mtrx blog

For a long time I was too busy with life to actually build crablog the way i wanted it to. Manufacturing a precise, lightweight tool to scream into the void. Now, after 6 years I was finally able to allocate the little time I have to make it work. The tradeoff was to work on it AI assisted.

After years of trying to build it proper and nice, I was left considering between never finishing my project, or eventually completing it not meticulously crafted. I decided on the latter option, with a sour aftertaste. Life goes on and you might miss it, if you let your pride get in the way. I'll be outside touching grass now, maybe writing a blog post or two soon.

In my life I've spent a lot of time talking to strangers and not-so-strangers online. I enjoy getting to know people of different fields and from different countries to gain perspective, have fun together and sometimes to talk about things that we would never talk about in person under the cover of anonymity.

At some point I joined a UNIX community which at first repulsed me a bit, since it contained graphic language and condensed internet weirdness. Though at second look to my surprise, they were incredibly knowledgable about the main topic. Since I often needed help when I started out using Linux, I stayed around.

Then the server owner handed all of the responsibility over to a now very good friend of mine. He started cleaning up, introducing a functioning moderation team and setting up new rules. Everything was going great, but some people didn't like it. Everyone could see the quality of discussion rose almost immediately with more on-topic talk. People started yelling at the new moderation team, calling them out on subjective over-moderating in lots of colourful and graphic ways. They felt like something was taken from them. Someone took their creative outlet for non relevant, derailing and provoking language and imagery and they weren't happy about it. They eventually either left or were banned.

I didn't quite understand what drove the need for it. Maybe the taboo of not being able to say such things anywhere else, maybe the few low effort inside jokes that were formed. None of it was of any particular long-term value. If they really want to, they can go to millions of other online forums to do such.

A year has passed and I found myself talking a lot more in this community. I made a few friends and learned a lot together with them. Our voluntary support channel was off the hook and everyone helped each other in a mostly wholesome way. The community owner elected me for the moderator team and soon after to the administrator team.

People have gotten used to the new rules, but since some people were around for so long they had a kind of "special status" in our heads. A kind of sentimental value, which allowed them to break the rules without really getting punished for it. We didn't realise this was the biggest problem our community had. Every week there were controversies and "what did he do this time" moments. I've had enough. Something needed to change. I didn't feel quite comfortable with ripping out what once was a pillar in our group, but I banned them from our place. They did not fit our community guidelines and it was long overdue.

Oh and how the world exploded. Suddenly I was the person who did wrong. How dare I remove someone who broke basic rules like "no racism" to provoke us. The actual problem is not just the person I banned but the whole toxic friend group around them. Even though they were moderately following the rules you could tell they agree with the not-so-great world views of the banned person.

But how did it get this far? What can I or we do to prevent drama as seen above? It got this far because people feared getting flak to enforce the rules. Not only that, but also people got attached to each other, even though they aren't fit for the community. People were scared to ban and always tried to find a compromise with warnings and even full-on excel sheets to keep track of them. There is no reason to, because if you notice a new person doesn't fit the community there is no point in trying to change them. It is just a stranger on the internet and it is not our job to play parent and teach them online etiquette. I do not have the time to argue and I'd rather just get rid of the problem, since they can just create a new account anyways and behave the next time they're around.

First and foremost, I don't hate any language like some people do. If a project requires me to write a certain language, that's fine. There are reasons to use any popular language right now.

Though, there are languages that have an infrastructure that make my head spin. NodeJS is one of those. Never in my lifetime I have downloaded a node-based project and could start developing right away. There's always something. Today that hick-up was a bit special and I felt the need to share my experience.

I was allowed to work on a Django project we had around, which I was hyped about, since I like Django a lot. So I download the project and to my surpise, I'm seeing a lot of NodeJS files. package.json, gulpfile.js, package-lock.js. I'm already getting goosebumps because I know what's going to happen. That sudden creep down your neck that you get in a horror movie when you realize it was all a trap and someone's going to die.

So I do what every developer does when they first download a project. They try to start it. I look at some files to see what they do, then download the dependencies. npm install --save-dev . <enter>

A bunch of familiar text rolls by, the usual amount of warnings that npm spits out and then it just stops with a bunch of red text. Here's what I was looking at.

No receipt for 'com.apple.pkg.CLTools_Executables' found at '/'.
No receipt for 'com.apple.pkg.DeveloperToolsCLILeo' found at '/'.
No receipt for 'com.apple.pkg.DeveloperToolsCLI' found at '/'.

gyp: No Xcode or CLT version detected!
.....
.....
gyp ERR! cwd /Users/redacted/Git/portal/node_modules/node-sass
gyp ERR! node -v v14.13.0
gyp ERR! node-gyp -v v3.8.0
gyp ERR! not ok
Build failed with error code: 1

Specifically: gyp: No Xcode or CLT version detected! got my attention. I am asked to install a text editor / IDE to install my projects dependencies. "Alright", I thought. Maybe there are some development libraries that get installed with it. "Let's download xcode then...". I proceed to open up the apple store for the first time on the MacBook I was handed from work. I've never done that before, because I never needed to. I'm using open-source tools for the most time anyways, which aren't platform specific.

It asks me for my Apple ID.

I didn't even know you need an ID to download applications. Since there was no way around it and I needed to get stuff done, I clicked "Create Apple ID". It starts of tame. Name, surname and date of birth. Probably for age restricted apps, whatever. Then it asks me what kind of bank details I want to enter with the option to select "None". For some reason it still asks for my address. Why does an application downloading service need my address? Picture me in this moment. My eyes start twitching a little bit, I'm gazing out the window and thinking over if I really wanna give a company my Address to download an application. I start gesticulating my disgust over this practice and enter some fake details. I click "Next".

It worked. I cheated the system! I was in awe. Until I read what came next.

They need my phone number for verification.

I couldn't believe it. A company that is known for their privacy respecting practices and software literally asks you for your address and phone number the second you wanna use an app store. And it's okay because people don't care. They get away with this, because they have a perceived monopoly of software distribution once you buy into their Apple universe. You can install other software, but only a handful of people, like us developers use software not served by the companies software vendor.

I will not hand out my phone number to Apple. Guess I'll look for xcode somewhere else. Signing off.

This is absolutely outrageous. I've never thought we'd make it past 14nm, yet here we are. Reaching a transistor size of literally less than 15 atoms.

Apparently Samsung just invested half a billion in this technology too. This means ultra low power usage or even higher performance with current cooling solutions. Just imagine your phone lasting 1.5x as long.

Source How it works

Virgin Hyperloop just transported 2 people at 160kph over 500 meters. Insane to think about how such a post modern futuristic dream has become a reality now.

Link to the twitter video post.

I've always seen such technologies as a novelty. A kind of gimmick, a proof of concept. In retrospective almost all technologies that have become a standard in our lives, like mobile phones have started like this. I don't think we will see this become the standard of transportation in the next 10 years, but maybe I will live until the day we do.

Imagine all the science fiction books being written or having been written up until this point that contained some form of a hyperloop. Did the authors believe in the idea? Did they just think it was cool but couldn't ever realistically be a thing? I'd love to talk to a science fiction author for a few minutes about their ideas, what they think about the current state of technology and what they see coming. Maybe write up a little time capsule.

Godspeed.