Author: geoff

“Mob” thinking among the oligarchs

This:

“The rich rabble is marked by the ‘corruptness’ which manifests in the fact that the rabble ‘takes everything for granted for itself’ because he denies the right to any of the ethical, legal, or statist institutions…[it assumes] an economically determined state of nature, in which it can also assume the economic right of the fittest.” It also believes in conspiracy, because it experiences itself politically as a conspirator, as part of a self-interested group only working for its own ends.

(Frank Ruda, quoted by John Ganz. )

Thoughts on personal social media strategy

Quite a few of my friends have been posting about their uncertainty about if and how to use social media going forward. Musk rendered X/Twitter toxic, and now Zuckerberg is capitulating to MAGA and abandoning moderation on Facebook. I posted the following as a comment on one of these threads, and decided to repeat it here:

I think the best approach is going to be dual-track: Bluesky plus personal blog. Longer form content on the blog, ephemeral interactions (plus notifications of blog updates) on Bluesky. (Or whatever supersedes Bluesky.) This is what folks like Scalzi and Emptywheel are doing.

What FB and Twitter have taught us is that relying on a single platform is risky/unwise/disappointing. Migrating old content is awful, but do you really want to lose your history? And setting up and running a WordPress instance is operationally trivial and pretty affordable.

Right now, I have four daily feed sources. (Too many, but 🤷?)
– Email, for all of the newsletters (including many Substack sources).
– Feedly, for all of the blogs and news sources that provide RSS feeds.
– Facebook, for family and friends.
– Bluesky, for ephemeral stuff.

An update on the new laptop

A couple of months ago I posted here about my new Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge laptop. I thought I should update you on my progress. I just posted the following to the Samsung support forum…..

I acquired a Galaxy Book 4 Edge laptop for personal use to explore the new features of Windows Copilot+ PCs. Unfortunately, I’m finding it difficult to do so because of strange issues with the GB4E. I’ve compared notes with colleagues who are using various Copilot+ laptops, and these issues occur only on the GB4E.

I enrolled the system in the Windows Insider program (Dev channel) to get early access to new Windows features like Recall. The Insider program uses the Feedback Hub application to track any problems. However when I try to start Feedback Hub, I am told that because I’m “on a tented project” I will need to sign in with an AAD account. Since this is a personal machine, I do not have such an account. I have no problems using Feedback Hub on any of my other computers.

Next, I tried to set up the new Recall application. When I did so, it instructed me to “Turn on device encryption” in Settings. I checked with System Information, and the GB4E supports device encryption. However, when I did so, I got a generic error message, and although device encryption appears to be activated, it advises me that “Some drives can’t be managed with device encryption.” The only drive on my system is the built-in SSD. When I restart Recall, it repeats the instruction to “Turn on device encryption.” 

What’s going on? What’s a “tented project”, and why is a GB4E part of one? My friends with Copilot+ laptops from Microsoft and HP are encountering none of these issues….

UPDATE: The problems are now resolved. For Feedback Hub, Microsoft or Samsung seem to have cleared up the “tented project” issue. As for Recall, the solution was to upgrade from Windows 11 Home to Windows 11 Professional. This allowed me to turn on Bitlocker encryption, after which Recall started up fine. I’m actually finding Recall quite useful, particularly with the bizarre websites for Medicare insurance and prescription drug providers.

Maybe it was the propaganda, not the campaign

I’ve always been careful to play by the rules on Facebook. I’ve avoided posting the kind of content which has led some of my friends to have posts taken down or spend time in “FB jail”. However, over the last couple of months (yes, during the election season), I had several of my FB posts deleted for violating “guidelines“, for “trying to get likes“. The common element in all of these was that I posted a link to a piece in a mainstream media channel, with a short introduction on the subject and why I thought it mattered. (I never post bare links.) Well, we now know that this was a deliberate policy change by Meta to “depoliticize” FB. Of course, channels like X didn’t do anything of the kind (quite the reverse), and so the effect was to shift the overall sharing of content rightwards.

I’m also posting this on FB, and to avoid that FB policy I’ll use a comment to share the link to the Emptywheel piece that includes hard numbers to back up this claim. I’ll also link to this blog piece from Bluesky.

As Marcy points out, “If I’m right about that dynamic — that politics worked but propaganda worked far better — then it means much of the post-election soul-searching is misplaced (and, indeed, a dangerous misallocation of focus). That’s because Harris lost, in part, because of media disfunction, because electoral choice became dissociated from political persuasion more than any recent US election, largely due to an assault on the press and rational thought.”

Actions speak louder than words

It occurs to me that the political consequences of the failure of the Washington Post and LA Times to endorse Harris have been much more significant, and immediately positive, than their endorsements would have been. This is almost certainly unintentional, but let’s run with it.

If the papers had published their endorsements, it would have had almost no impact. It would have been predictable, unremarkable, and instantly forgettable. Instead, we have a dramatic and effective demonstration of the reality of the central message of the Harris campaign: that Trump is a fascist whose disrespect for the rule of law causes even oligarchs to bend the knee, and this event is reverberating widely. Actions speak louder than words: Bezos signaling that he is scared of Trump is much more potent than yet another politician using the “F” word.

From NYmag:

When Donald Trump first ran for president, he began to threaten that Amazon and Jeff Bezos would pay the price. “If I become president — oh, do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems,” he warned. Trump’s grievance with Amazon was centered on Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, a connection the president did nothing to disguise. […]

In 2019, Trump found his lever. Amazon was due to receive a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Pentagon. The Pentagon suddenly shifted course and denied Amazon the contract. A former speechwriter for Defense Secretary James Mattis reported that Trump had directed Mattis to “screw Amazon.”

This is the context in which the Post’s decision to spike its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris should be considered.

Some thoughts on video gaming

So I just played Skyrim for (probably) the last time. And that’s a big deal. Let me explain.

I love playing big, sprawling, open-world video games. I’m not very good at it, so I always play on the easiest settings, but I love the immersive experience of exploration, puzzles, discovery, and (yeah) combat. Like many others, the game that defined the genre for me was Skyrim, which came out in 2011. I played it for several years, on various devices (PCs, handhelds, consoles), and every playthrough I found something new. (Sometimes it had always been there, sometimes it had been added in a new edition of the game or a mod from the Creation Club.) And from Skyrim I moved on to the various Fallout and Assassin’s Creed games, and then Witcher 3, Horizon Zero Dawn, and the Ghost of Tsushima. After each of them, I found myself coming back to Skyrim (and sometimes to Fallout 4), even though the graphics and gameplay were looking increasingly dated. Familiarity, I guess.

Last year Bethesda, the team that created Skyrim, released Starfield. It was widely panned. I bought it, played it through, yawned, and went on to other things. This year, the first add-on for Starfield appeared. It wasn’t all bad, but it was disappointingly repetitive: the main quest, culminating in a manic “fight your way out of a collapsing ship/building before you die“, had been done to death (pun intended). Enough. Oh, and the graphics weren’t a patch on Horizon Forbidden West. (Just compare the Va’ruun Citadel with a Horizon cauldron.)

Waiting for a couple of games to be released in the fall, I decided to do another Skyrim playthrough. Basic game, no mods, take my time, pay attention to the little details I often overlook. Without mods, the game really showed its age, but it was clearly a much better, more immersive, more carefully crafted world than Starfield. And even though I was stopping to smell the roses (and found some charming details I’d previously missed), I still zipped through the early part of the game, becoming arch-mage at the college, and signing up with Ulfric’s Stormcloak rebellion.

And then it all went wrong. With the Stormcloaks, I attacked Whiterun and defeated the Jarl. I returned to Ulfric, and waited for my next mission. He wouldn’t give me one. I wondered if I’d forgotten to finish something at Whiterun, so I opened my map. Whiterun had disappeared. I travelled to a nearby town, and “walked” from there to Whiterun. Even though there was nothing on the map, the town was still there, and the Jarl was still on his throne. There was no sign of the conflict, no loose end I could clean up. I travelled back to Ulfric. He still wouldn’t give me a mission, nor would he initiate the attack on Whiterun. I was stuck. And I didn’t want to go back to a save from a few days ago and go through it all again.

Even after 13 years, it’s not surprising that a game like Skyrim still has major bugs… but I don’t have to put up with them. That bug destroyed the spell. There are so many better games to play, and I will. Bethesda’s simply lost the plot, and for Skyrim, Starfield, and Fallout are history. (And so, I fancy, are the Assassin’s Creed games.) When I get back from Massachusetts, I’m going to replay the remastered Horizon Zero Dawn, and dive back into Baldur’s Gate 3 – until Avowed appears, anyway.

Laptop update

Five years ago I was just starting a my new (and final) gig, Chief Open Source Officer for a startup, the (now defunct) Lacuna Technologies. I’d been working at Verizon, where my work laptop was a MacBook, but I knew that Lacuna would be a clean sheet. Hugh Martin (CEO) and I wanted to use Microsoft Office as the basis for the productivity environment, in part because we’d had mixed experiences with Google. I knew I was going to need a new work laptop, and that I’d be doing a fair amount of traveling, and so I picked up a Microsoft Surface Pro X, a 2-in-1 with an ARM CPU and a slot for an LTE SIM. It was risky, because Windows on ARM was still fairly experimental, but Microsoft was making all the right noises.

As it turned out, most of the people we hired into Lacuna wanted to use Google apps, so we abandoned Microsoft Office. And although the Surface Pro X was wonderfully light, I never found the 2-in-1 form factor very convenient. (It’s hard to use on your lap, unless you go for full tablet mode.) Also the reliance on x86 emulation meant that it was slow, and Microsoft did a lousy job of pumping up the Windows-on-ARM ecosystem. And finally the pandemic meant that I was working from home, and didn’t need mobile connectivity beyond what I could get from my phone.

When I retired from Lacuna, I stuck the Surface Pro X on the shelf, and replaced it with a maxed-out Dell laptop, which has served me well for the last two years. But I’ve always been an early adopter of new technology (remember Google Glass?), and so this week I decided to replace the Dell with something lighter. And I chose… an ARM-based Windows laptop! Specifically, I chose the 14 inch version of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, with a Snapdragon X Elite chip. It weighs 1.17 kg, compared with 1.07 kg for the Surface Pro X and 1.61 kg for the Dell, and it has a gorgeous 120 Hz OLED screen. (I’ve always loved Samsung’s displays.) Best of all, it was a great deal: $899 from Best Buy, $450 less than at the Samsung store. (Most of the current crop of so-called Copilot+ laptops are over $1,000, and, oddly, it’s not available from Amazon….)

I hesitated before buying, however, because I’d seen some conflicting reviews of the product concerning performance and battery life. It turns out that the culprit is Microsoft, which has unnecessarily complicated the configuration of power modes in Windows 11. This excellent video makes it…. well, not easy, but comprehensible.

So far I’m really enjoying the Book4 Edge. As usual, I’ve joined the Windows Insider program, so I’m curious to see how this generation of Windows laptops evolves. More anon.

Project frustration

I need to vent….

I’m working on what I hoped would be an easy little project. I fell in love with the replica computers created by Obsolescence Guaranteed, and decided to get a PiDP-11. Yes, I had worked with PDP-8s and a PDP-10 long before I got my hands on an 11, but there’s a lot more you can do with an 11, including running Unix V6 and V7! I knew my limitations, however (I’ve never been very good at soldering), and so I bought a pre-assembled model. All I needed to do was add a Raspberry Pi, and I’d be in business….

While I was waiting for the PiDP11 to arrive, I decided to familiarise myself with the SIMH software that underpins this and many other computer system simulations. I grabbed the nearest hacking laptop (which happened to have Fedora installed on it), and immediately ran into the tangle of issues that plagues so much open source. First, I learned about the split between SIMH and OpenSIMH. Then I found that the latest OpenSIMH on Github wouldn’t build (because you have to build from source – this is FOSS 🙄) because… something to do with CMake on Fedora. And everything seemed to depend on a bunch of shell scripts that looked like they’d only been tested on Ubuntu but didn’t work on Fedora. Sigh. I looked for pre-built binaries for Windows or Mac, failed, and decided to wait for the hardware.

My assembled PiDP-11 arrived, complete with a preloaded microSD card for the Raspberry Pi. I hooked up a nice new Pi 4 Model B to a screen and keyboard, booted it, and everything worked just fine. But before I installed the Pi into the PiDP-11 case, there was one more thing I needed to set up. I wasn’t planning to leave everything hooked up to an HDMI display and USB keyboard, so I needed a way to log in to the system via ssh over WiFi. So I created two new accounts on the Pi: one for remote admin, and one as a virtual terminal for the PiDP-11. I enabled WiFi and ssh on the Pi, booted it up, and successfully ssh‘d in from a Windows laptop. (I discovered that Windows Terminal now includes an ssh client – nice!) To find out the IP address of the Pi, I logged in to my Netgear Nighthawk router and looked at the list of connected devices. Excellent. All set. Except….

How could I be sure that the Pi would always get that IP address? DHCP hands out addresses on a first come, first served basis. Clearly I needed to assign a static address to the Pi. So I logged in to the Nighthawk, navigated to LAN Configuration, tried to assign an address, and failed with “Bad MAC address”. I consulted the Internet…. and discovered that the Nighthawk firmware has been broken for over a year, and the community has been yelling at Netgear to fix the Address Assignment bug, to no avail. 🤬

I really didn’t want to have to buy a new WiFi AP/router. But I think I’ll have to.

UPDATE: I decided to use the opportunity to upgrade our home WiFi to support WiFi 7. Future-proofing, I hope…..