Product professionals (whether designers, PMs, or developers) would do well to take away the same lesson: we ask too much of our tools. Doing perfect Agile will not produce good software, but that’s not Agile’s fault.

A lot of people ask me, what should we use instead? My answer is always: use your brain.

A tasty, self-hostable Git server for the command line. 🍦

Right now, I want to talk about the heritage of these input/output mechanisms. Why is it that punched paper tape and the teleprinter were the most obvious way to interact with the first electronic computers? As you might suspect, the arrangement was one of convenience. Paper tape punches and readers were already being manufactured, as were teleprinters. They were both used for communications.

Wer in letzter Zeit auf einer Demonstration in Wien war, hat sie vermutlich bemerkt: Die Polizei setzt Drohnen ein, um Teilnehmer*innen vom Himmel aus zu beobachten. Aktuell baut das Innenministerium die Drohnenüberwachung aus. Dafür legte es sich ein „IMSI-Catcher-System zur Verwendung mit Drohnen“ zu.

Mit dieser Anschaffung wird eine neue Ära der Überwachung eingeläutet. Die Kombination aus Drohnen und IMSI-Catcher ermöglicht es, Personen unbemerkt zu überwachen oder Teilnehmer*innen von Versammlungen zu identifizieren.

I experienced the disconnect between the torture I was comfortable with and the torture that drove me away during my first year in college. As I've mentioned here a few times, most recently in my post on Niklaus Wirth, from an early age I had wanted to become an architect (the kind who design houses and other buildings, not software). I spent years reading about architecture and learning about the profession. I even took two drafting courses in high school, including one in which we designed a house and did a full set of plans, with cross-sections of walls and eaves.

Then I got to college and found two things. One, I still liked architecture in the same way as I always had. Two, I most assuredly did not enjoy the kind of grunt work that architecture students had to do, nor did I relish the torture that came with not seeing a path to a solution for a thorny design problem.

That was so different from the feeling I had writing BASIC programs. I would gladly bang my head on the wall for hours to get the tiniest detail just the way I wanted it, either in the code or in the output. When the torture ended, the resulting program made all the pain worth it. Then I'd tackle a new problem, and it started again.

In December 2023, Voyager started sending back gibberish instead of data. A software glitch, though perhaps caused by an underlying hardware problem; a cosmic ray strike, or a side effect of the low temperatures, or just aging equipment randomly causing some bits to flip.

The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — the operating system, as it were. And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.

Die NZZ wurde im vergangenen Frühjahr Opfer eines solchen Angriffs und hat sich dazu entschieden, die Hintergründe publik zu machen. Dass die meisten angegriffenen Unternehmen schweigen, spielt den Erpressern in die Hände. Ein Angriff gilt als Versagen. Dabei kann es jeden treffen. Die NZZ ist überzeugt, dass die Lehren aus dem eigenen Cyberangriff anderen Firmen helfen können, sich vor Ransomware-Banden zu schützen.

... he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.

Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.

Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:

• Making chalk mark on generator $1.
• Knowing where to make mark $9,999.

Ford paid the bill.

For decades, robots.txt governed the behavior of web crawlers. But as unscrupulous AI companies seek out more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.

In what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors. A version of this post was originally published on my personal blog, Berthub.eu.

Der VwGH hielt fest, dass unzweifelhaft ist, dass es sich bei Errechnung der Arbeitsmarktchancen durch das AMAS um "Profiling" handelt. Damit kann diese Art der Datenverarbeitung eine automatisierte Einzelfallentscheidungen im Sinne des Art. 22 DSGVO darstellen, die ohne eine gesetzliche Grundlage verboten wären. Dabei kommt es entscheidend darauf an, ob die Entscheidung der MitarbeiterInnen des AMS über die Zuordnung der arbeitssuchenden Personen maßgeblich von den automatisiert errechneten Arbeitsmarktchancen bestimmt wird.

Die Frage der Maßgeblichkeit der automatisch errechneten Arbeitsmarktchancen auf das Vorgehen der MitarbeiterInnen hatte das BVwG jedoch nicht geprüft. Wäre das Vorliegen einer automatisierten Einzelfallentscheidung zu bejahen, sei ferner die Frage zu stellen, ob eine gesetzliche Rechtfertigung für die Anwendung der automatisierten Entscheidungsfindung besteht, was ebenfalls nicht geprüft wurde.

Im Mai des Vorjahres erklärte Kocher, dass sein Haus eine "kleine Datenbank der wichtigsten Lebensmittel des täglichen Bedarfs" andenke. Weiterreichende Ideen wie eine Preiskommission kamen für Türkis-Grün zwar nicht infrage, aber eine Art staatliche Preis-App am Handy solle immerhin für eine "bessere Vergleichbarkeit" sorgen, so Kocher. Überdies war die Rede von besseren Rahmenbedingungen für private Programmiererinnen und Programmierer, damit diese ähnliche Datenbanken anbieten können. Es geht dabei vor allem darum, dass die Privaten an die Preisinformationen der Supermärkte kommen.

All dies solle "so rasch wie möglich" kommen, so Kocher im Mai 2023. Konkret: noch im Herbst desselben Jahres. Die Preis-App oder ähnliche Maßnahmen sollten also bereits seit Monaten umgesetzt sein – tatsächlich gibt es bisher keine Spur davon.

It is unfortunate that people dealing with computers often have little interest in the
history of their subject. As a result, many concepts and ideas are propagated and
advertised as being new, which existed decades ago, perhaps under a different
terminology. I believe it worth while to occasionally spend some time to consider the
past and to investigate how terms and concepts originated.

We had four lawyers, three privacy experts, and two campaigners look at Microsoft's new Service Agreement, and none of our experts could tell if Microsoft plans on using your personal data – including audio, video, chat, and attachments from 130 products, including Office, Skype, Teams, and Xbox – to train its AI models.

If nine experts in privacy can't understand what Microsoft does with your data, what chance does the average person have? That's why we're asking Microsoft to say if they're going to use our personal data to train its AI.

Microsoft is using this announcement as an opportunity to upsell customers on their security products, which are apparently necessary to run their identity and collaboration products safely!

This is morally indefensible, just as it would be for car companies to charge for seat belts or airplane manufacturers to charge for properly tightened bolts. It has become clear over the past few years that Microsoft’s addiction to security product revenue has seriously warped their product design decisions, where they hold back completely necessary functionality for the most expensive license packs or as add-on purchases

The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP.

I contend Starship Troopers (1997) wasn't recognized as a satire of fascism because almost all of the obvious and over-the-top media manipulation, propaganda, disinformation, hero worship, &c in the film were entirely too familiar for audiences to cognize or understand.

To Verhoeven or Carpenter the political landscape of the western world and america in particular was already a sea of manipulated citizens gleefully worshiping anything their leaders would deign to fool them with.

I don't think Starship Troopers and They Live and RoboCop and similar films were "ahead of their time", or "prescient". In the same way "The Simpsons" hasn't predicted anything. The creators just had a much more accurate understanding of reality than their peers or the general public. They made works to show the comically obvious and nauseatingly banal places these ideologies would lead us.

These creators were dismissed as cranks or hacks making genre pictures. Their work wasn't seen as the well-reasoned and artfully made critiques of society they really were. Their cultural criticism was so dead on that only people with a historical frame of reference or a critical eye caught it. The [purposeful] lack of political education and media literacy in the dominant culture meant that the real messages of these films sailed over the heads of the people who most needed to hear, understand, and internalize them.

In July 2004 I found myself sitting alone in the dark, on the enclosed deck of a ferry boat oozing between fog-shrouded islands of the Alaskan coast. The scenery was haunting, but after the first three hours, I decided to occupy myself by finally reading Neal Stephenson's essay about the command-line. Halfway through it I began crossing things out, and scribbling comments in the margin. The essay was five years old, and in dire need of a fresh perspective.

Months later, I learned that Stephenson himself was dissatisfied with the essay. He wrote that it, "is now badly obsolete and probably needs a thorough revision." An "Ask Slashdot" poll quoted him as saying, "I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely."

Though I have fleshed out my original comments into longer, more structured pieces, it is not my intention to replace or revise Neal Stephenson's original writing. His original essay is a much more cohesive and entertaining read than my notes are. (He is a Writer, after all. I consider myself a code-monkey by comparison.) In fact, my notes do not hold together unless they use the original essay as a framework, and that's why his entire essay is reproduced here, with my comments color-coded. And yes, I have sought and obtained permission from Neal to do this.

Erst im Januar 2022 vermeldete die Unfallkasse einen Cyberangriff, bei dem "alle Server" mit einer Ransomware verschlüsselt wurden. Auch damals kam es zu weitreichenden Ausfällen über einen Zeitraum von mehreren Wochen, während die IT-Systeme neu aufgesetzt wurden. Die zuständigen Administratoren dürften darin also inzwischen geübt sein.