with gloomy, elaborate whining; that like
a privileged luxury that people have when Mom's not chased in exile
and Dad's not under arms in a trench. And yet, I do realize that
my customary futurist speculative habits have become old-fashioned.
I'm from a tech-obsessed subculture, so it's my habit to look for
scientific and industrial innovations and assume they're gonna alter
the world's situation.

That's not what happens in this decade. I'm aware that I need
better methods.

There's something very Twenty-Twenties about attempting and failing
to "turn the page" on inconvenient truths that can't and don't go
away. That's why each year tends to repeat the last. I wouldn't
call that "moral cowardice," because people do not, and cannot,
really ignore the pervasive problems -- they do see them, and tend
to complain quite consistently about the same issues, year after
year. But, without ever getting much done about them. It's rare to
see any public problem that's analyzed, agreed-upon, confronted,
dealt with and dismissed. All the "crises" tend to thrive, and to
mutate into long-term shambolic debacles. It's a decade that feels
the need to marinate in its own distresses -- doomscrolling as a
way-of-life.

"When you can't imagine how things are going to change, things
change in ways that are unimaginable."

In other words, web0 is web3 without all the corporate right-libertarian Silicon Valley bullshit.

This is why many people in IT drink heavily.

Caching and prefetching were used in mainframe computers dating back to the 1960s. For instance, the IBM System/360 Model 91 (1966) had a cache with prefetching. Minicomputers such as the VAX 11/780 (1977) later used caching and prefetching. However, these features took a while to trickle down to microprocessors. The Motorola 68000 (1980) had a 4-byte prefetch queue. As far as I can tell, the 8086 was the first microprocessor with a prefetch queue.

We can view the 8086 as a stepping-stone towards the large caches first used externally in the 80386 and internally in the 486. The 80186 and 80286 kept the 6-byte prefetch buffer size of the 8086. The 80386 has a 16-byte prefetch buffer, although apparently due to a bug it was shrunk to 12 bytes in later revisions. As well as the prefetch queue, the 80386 supported an external cache.

http://↑↑↓↓←→←→ba.tk/

Yup, copy and paste that into your browser and it will resolve.

Right before the holiday season, LastPass published an update on their breach. As people have speculated, this timing was likely not coincidental but rather intentional to keep the news coverage low. Security professionals weren’t amused, this holiday season became a very busy time for them. LastPass likely could have prevented this if they were more concerned about keeping their users secure than about saving their face.

Their statement is also full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies. As I know that not everyone can see through all of it, I thought that I would pick out a bunch of sentences from this statement and give some context that LastPass didn’t want to mention.

The Sierpiński triangle (sometimes spelled Sierpinski), also called the Sierpiński gasket or Sierpiński sieve, is a fractal attractive fixed set with the overall shape of an equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles. Originally constructed as a curve, this is one of the basic examples of self-similar sets—that is, it is a mathematically generated pattern that is reproducible at any magnification or reduction. It is named after the Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński, but appeared as a decorative pattern many centuries before the work of Sierpiński.

“It feels good to run a bar when the people really need one,” Dad confided to Nikola, “but here at my ‘Stairway-of-Calvary,’ it seems that every night finishes sad.”

“Pop, they’re already sad people. They were sad before they got in here.”