I got married in 2006. It was great, we’d decided to get married on a ski slope in Canada. We flew out with a group of friends, skied around for a week or so, got married on a slope, had drinks and food, skied some more and came home. Piece of cake! Or at least…
Zoom and Room: hidden labour — lawrie : converged
And think too about scale. This is not for a one-off, bespoke event instance. Try doing something for 600+ classes being taught across a 150 acre campus. I have one small bit of this repsonsibility, scheduling automated recordings in 50 classrooms and submitting videos for captioning for classes where there are standing accommodation requests. This semester alone we’ve seen an appreciable inflation of recording requests 40 more than last semester. And, during last semester we saw a giant increase from our single most busy semester prior to that Fall 2019 when we had a grand total of 20 scheduled recordings and 1 or 2 classes needing captions. So lets assess this numerically 2019, 20 classes, last semester Fall 2021, 60 classes and now this semester Spring 2022, it’s 100 classes and 15 with accommodation requests needing captions. Needless to say our staff (meaning me, a team of 1) has not grown or increased. And complaining about it doesn’t seem to be motivation for anyone in charge. So until a big disaster occurs, a ball gets dropped, or god-forbid I get sick and have to leave for a time, this all hinges on me. And that’s just for one small fraction of the overall pieces (our Classroom Tech support folks are bearing the brunt of the support and maintenance issues). So yes, think about the growth, try to get ahead of it, otherwise burn-out will occur.
Repeated rumors of tech layoffs since this year have made those in big tech companies psychologically prepared.
Tech Workers Are Resigned to Layoffs — Sixth Tone RSS
No surprise really that China, who has depended on 5% economic growth every year (or more in the early days), is slowly winding down the wild west, frontier days of their Internet behemoths, Weibo, Tencent and Alibaba. These companies gained dominance, now they can consolidate and cut costs by dumping workers. It’s all about the marginal returns now in China’s cloud services industry.
There are still plenty of remarkable “digital artifacts,” as I thought of them while I was combing through Ukrainian social media posts for Black Square—for instance, a Kyiv rockabilly musician posted a video of himself in his fatigues, crouching in a hallway, singing a song he wrote about Javelin missiles set to the tune of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.”
Perversions of Historical Memory
Sophie Pinkham, interviewed by Lucy Jakub – https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2022/03/12/perversions-of-historical-memory
Reading these lines absolutely breaks my heart in a way Jeff Tweedy and Wilco and Capitol Records could never do. It’s funny and sad duality conveys just how messed and artificially fraught the Russian invasion of Ukraine really is. All Putin need do is tell the troops to pull out and this misery has at least slowed down a bit instead of continuing to rise along some asymptotic wall going to infinity. Every individual Sophie Pinkham mentions is a novel and essay unto themselves, universes dwell there. The only upside is the misery and despondency of barrel bombs and endless destruction of buildings/apartment blocks hasn’t reached the scale of Syria. Let’s hope it doesn’t ever get that far.
https://micro.blog/aaronpk/12584357
Yes luggage rolly-wheels do suck stringy fibres up into them. I also notice this with office chairs too. One could build a wig out of all the human hair wrapped around the axles of all the Herman Miller chairs in the offices where I work.
Today I learned about a book written in 1989 by a sociologist named Ray Oldenberg.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4119.The_Great_Good_Place
But the way I came upon it was via a discussion between educators at UW-Bothell, who are trying to adopt more “open technologies” for teaching. Alternate paths to the Learning Management System are desired, in an effort to make learning and the process of learning more visible, less containerized and siloed generally. There’s an interesting talk shared by Jim Groom of a short presentation he gave on a historic antecedent to educational blogs, digital scholarship that was termed “Eduglu”. Link to that blog post + video is here:
Within that talk right near the end, Chris Lott steps in and talks about the behaviors, phenomenon occurring when open tools are used and a community or interactive space builds up around them. The “hope” is a Ray Oldenberg-like 3rd space will manifest itself. The 3rd space is numerically located after 1.) Home and 2.) Work. It’s the space where you can engage communally with neighbors, locals, it’s not exclusive or private. However it’s not virtual and that’s vitally important, as even Ray Oldenburg points out in this interview with Steelcase.com (the office furniture manufacturers – who BTW are heavily invested in non-virtual offices).
Ray is asked point-blank the following question:
Is social media a new form of third place?
https://www.steelcase.com/research/articles/topics/design-q-a/q-ray-oldenburg/
To wit Ray answers decidedly: “No”
“Virtual” means that something is like something else in both essence and effect, and that’s not true in this instance.
https://www.steelcase.com/research/articles/topics/design-q-a/q-ray-oldenburg/
So Steelcase were really trying to get expert opinion that supports their business of equipping physical offices in rented/leased buildings managed by property owners. It’s a by-product of capitalism as practiced in the 20th Century, as-is Ray’s book about 3rd places. Without the suburb, the office, why do we need a 3rd place? It really calls into question the whole “system”, and who is it really benefiting? Suburbs were places that took in people escaping cities (wealthy white people), offices existed for the benefit of housing the white collar workers who smoothed the daily transactions of business, even as that became automated (more whiteness). So who are the target market for 3rd spaces? It’s most likely privileged white folks who need an escape from home and work and a greater need for belonging outside those 2 spheres. I think I would elect instead to simplify and pare down. I don’t need no stinking 3rd space to further compartmentalize or double my personality into work self, home self and 3rd place selves.
Instead I would rather re-integrate and become whole again and be myself in one space, and that would leave the Home. That sounds a little insular, selfish and self-centered I know. But I have been able to experiment with that a bit while working from home temporarily from March 2020 to August 2021. And I hope to get more chances to work from home in future too. That to me is the best compromise of all. And gives me all the places I need. It’s enough, ’twill do.
Prototypes now available for testing Arm has made available for testing prototypes of its Morello architecture, aimed at bringing features into the design of CPUs that provide greater robustness and make them resistant to certain attack vectors. If it performs as expected, it will likely become a fundamental part of future processor designs.…
Arm rages against the insecure chip machine with new Morello architecture — The Register
Being a fanboi/supporter of Wikipedia.org, I’ve had occasion to spend long hours, Saturday afternoons, tripping through the wires and links of articles on the History of Computing. You can bet I stumbled into more than a few interesting sidelines, dead-ends, and orphaned ideas and projects along the way. One of them was interesting in that it was “later” when Mini computers were on the verge of being eclipsed, meaning after Intel+MS+IBM were beginning to create a new industry called “desktop computing”.
An idea that had been bouncing around as more Time-shared, mainframe computing was sweeping through Academia and Business was a way to stop those pesky “hackers” and internal threats from savaging the Data Center computers. Grand efforts in past had included the idea of “shells” within the OS. Multics was both plauded and derided for its attempt at architecting in privilege and security levels. Especially since the target was being a compute “utility” like a power/gas company where users from ANYWHERE could all get a time-slice of a giant GE645 dual-cpu mainframe. The question was how can you get 1,000 users on one machine and not have someone ‘sploiting the computer and it’s time-sharing users? One possible solution was to define “capabilities” rather than the Multics idea of shells. Capabilities were somewhat like a Kerberos style ticket/privilege based on the function of what you had access to. Login, that’s a ticket, File System, that’s a ticket, printer, that’s a ticket. And to me “capabilities” are reminiscent of clearly defined and narrowly scoped privileges. Whether it was as explicitly laid out as Kerberos, or as vague as “shells” didn’t matter. Capability could be given/rescinded independent of the users group memberships, and can be logged/monitored in real time independent of user running any commands during a live login session. It’s pretty robust. But it was really just a research area originally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security.
Some attempts were made to put Capabilities based security into the software. But one interesting example built it into hardware as well to reinforce and parallel capabilities throughout the whole computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_computer. Cambrige built the CAP computer to prove out the ideas. Capabilities were engineered into the registers of the CPU! Talk about level of detail. The central thesis being that if the CPU depended on capabilities to function, the ability to circumvent, and override would be much lower. One could not load anything into a memory address anywhere without first having the defined “capability”. So processes couldn’t really masquarade or “overflow” as such, the way that C/C++ programs allocate/de-allocate and pointer to locations in memory. First you have the capability. THEN you perform the action. Likely this will slow performance say versus and unbridled, machine code driven OS where instructions per clock cycle are of utmost importance. But in an environment where separation/security/privilege levels is of utmost imporance, capabilities is the way to go. When I read this about the new ARM Morello chip, I immediately went back to Wikipedia to remember, lookup what I had bumped into re: Capability computing.
In recent times Rust programming language has captured a lot of imaginations when it comes to securing OS level code and eliminating the many exploits possible with C/C++ memory allocation and overflows. Rust has been touted and recognized as less susceptible to the past, historical pathways of exploitation at the OS/driver levels. But there’s still the matter of the BIOS/Firmware and the novel ways exploits have been found in Intel’s own implementation of firmware on the CPU. Obfuscation of the Intel firmware has only made it more frustrating as new CVEs get announced of a SPECTRE/MELTDOWN style exploit that seizes control of the cpu, and bypasses all hardware security much less software security on the system. I’m glad to see capability based security at a hardware level being researched. And if we can pair this effort of ARM Morello with new work being done re-writing critical OS kernel and driver software in Rust, we may “just” start to turn things in the right direction of protecting systems by default. Too often the exploits are remediated after they’re discovered, and not engineered out from the start. And then, mostly ‘cuz “performance” being the only measure by which a silicon integrated circuit is judged, we don’t get security by default. Can’t wait to see what ARM comes up with and who decides to license the new design.
This hotel room costs less than a deluxe bowl of ramen, but you’d better come prepared. For budget travelers in Japan who’re looking for a cheap place to spend the night, capsule hotels are the first thing that comes to mind, since they often charge less than 5,000 yen (US$43) a night. The downside, though,…
Crazy cheap hotel in Tokyo comes with a crazy catch【Photos】 — SoraNews24 -Japan News-
This hotel is on a major thoroughfare through Edogawa-ku. This is also the area where I visit/stay whenever I’m in Japan. The airport Limousine bus makes stops at Ichinoe station and Kasai station along this same road. In fact, I think the bus may stop right IN FRONT of this hotel when it stop at Ichinoe. Ah, such memories. I haven’t visited Japan since 2019. I do hope to return in 2022. I have my fingers crossed.
They only “said” they changed the recipe but it’s still the same. In this metaphor, I’m clapping back to Mark Zoidberg and his renaming of the FakeBook to Meta-statis.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22761598/facebook-facial-recognition-meta
Big announcement this week from the newly renamed FaceBook entity to “meta” by ZuckerburgCo. Facebook is changing the embrace and exploitation of Face Recognition (which they have already sold/re-sold to the likes of anyone paying into their platform to get to the data). Dropping and deleting the vast Face Recognition database is being sold as an innate good to humanity, not least of which includes all the subscribers to Facebook. But don’t be too quick to rush to judgement and accept this at face value. Because as ZuckerburgCo. knows, it’s all about the slippery wording.
Vox.com has an article out today (link above) more or less emphatically contradicting the big announcment over the deletion of Facial Recognition databases. In it the pull quote below:
For any potential future applications of technologies like this, we’ll continue to be public about intended use, how people can have control over these systems and their personal data, and how we’re living up to our responsible innovation framework.”
https://www.vox.com/recode/22761598/facebook-facial-recognition-meta
That quote is meta speaking for meta’s future intentions re: Bio-metric data y’all. What is a responsible innovation framework, anyways? I thought they were deleting the facial recognition data. This sounds like a contradictory, misleading, soft-ball. Like a caveat at the end of a definitive statement. It appears that meta has future applications for bio-metric data that could pale in comparison to the Face Recognition for Facebook vers. 1. And the meta-verse is just the beginning of this new round of personal privacy invasion/collection by ZuckerburgCo. You’ve been warned, caveat emptor.
Lots of fun with green screen on the BlackMagic Design ATEM Mini Extreme switcher, doing virtual studio “visits” to other youtubers. Much fun is had, and the quality of the key’d in backgrounds is pretty darned good for the price. BMD for the win.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 