Thursday, June 13, 2019

Maciej Cegłowski, the New Wilderness:

So why have the gravediggers of online privacy suddenly grown so worried about the health of the patient?

Part of the answer is a defect in the language we use to talk about privacy. That language, especially as it is codified in law, is not adequate for the new reality of ubiquitous, mechanized surveillance.

In the eyes of regulators, privacy still means what it did in the eighteenth century—protecting specific categories of personal data, or communications between individuals, from unauthorized disclosure. Third parties that are given access to our personal data have a duty to protect it, and to the extent that they discharge this duty, they are respecting our privacy.

Seen in this light, the giant tech companies can make a credible claim to be the defenders of privacy, just like a dragon can truthfully boast that it is good at protecting its hoard of gold. Nobody spends more money securing user data, or does it more effectively, than Facebook and Google.

The question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is suddenly so much of it that needs protecting. The problem with the dragon, after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite.

facebook, google, panopticon, policy, politics, scale, surveillance :: p1k3 / 2019 / 6 / 13

Sunday, June 2, 2019

I recently read At least one Vim trick you might not know, which is a pretty high-quality example of the stuff-about-text-editors blog post.

There are- very roughly- two categories of Vim users. Purists value Vim’s small size and ubiquitousness. They tend to keep configuration to a minimum in case they need to use it on an unfamiliar computer (such as during ssh). Exobrains, on the other hand, stuff Vim full of plugins, functions, and homebrew mappings in a vain attempt to pretend they’re using Emacs. If you took away an exobrain’s vimrc they’d be completely helpless.

Not too unreasonable a model of the thing, probably. I’m definitely somewhere in “exobrain” territory at this point.

I ought to write one of these eventually - or maybe follow Tyler’s lead and write a literate .vimrc. My existing one has a lot of comments, but it’s not exactly a coherent document.

technical, vim :: p1k3 / 2019 / 6 / 2

thursday, may 9, 2019

a may snow, all day
the skies gray and
the grass growing taller
while it falls, tulips
blooming round the side of the house
the frogs across the street
sounding low and slow through
the patter of barely frozen
water falling on the just-unfolding
leaves

poem :: p1k3 / 2019 / 5 / 9

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Thesis: The complexity ratchet in technology is designed (or has evolved, take your pick) to drive the concentration of administrative power.

technical :: p1k3 / 2019 / 5 / 8

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

App::WRT v6.0.0.

Links:

Despite the bump in major version number, this one is mostly a bugfix release. A hypothetical user wouldn’t notice many changes, but I’m rearranging things further in a direction I started on a year ago, abstracting interaction with the underlying directory structure to a class that caches the full set of entries and some metadata about them. More on this in the latest commit message.

This kind of change has gotten easier as I’ve added more tests, even if the tests themselves are sort of ridiculous, which is a useful lesson.

As I wrote last year:

This was an interesting way to kill some time, both because I revisited an algorithm I’d forgotten about, and because every time I hack on a project like this I’m in a dialog with basic decisions I made before I knew how to write software at all. And maybe, by the same token, looking with fresh eyes at norms that I’d take for granted in any more modern context. wrt isn’t a good piece of software by any contemporary standard, and the approach it represents isn’t one I’d use for anything bigger than a trivial shell script at my day job, but there’s a curious durability to it all the same.

Every few years I revisit some facet of this tiny, mundane tool and apply a bit of understanding I lacked when it was first written, and some structure comes a little clearer that lives in the space between my ignorance at 20 and my experience, such as it is, at whatever age I’ve reached.