Category: I Wish I Didn’t Know About This Page 1 of 2

How I Ended Up Back Here (Again)

On December 18, 2024

In Cool As Fuck, Fueled By Spite, I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Oh God, Politics

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every post that I’ve made here for the past 5 years begins with an acknowledgment that I haven’t done diddly with this site in nearly literal eons. During the pandemic (you know, 3+ years ago), I felt slightly less constrained by the normal demands of life and 1000x more mentally unhealthy so it made more sense to transition back over here and away, at top speed, from the decaying mess that social media became. Then another well paying but micromanaging job came my way, my wife had a second open heart surgery with accompanying small strokes, and the bottom fell out from all of that while I primarily used Slack to vent my angst at the world at the world instead of doing anything sane or safe.

After four years of doing a great job of fixing broken technology and a terrible job of preparing for 20+ hours of progress meetings a week, I lost that job which was great for my sanity but terrible for all other purposes. What that boils down to is that I now have some free hours every day to pointlessly fuck around on the the inter webs. Facebook, for numerous reasons, is dead to me and Instagram is largely a video platform now so those were off the table. You can still find me on Instagram for the occasional photo of something I find amusing with captions that may or may not be funny or mean. Twitter (never, ever X) evolved into the worst possible version of itself so I ended up creating a Bluesky account. At the present moment, Bluesky is a fun platform for connecting with people and not seeing every post besieged by literal Nazis insisting that their assbackward screeds were the kind of ‘engagement’ that everyone clearly needed. I really hope that it continues to be fun since it can become anything you want it to be without exposing yourself to algorithmic toxicity. However, I tend to run into issues with word count limitations because I am a verbose motherfucker. So, here I am, back here again to write needlessly verbose rants without the need to thread longer things out or, you know, edit properly.

I Need A Day Off To Properly Recover from 4 Days Off

By goneaway

On November 30, 2020

In Apple, Cool As Fuck, I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Link Dump, Robot System For Robots

I logged very little time at a keyboard this weekend, hell this past week excepting work, and spent most of the time off either driving around on errands or figuring out the logistics of getting to some place on some day by a certain time. I feel like I spend a lot of my life trying to stack tasks up to get small pockets of time to do things I like. Ultimately this is nearly always a losing strategy since I end up too exhausted to really use those time slots fruitfully. Thus, some links:

1. I am not a scientist but I do enjoy reading about bug sex on the internet when long and interesting stories about the aforementioned topic become available. I can especially and completely away from the topic of the article relate to the author’s compound dread and fascination with spiders. I don’t like them either when we come face to face while they descend on a web but I am fascinated by them.

2. text.fish is an invaluable bit of web hackery that allows you to bypass the javascript hackery that hides new stories behind an overlay about how expensive it is to publish words on the internet after you’ve published them on dead trees already. I may start actually linking to stories published by a certain monochrome lady again if this continues to work since the text is the only thing I’m really interested in. Good stuff that I hope isn’t immediately detected and blocked by more disgusting JS.

3. I was going to link yet another article about Parler and the weird-ass continuing outcry about election fraud from the fringiest crazy people and then I realized I may have already posted something about that story or maybe it was quoting large chunks of something I’d already read a week ago. Call it exhaustion or a hangover of sorts from the first couple of weeks of post-election misdirection and chaos mongering by the right but I’m about out of interest and/or enthusiasm for anything related to crazy people and the 2020 election.

4. Growl is ceasing development which is kind of a bummer because it was a great case of how to deal with Apple not being equipped to handle a necessary interface element and devs stepping in to handle the shortcoming. As seems always is the case with Apple, they took some of their good ideas, pasted some shit and failure on top, and made it just barely good enough for interest to decline in something better.

The Only Sane Explanation of Insane QAnon I’ve Seen

By goneaway

On November 22, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Oh God, Politics, Robot System For Robots

Q Anon is bat shit crazy, right? It should be apparent to most people that the likelihood that celebrities are all baby eating pedophiles all hopped up on Adrenochrome is pretty unlikely to be anything but the product of completely insane theorists of the least discerning kind. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t seem to go away with new batches of freshly hatched lunatics hallucinating, connecting the dots between their hallucinations and other people’s hallucinations, and eventually getting together (online or otherwise) to either congratulate each other on being totally nuts or, you know, doing something crazy that involves too many guns and a bunch of cops. It makes no sense to me at all but then again neither does Christianity.

It really took someone with some insight into understanding what caused people to voluntarily alter their reality to present their perspective on it for the edges to align for me. This very long and extensive look at QAnon via a game developer who’s spent a lot of time thinking about how to best design immersive alternate reality is the best attempt I’ve reading at trying to understand the zeitgeist crazy of QAnon without completely discounting those who find themselves sucked into it. You should read it. It made me feel less dismissive about the folks who end up painting themselves into this ridiculous corner.

The Things That Made It Past The Collection Of Calamities I Call My Life

By goneaway

On October 14, 2020

In Apple, I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Life During The Plague Years, Link Dump, Oh God, Politics, Work Horrible Work

It’s been an inordinately busy week. I’ve been spending my days slogging through work, interviewing with another company (shhh), and visiting my wife in a cardio thoracic ICU nearly every night. My wife is recovering from two small strokes that she suffered either during or after surgery. The main effect is aphasia which means she struggles with verbally expressing thoughts. This is painful because my girl is a talker and is brilliant at relating something that happened in a story and I hate to watch her struggle. That said, the doctors have said that the recovery process from this can take a very long time and she’s improved dramatically from yesterday. It’s difficult but it doesn’t feel like the end of the world, just a change. I’m okay with things changing and generally uncomfortable with catastrophe. I know she is having a terrible time being stuck in her head and I need to be better about filling the silences. I have a feeling we’re both going to have to adapt on a level that neither of us is accustomed to. I’m just happy she’s awake right now.

These are some things I noticed today:

1. To begin with, most Apple hardware has an unpatchable vulnerability stemming from the T2 chip and the outlook is not looking great in terms of mitigating this issue. I’m sure there is some amount of karmic retribution here but I’ll settle for vague analogy about putting all of your eggs in a single basket. I’m typing this on a vulnerable machine in the spirit of living dangerously.

2. Tangentially related to Apple, this brilliant person adapted an iSight into an acceptably modern camera by packing the pretty shell with a Raspberry Pi and doing some 3D printing to piece it all together. The responsible mad scientist also created a GitHub repo for all of the necessary components in case you want to play along at home.

3. My son’s school was scheduled, rather optimistically, to resume in person learning next week. We just received notification from the district that they’re now pushing that date out until late November. I really and fervently hope that when our idiot in chief runs out of steroids and dies that we, as a country, start to take this a little more seriously and listening more carefully to scientists when they try to warn us about killing ourselves. I am completely in support of calling everything off until we have a safe and effective vaccine. I have enjoyed hearing about attempts Trump’s fundamentalist supporters have made to square up their fervent belief that their draft dodging, adulterous fuck boy is somehow the torch bearer of Christianity while having his morbidly obese life saved by a treatment utilizing stem cells. At some point does your brain just throttle itself and eventually turn off?

4. My ballot arrived in the mail today. I look at voting like an act of exorcism. I’ll fill it out tomorrow and drop that shit off. Make sure you do the same even if you disagree with my politics completely. You owe it to yourself and everyone else in the ragged remains of a country to participate in this so-called democracy.

One Not Really Weird Trick To Avoid IT Wrath – Microsoft Hates This

By goneaway

On October 8, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Microsoft, This Sucks

About once every ~~10 minutes~~ every couple of weeks I warn someone about what a terrible fucking idea storing important data in Excel really is. Seriously, don’t do dumb things like that. There are are as many good alternatives to Excel as there are pieces of software that are not named Excel. I’d sooner try to recover lost data from scraps of paper kept in a hat than I would some monstrous spreadsheet filled with fuckery that sorta works most of the time. Try a fucking database that is actually designed to efficiently store, manage, and retrieve data. Seriously.

That makes disasters like the loss of 16K Covid-19 tests in England so painful. If you’d used not even the right tool but any tool actually designed for the task at hand. I know people are lazy and stupid but you can be lazier and stupider with better tools and not, you know, have to change the naming convention for genes:

Errors from the spreadsheet software have even changed the very foundations of human genetics. The names of 27 genes have been changed over the past year by the Human Gene Nomenclature Committee, after Microsoft’s program continually misformatted them. The genes SEPT1 and MARCH1, for instance, have been changed to SEPTIN1 and MARCHF1 after they were repeatedly turned into dates, while symbols that were common words have been altered so that grammar tools didn’t autocorrect them: WARS is now WARS1, for instance.

There are very good reasons why your IT folks get so pissed at you after you build some business critical business process that runs entirely in Excel and is brittle and prone to losing or altering the data it mismanages. Don’t do it.

The Half Life of Shows Produced By Netflix Is Oddly Precise

By goneaway

On September 24, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, The Dollar Dances On Our Asses, This Sucks

I enjoyed the Netflix series Altered Carbon more than I enjoyed the books written by Richard Morgan. They numbered among those guilty of my least favorite criminals in the science fiction genre: exciting worlds full of engaging ideas written poorly, presumably at top speed in order to pay the goddamned bills. It’s an unfortunate pattern I’ve been haunted by more than a few times and a hypothetical (following my own assumption that books were issued hastily) situation that I empathize with. I hope that the Netflix money provided the author some more time and resources to invest in his creations. The preceding makes me feel somewhat mean.

The reason for this personal attack on a writer (sorry!) is that I read an overdue explanation of the reasons that Netflix keeps cancelling shows after two seasons from Wired and it really points to how little algorithmic trickery and how much the simple cost of production and the oddball bonus incentive structure tied to attracting creative talent has to do with it. You’d think there were many more data points under consideration and for a longer period than 28 days but apparently it’s watched one and watched all spread over a slightly less than month long period weighed against costs that will rise per additional season after the second:

Netflix tries to make itself more appealing to TV show producers by giving them bonuses and pay bumps as a series carries on. Harrington says that shows on Netflix are more expensive after season two, and even more expensive after season three, with the premiums going up each season. “They have to give [a show] more money per series, and if they decide to recommission it, it becomes more expensive for them to make,” he says. “Because of that, so many more shows are canceled after two series because it costs them more.”

Financially, it makes more sense for Netflix to commission a new show than to renew an underperforming show that is only going to get more expensive the longer the series goes on. Tim Westcott, research and analysis director at Omdia, says that in terms of investment in content, Netflix is still in the growth stage. “In the US, subscriber growth has leveled off a bit, and they’ve now got a lot of competition in the US. But they’re adding many hundreds of thousands of subscribers every quarter around the world. They’re still in a phase where they’re still throwing fuel on the engine to keep that subscriber growth going,” he explains, adding that it’s ultimately looking to increase volume so that it can churn out new shows that it can promote to attract more subscribers.

This strikes me as absurdly since so many intriguing series that have excited me were doomed from the start by their release date or what was going on in the world when they were released (would Tiger King be nearly as successfully as it was had it been released before the Covid-19 quarantine? I have my doubts.) and that part of the algorithmic decision making breaks my fucking heart. I guess it’s marginally better to know than to be clueless but the ruthlessness of this decision making process makes me not want to get too emotionally involved in anything that Netflix produces.

If You’ve Got Time To Lean …

By goneaway

On September 16, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, This Sucks

I’m currently waylaid in unplanned emergency project land so my time has, yet again, been short and my reading seemingly only happening in 45 second chunks. I had a moment of terrible deja vu during dinner last night when I learned that my entire company was unable to access any Office 365 applications. It turns out that our accounting department had failed to pay $7K in invoices due to the reseller. I guess that’s the new new normal. I’m feeling more than my usual amount of fried.

Some things I’ve found interesting enough to take note of over the past few days:

1. To the surprise of absolutely no one, folks are getting hit with malware/adtech (is there any real distinction between the two anymore?) when using Internet Explorer to access porn sites. Ugh. This bothers me for a couple of different reasons. The first is that IE has never, ever been the best browser for anything even when it dominated market share. Why would you ruin your viewing experience by using the very worst viewing platform available. You might as well just slink back to your childhood hideout and try to decipher scrambled porn on good old fashioned cable. Why, stupids, why?

2. You should also give this post by a deeply religious but politically liberal person that examines the conservative obsession with child trafficking a read because it’s very well composed and gives you a bit of insight into how an intelligent believer would interpret the current and persistent insistence that a shadowy legion of pedophiles is abducting children and mining adrenochrome for Satan (?). It’s a much more balanced examination that I’m capable of making because I’ve already blazed through a lifetime’s supply of patience with trying my best to respect religious beliefs that I entirely disagree with and would just drop the that-person-is-fucking-insane mic at top speed and move quickly away and onward with my life. I gained an immediate respect for the author. I may not have the faith that he does (or really any belief in the non-concrete) but I respect the amount of thought that went into this piece of writing. It comes from a place that is relatable above and beyond religious beliefs.

3. This is kind of old news at this point but the seizure of ‘counterfeit’ ear buds by Customs and Border Protection is weirdly emblematic of the world we’re living in right now. Did Microsoft
Apple file a legal complaint against OnePlus? Nope. Is CBP actively pursuing sellers of actual knock off Air Pods? Nope. Does this feel like petty and political bullshit? Yep.

4. This is a sensible explanation of the various forces at work behind Oracle’s sudden emergence as the buyer for TikTok. It’s a lot more complex situation than the typical Trumpian defiant corruption scenario that we’ve become so accustomed to wincing at. No surprises at the ickiness of Oracle’s leadership at all. We’ve all known that Larry was human garbage for ages. I wonder how much time in the courtroom these maneuvers are going to consume after this toxic administration is banished back to hell. I look forward to reading about those minus the white knuckled terror of being governed by that toxic cesspool of the most shameless Americans.

When You Have A Problem So Bad That Burning Down The Office Would Be The Only Logical Solution

By goneaway

On September 5, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Microsoft, Security, This Sucks, Work Horrible Work

I’ve tried to write out my thoughts about this a few times but I always end up being overwhelmed by the ever widening scope of related things that end up being pulled in. What I’m hoping to do, and this may never be read by another human and/or web robot, is use my cane to tap around the perimeter of this vexing problem that I’ve faced at nearly every place I’ve worked: Active Fucking Directory.

At the moment I’m completely mired in the weird middle space between wanting to switch completely over to something that functions less like a needlessly complicated wrapper around LDAP and more like a secure-ish authentication method that performs a bunch of single sign on functions. It would also be nice if maintaining this shiny new solution didn’t become my full time job as well. The short answer, in my situation at least, is that an answer that simple and comforting doesn’t exist at all.

Here are the problems:

1. This needs to meet all of the requirements of the eleventy billion master service agreements that we’re supposed to hit. These are constantly changing and some of them we just sign off and ignore until one of our customers proposes an audit. Some of these requirements would be better left to a capable MDM solution but …

2. My budget for such a solutions is, well, um, if you could just cut checks to my company for using your solution that is about the only that would make it through our finance department. The finance folks are not looking to invest money in anything ever so that becomes a rabbit hole I’m not going to willingly crawl into.

3. To make things absolutely and utterly disaster-tastic we also just hired a CTO who seems like a cool enough guy but wants to have more input into the infrastructure we’re implementing. The real rub here is that he really just wants to implement a SaaS solution that is the namesake of the company he just jumped ship from and I have heard nothing but gnashing teeth and the sound of hope anally escaping the human body from other folks I know that still do infrastructure work. So, I’m in a holding pattern right now while I fervently hope that one of the interviews I’ve had recently bears fruit and I can hit the ejector seat button thus escaping with a few tatters of my sanity intact. Maybe I’ll get budget approval for something more expensive than anything I’m proposing and doesn’t work either? Splendid.

4. Another thing that happened in the midst of all of this was an office move, a company rebrand, a phone system replacement, and a few other ball crushing tasks that I might be defensively forgetting. Just a few minor things that need to happen all at once and posthaste. Our IT department, at least for anything that doesn’t live in AWS or Salesforce, is poor old me and I report up through 2 levels of managers. The usual song and dance occurred after the move was sprung on us/me; we’ll just have an MSP come in and do some of that work for us because that is always painless. I got a few things out of that: some new networking hardware (Meraki because the techs were either morons or thought we/me were morons) and a new server to host the software used to manage badging and security cameras. Like most security and monitoring software it requires me to install components from Windows Server 2000 to get it successfully running so I’m completely okay with isolated that garbage onto its own server and away from any infrastructure that actually matters. It did not get me any new server hardware that I could because there’s much money to be made reselling software licensing, of course. The MSP folks built us a sort of functioning Active Directory server in AWS but didn’t do most of the grunt work before their contract budget was consumed. Thanks guys! I was hoping to spend a couple weeks running hastily written Powershell scripts on a production machine. This also sounds amazing!

5. Here’s the punchline to all this: The server that really, really needs to be replaced is a 7-8 year old Dell PowerEdge that has been outside of a service contract for several years and spent most of its life in a switch closet/sauna basically the size of a closet with no real cooling. It is obviously a ticking time bomb despite having a backup domain controller even older that takes more than 15 minutes to reboot when I do something terrifying like rebooting it. Oh, yeah, and this is hosted on a Windows Server 2008 SBS box. Yeah, it really is that grim. The message from on high is that I need to somehow keep this incredibly robust and reliable machine running for a unspecified period of time until there is a decision and budget available for a cloud solution that will likely do measurably worse job of handling authentication and won’t serve any policy at all. Maybe that means I’ll finally get some budget for MDM? Probably not.

We are an Office 365 shop (this is what that service is called no matter what stupid renaming convention they try to employ) so everyone in the company that has absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about immediately tells me how we should just migrate on over to Azure Active Directory. This, of course, is more telling of how much coverage Microsoft pays for in trade magazines than anything else and has caused me to explain far too many times that (cue the theme music) Azure Active Directory is not fucking Active Directory in any meaningful sense.

At the end of this highly purgative post, I’m left with some questions that mostly should be posed at the huge corporations that create the software I’m supposed to keep things up and running with because cruel and unusual is industry standard. One very, very important question is: why the fuck isn’t Azure Active Directory analogous to Active Directory? That’s the most painful question. Look, I know it’s blindfolded brain surgery dangerous to expose an AD server to the internet, right? That’s been pounded into our heads since Active Directory was a relatively new thing. Don’t ever allow your AD server out into the world without galoshes and a rainsuit. That’s IT canon. BUUUUUT, the other Microsoft product that was absolutely, positively unsafe to expose to anything but a RADIUS-backed VPN was Exchange and now Exchange or at least a distant cousin of it is out there on the web eating apples full of razor blades and taking Tylenol from open packages all willy nilly. Obviously O365 isn’t the most secure platform in the world but it only seems to roll over dead a couple of times a week. Why can’t Microsoft spend a few cycles on that sort of work for AD? Oh, because all the data transmitted between a client and the AD server is full of delicious data that isn’t well protected. Extra fabulous!

The other non-option would be something like Direct Access which is already deprecated, requires the very most expensive edition of both the client and server pieces that it would run on, and only runs on Windows which is not real world useful unless you’ve landed a sweet gig at Contoso or Margie’s Travel. That leads me back, all the way back, to the always on/pre-logon VPN issue which means more expensive software seats and more moving parts that I can absolutely guarantee will break each and every time the wind picks up because I’ve foolishly made decisions like that in the past. In the end, I have no fucking answers and I’m feeling like one of those sad photo-op polar bears stranded on a melting mass of ice with nothing to do but wait until the sea eventually consumes me bringing on the sweet oblivion that erases all of this fuckery.

Things I Noticed Today While Doing Other Things

By goneaway

On August 30, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Link Dump

I built my cute and tiny PiHole server today and that made me happy since I can preemptively clear garbage on my network and prevent some potential tragedies from happening to the clickier of the people who live with me. Since I am the IT person in the household I think of it as a time saving measure that will likely save me from having to have credit cards cancelled.

Some things I read today while waiting for progress bars to move:

This and the fact that the victim of this garbage has to publicly call out the non-anonymous harassers makes me fucking sick. The toxic and douchey tech bro stereotype exists for a very good reason; the tech bro is the absolute embodiment of entitlement and makes me fervently wish for another technology crash, despite the fact that it would hurt me in the worst ways possible, just to make these fuckers see that sometimes when you act like like a tantruming four year old there are potential consequences beyond being punished with diversity training purchased from a 3rd party that is likely a frat house for the types that would be actually need this sort of coaching to treat the people around them like fucking people. As the stereotypical white tech guy: I am so fucking sorry and wish that there was something more concrete that I could do apart from waxing poetic with my grab bag of four letter words. I wish I knew how to do more.

While I’m 100% in support with the ideas behind The Polite Type and wish wholeheartedly that the Covid-19 virus would be replaced with a virus that fixes whatever broken part of the human brain that allows people to demean other people, I’m not sure if this implementation is the best possible implementation. I’m not going to talk shit about this project because I respect the ideas and motivation behind it but I’m doubtful if any of the people that would normally type out the word ‘slut’ in reference to another person would actually have revelatory moment as result of their words being dynamically changed while they’re typing them. Maybe I’m far too cynical for efforts like this but I sincerely hope that the cynicism is entirely offbase and that at some undefinable point in the not so distant future that people can just start being decent to the other human beings that their words might reach. As always, there is hope behind the doubt.

You should check out this Noam Chomsky video where he runs down the every increasing potential for nuclear war which only compounds the hopelessnes we’re already feeling due to the pandemic, the endless killing of people of color by police, widespread unemployment of service workers with little hope of meaningful recovery or recompense before these issues escalate into hand-to-mouth problems when folks are worried about where money for food is going to come from, and the usual myriad of problems that come along with living in the United States in a time when we’re hovering over the precipice of utter collapse and the utter relinquishment of all of the qualities, expectations, and freedoms, for and from, that have distinguished this country thus far. It’s a debasing time to be an American and it doesn’t seem like there is going to be any reason to stop white knuckling until the clownish sociopath currently in charge of the country is (fingers double and triple crossed) is replaced with a different brand of sociopath that is better at approximating empathy for people outside their immediate socio-economic bubble. It’s all so fucking depressing.

There is no stable place to comment on this from but apparently Tim Tebow is a QAnon guy now. It is quite possible that we should just shut this planet down now and cut our losses. Every day just becomes that much more oppressively stupid.

Two More Reasons Why The Smartest People Are Also Idiots

By goneaway

On August 23, 2020

In Apple, I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Robot System For Robots, This Sucks

This bit about Google Cloud Platform’s habit of killing everything useful in it has been all over all of the places I look at during lunch and it, despite being hosted on the most noxious platform for putting words out onto the internet: Medium, is worth reading if you have any opinions at all about the methodology that Google uses to poop what they’re not interested in any more out of their software stack (that’s deprecation for those of you who capitalize the word ‘engineer’) and not just because it’s funny. It’s also worth reading if only because it’s written from the perspective of someone who has actually used the things he’s talking about in a production capacity. Typically everything that I read critical of GCP falls broadly under the umbrella of tried this once and I didn’t understand some part of it so it sucks think-piecing. I’d love to think that the idea of building things with an eye toward them being useful for more than 3 months might make a comeback in the not so distant future. People do love to say the word ‘deprecating’ during meetings though.

All of the above said, I’ve never once wanted to invest any effort into getting my head around Google Cloud Platform. As Steve Yegge said in his post, the documentation is godawful and mostly non-existent and I don’t enjoy needing to mess with things when I don’t have to. The decades of IT work have made risk adverse even when I’m just messing around with conceptually. The odds of me learning much about something I know will break and will break by design are next to zero. God forbid I built something useful to a handful of people and then have to keep revising it just to make sure the framework keeping all of that shit together doesn’t silently decide that I’m doing it the wrong way and subsequently requiring me to rewrite something I no longer care about. I have the option of taking that posture because 1) I don’t write any code that any one else should ever read much less use and 2) because I’m not selling people services that may or may not work tomorrow due to engineering whimsy or boredom with something that doesn’t disrupt the paradigm, bro. No thanks and next contestant. I get to be that petty and arbitrary because no one is paying me (well, except my work and I do nothing but manage tools that manage other tools there these days) for things that started out fun and then got tedious quickly. I completely get it. It is fun and rewarding in a punitive way to work on things that sort of work well enough and then move onto another more novel and interesting problem. That is great method of creating things for a hobbyist. No one expects to pay a hobbyist (against a running meter much less) for their sorta working and might not see much new work in the future projects. The evidence for that is everywhere. I think Source Forge is basically a monument these days to projects that started strong and sunk silently into obscurity and obsolescence. The operative difference with Source Forge is that if something there is something people find useful and necessary then after the original author has moved on to other things there is opportunity for other people to pick up where the first person left off. Google has an utterly hobbyist attitude towards the majority of their products and no tangible accountability other than lighting the occasional stick of incense on the altar of Our Lady of The Perpetual Beta to atone for their indifference to any user of their software that doesn’t also work for Google. I guess if you sell enough advertising then you buy the right to just mess around on every front.

Ironically, after all of the Google bashing, I realize that I’m typing all of this up on Pixelbook which is my favorite in an increasingly gigantic stack of powerful and portable machines. The reason I love it so much is because it’s absurdly overpowered for what it needs to do, still has great battery life, and stays the fuck out of my way for the most part. I even get to choose which branch of Chrome OS you want to run on it and even if you make the wrong choice (p.s. the correct choice is the Beta branch) you can just power wash the machine back to newness and start the mucking up all over again in a matter of minutes. I’m acutely aware that they’ll probably never build a machine as cool as this again but I’ll be using this machine until it either rattles apart or isn’t eligible for OS releases any more. I’m betting the latter will likely be the end instead of the former.

Speaking of companies who have have incomprehensible piles of money to burn and utter disdain towards all but the smallest fraction of their users and the vast majority of people writing software for their platform, I also enjoyed this post about the pain of installing software that didn’t surrender 30% of its purchase price for the right to inclusion in App Store. I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to create anything intended to run on macOS. It makes me wonder if any of the developers that were around for the old days of being a tiny percentage of the marketplace and making cool things for the people who haloed themselves in an aura of rugged and tasteful individualism by buying from the scrappier millionaires are adapting well to the utter irony of those artisanal mass market computer manufacturers dominating the market and using that dominance to make everyone resent their presence in it. While they’re likely making a better living (minus that 30% obviously) these days it’s undoubtedly a much more expensive and bureaucracy-laden process to even get to the point where someone without a Developer license would even be able to install something they’ve written.

Over the years, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time coaching people through the maze of workarounds needed to accomplish seemingly basic maintenance tasks on their ‘just works’ computers so I feel this pain in a palpable way. My frustration towards the design decisions Apple has made over the past handful of years mirrors the way that I feel towards the way the Gnome project veered much to the dismay of folks who appreciated Gnome 2 for its measured simplicity. I’ll be the first to admit that the Apple demographic may be the worst group to try to explain things to since the idea of a mod-click of any kind seems alien to them, thus the Can’t you just right click title of the article I’m talking about.

While this whole plague that’s killing people while they ignore it thing is going on, I’ve been working completely from home since March so the functionality holes in user controlled security has been the most persistent pain point for me in administering my shrinking fleet of Apple hardware. Every user in my organization now has the local admin account password because I need to give to them so that I can walk them painfully through the process of enabling screen recording and accessibility functions in System Preferences. Super duper cool, Apple. The most frustrating part about all of this is that Apple has yet to create any tools for managing their machines in what should be a managed environment. I know Microsoft has rolled out some paid solutions equal in vexation to the 3rd party JAMF suite that is supposed to allow me to have some degree of control over these precious slabs of silicon individuality but there’s always a way to work around that damage on the Windows side of the house. Again, backwards fucking compatibility motherfuckers!

The list of things that Apple keeps me from being able to do easily and cheaply continually grows. Wanna reimage any machines that thankfully don’t have T2 chips and are running Catalina? Prepare to fuck around with DeployStudio forever just to route around that damage. Need to install or update anti-virus? Get ready to become bffs with csrutil because you’re going to be hanging out a lot. Super cool to decide that monolithic imaging is dead without providing any method for replacing it. Oh yeah, keep your finger on that csrutil button if you want to do something crazy like removing FaceTime or any of the other included software that isn’t necessary for most business cases. In short, it’s awful and again it’s a case of being forced to cater to the whims of their innate need to control all aspects of their machines. Locking down common functionality and intimidating users by popping up warnings about malware and potential harm to their computers is really, really user friendly as is non-standard deinstallation of most software: it’s super easy! You just drag the Application to the trash and later go and find all of the plists it left behind that are breaking other things! It just works (for us)!

Automattic ended up in a battle of wills with Apple wherein Apple wanted them to build in purchasing capability (for domain purchases and non-free hosted WordPress plans) so it could collect its 30%. Luckily, they yielded in the face of angry users and relented. Apple isn’t a company that I’d ever choose to work with but until they make enough decisions that piss off a huge majority of mobile phone buyers most companies are forced to donate a third of their application revenue to the scrappy little computer company worth more than a trillion dollars. My interpretation of their position is that your product should already be worth millions of dollars before you even attempt to besot their App Store with your feeble stab at relevance otherwise they’ll relegate you to working in the gift shop on a commission basis. I liked it much better when the reality distortion field was smaller and didn’t infect and destroy more interesting things. I liked it better when Apple wasn’t so fucking huge and equipped with an infinite supply of blank checks for belligerently hostile behavior under the guise of aesthetic purity. Crazily, I liked it better when pre-SP2 Windows XP was the most pressing issue that I had and that is saying a lot.