Notes

On the Infrastructure bill allotting funding for broadband internet:

Unfortunately, a ton of that money is going to be given to giant telecom monopolies with a long history of empty promises and half-completed networks. But an impressive chunk will also wind up in the hands of smaller broadband ISPs, cooperatives, city-owned electrical utilities, and municipal broadband networks, allowing them to build fiber access out into areas that would have never seen service otherwise.

High speed internet is no longer a luxury. It powers today’s world and everyone deserves to have access to affordable, fast internet.

Monopolistic corporations have other ideas:

Cox is very upset that not all of the state’s share of infrastructure bill broadband money is going to Cox, so they’re trying to pretend the process was somehow flawed

You wonder how much they’re just going to pocket and say the did something anyway.

I’m for anything that will open up even a modicum of competition and give people access to the Internet.

Go to The Verge (just to poke at a site I generally like) without an ad blocker, open up the Network panel in DevTools and just let ‘er rip. I’m seeing 400+ requests. That’s tracking at work. You can even just sit there and watch it continue to make requests over time, even while you’re doing nothing. JavaScript is whirring, soaking up whatever data it can, setting cookies, and blasting data along with your precious IP address to god-knows-where. All those requests are slowing down the site, costing you bandwidth, laughing at your privacy, and causing legislation that at least you have to click a giant content-blocking banner with a “yes, this is fine.” button.

This is why I run an ad blocker. Contextual ads as Chris alludes to aren’t bad, they are often quite relevant to what you’re looking at. I however don’t need my web experience worsened and what little privacy I have on the web invaded for some random company to display some ad that might not even be all that effective.

The journey towards information is important. Humans retain information better they had to put effort in to get. Aimlessly browsing to find things you may not have heard of yet is as important as discovery is exciting.

I love getting lost on Wikipedia, going from one weird fact to another.

I used to love that on YouTube before everyone and their pet wanted to become an influencer and follow formulaic and manipulative patterns to create their content.

I remember first getting the internet at home in the mid-1990s and aimlessly browsing different sites on a super slow dialup connection. I’ve continued to do that of late, checking out the various blogs of the developer communities I follow on Mastodon and Bluesky. The web needs more of this.

It’s a scary thought that with some of the escalating conflict in the world, the GPS system we and the economy as a whole relies upon is vulnerable and a backup unavailable.

And because of course Congress is Congress, here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

GOWARD: Russia and China both have terrestrial systems that can give them GPS-like information in the event that signals from space are not available. Unfortunately, in the U.S., we shut ours off in 2010, and we have no sign of starting up something like that again.

WONG: Before GPS, the United States had a system called LORAN. That's an acronym for Long Range Navigation. It was a relic of World War II - a couple dozen 700-foot ground towers spread across the country that transmitted powerful radio signals - not as accurate as GPS, but it got the job done. In 2004, the Bush administration not only wanted to keep LORAN as a backup to GPS. It wanted to upgrade it to make it more precise.

GOWARD: The money for that was taken away in the various budget processes, and the old system was shut down without new replacement.

HEGYI: That shutdown happened during the Obama administration. They had a completely different view than the Bush administration and called LORAN obsolete in the era of satellite navigation. But then, a few years later, they said, oops, our bad.

GOWARD: We shouldn't have shut down that old system. We should have upgraded. We're going to do that. But again, nothing happened.

WONG: So in 2018, Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Transportation to build a backup to GPS by the year 2020, but then they didn't appropriate enough cash to do that.

Sigh...

Months later, marketing and management requests have continued non-stop and (of course) you’ve had no time to lace everything up. You think back to that fateful decision to implement a quick fix, not anticipating that the organization would utilize it on a daily basis, requiring constant updates for every unique sales avenue. In your haste, you built a system that is functionally not operable within the rest of the ecosystem—and you are now subject to that decision. As the requests take longer and longer to work, questions start to arise: “Is our developer losing his touch? Why is this taking so long when it used to take minutes?”

I feel this on a deep spiritual level. All too often we are asked to get features out the door as soon as possible to meet an immediate business need and are not always given the time later to clean the code up to make the system better.

Tech debt is real, and eventually comes for us all.

If you need to change a line of code, simply ask yourself two questions:

• Where did I get the inputs?
• Who relies on the outputs?

Answering these questions might not be simple; but, considering the code in this light removes the air of mystery and reduces the problem down to a set of quantifiable values.

Capability makes your life simpler. Tolerance, skills, knowledge, and health are always with you, wherever you go. They are assets but they take up no space. They are stored in your body.

Some lack capability through no fault of their own, but anyone can increase their capability. It’s an investment that pays dividends every day.

I listen to my music and no calls can interrupt me. No notifications can interrupt me. No in-the-moment actions can pause my music. I can take an earbud out and there's no algorithm that pauses or unpauses my music. I can't ask Siri about a song.

This is calm.

I definitely understand where Tom is coming from. While there is definitely some awesomeness to AirPods and the like, there’s still something awesome about the old school iPod.

This is why "give us your email address for 30% discount" popups and account signup forms are suddenly everywhere. Email addresses are stable, long-lived reidentifiers. Overt mechanisms like this are already replacing third-party cookies. Make no mistake: post-removal, tracking will continue for long as reidentification has perceived positive economic value. The only way to change that equation is legislation; anything else is a band-aid.

I’m kind of curious as to how much email aliases can help with this, and I don’t mean the ‘+’ in the email trick. I use FastMail for my email and can create truly unique emails for services I sign up for. Granted they all share the same domain, but they’re still different. It’s obviously not a panacea, but maybe something?

Not to diminish the harm that can come from layoffs—they can absolutely be traumatic and devastating, and we desperately need better safety nets. But I also want to name the sense of relief and opportunity that often emerges after a big rupture, the generative combination of fuck it and what’s possible now? energy that leads people in directions they had long considered impractical but which now seem ripe for exploration. I see this experience a bit like what happens after an intense fire burns a stretch of forest down to ash: seeds that were dormant and waiting for just that moment suddenly germinate and stretch up to the clear, bright sun.

A secret I share about these transitions is that big changes only make sense in hindsight. Some day, years from now most likely, you’ll look back and tell a beautiful story of getting laid off or fired or whathaveyou, and how from that dark and terrible moment came a new beginning. But when you are in the thick of it, when you don’t yet have the gift of a rearview mirror, it won’t feel anything like providence. You’ll feel like you’re flailing about and you’ll want to scream or cry or both at the same time. Your boots will stick in the mud and your ropes will fray and you’ll lose your flint on the coldest night. It will be chaos. But it was chaos that birthed the universe. It is from chaos that many great stories begin. You’ll tell yours in time. First, you have to live it.

Just a thought about tough times...

It looks like everyone's favourite FIDO token provider might have an unpatchable vulnerability! Much Sturm und Drang from the usual sources. But how bad is it really? Not so bad - but it does expose some weaknesses in the very idea of having physical tokens.

It also looks like the attacker will need:

• Physical access to key
• Username & password tied to account protected by key
• $11,000 worth of equipment

So yes, it doesn’t seem to be an “easy” attack, but geez…it’s always something.

Samsung and Google provide Android OS updates and security updates for seven years. Apple halts servicing products seven years after they stop selling them.

That might not cut it in the auto world, where the average age of cars on US roads is only going up. A recent report found that cars and trucks just reached a new record average age of 12.6 years, up two months from 2023. That means the car software hitting the road today needs to work—and maybe even improve—beyond 2036. The average length of smartphone ownership is just 2.8 years.

It’s not something that you might think about, but with all the technology in cars, how long will the tech be supported? Cars can last a long time if well maintained. Tech seems to be somewhat expendable.

My Honda Civic is now 10 years old and I don’t plan on getting rid of it anytime soon. The only “tech” I have in my car is the standard entertainment system, but newer cars have a whole lot more between cellular connectivity and much more.

Is it all going to be maintained and supported? Are security updates going to continue for the life of the car? What will GM, Ford, Honda and others consider the “life of the car”?