<n>Below are links to articles, highlighted passages<fn>, and occasional annotations<fn> for the week ending on the date in the title, <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=4085">enriching the raw data</a> from <a href="http://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/1890855/5c1g08eoy9skhOr3tCGqTQbZes">Instapaper Likes</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/mvonballmo">Twitter</a>. They are intentionally succinct, else they'd be <i>articles</i> and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.</n> <ft><b>Emphases</b> are added, unless otherwise noted.</ft> <ft>Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely <i>contemporaneous</i>.</ft> <h>Table of Contents</h> <ul> <a href="#politics">Public Policy & Politics</a> <a href="#journalism">Journalism & Media</a> <a href="#science">Science & Nature</a> <a href="#philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</a> <a href="#programming">Programming</a> </ul> <h><span id="politics">Public Policy & Politics</span></h> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/22/scott-ritter-on-horseradish-nuclear-war/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">On Horseradish & Nuclear War</a> <bq>Sullivan then laid out the Biden administration’s case against Russia, starting with the Russian suspension of the New START treaty itself. Left unsaid was Russia’s stated reason for this suspension, namely the impossibility from the Russian point of view of engaging in strategic nuclear arms reductions at a time when the United States was pursuing a policy in Ukraine of waging a proxy conflict designed to cause the strategic defeat of Russia. <b>From the Russian perspective, pursuing the cooperative reduction with the U.S. of the very strategic capability which is, by design, intended to prevent Russia’s strategic defeat at a time when the U.S. was pursuing the strategic defeat of Russia was a non-starter.</b></bq> <bq>If this insanity is allowed to continue unabated, it is lights out for all of humanity. Chew on that the next time you cheer on the Ukrainian counteroffensive or applaud the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund the Ukrainian military. <b>It is high time for the American public to recognize that our only hope for a survivable future is one where arms control and nuclear disarmament once again serve as the cornerstone of a U.S.-Russian relationship</b>, and that the shortest possible path toward achieving that objective is for Russia to win its war against Ukraine.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/19/the-emergence-of-a-new-non-alignment-the-twenty-fourth-newsletter/" source="Scheer Post" author="Vijay Prashad">The Emergence of a New Non-Alignment</a> <bq>‘The global West (Western developed countries and allies) has drifted away from the global East (China, Russia, and allies) in terms of core strategic interests, while the Global South (Brazil, Russia, India, and China and most developing countries) is reorganising to pursue its own interests’. <b>These final words bear repeating: ‘the Global South… is reorganising to pursue its own interests’.</b></bq> <bq>Our calculations, based on the IMF datamapper, show that for the first time in centuries, the Gross Domestic Product of the Global South countries surpassed that of the Global North countries this year. The rise of these developing countries – despite the great social inequality that exists within them – has produced a new attitude amongst their middle classes which is reflected in the increased confidence of their governments: <b>they no longer accept the parochial views of the Triad countries as universal truths, and they have a greater wish to exert their own national and regional interests.</b></bq> <bq>From Bolivia to Sri Lanka, these countries, which make up the majority of the world, are fed up with the IMF-driven debt-austerity cycle and the Triad’s bullying. <b>They are beginning to assert their own sovereign agendas.</b></bq> <bq>the US-led Triad states have unilaterally imposed their narrow worldview, based on the interests of their elites, on the countries of the South under the guise of the ‘rules-based international order’. Now, <b>the states of the Global South argue, it is time to return to the source – the UN Charter – and build a genuinely democratic international order.</b></bq> <bq quote-style="none" author="Una Marson">What matter that we be as cagèd birds Who beat their breasts against the iron bars Till blood-drops fall, and in heartbreaking songs Our souls pass out to God? These very words, In anguish sung, will mightily prevail. We will not be among the happy heirs Of this grand heritage – but unto us Will come their gratitude and praise, And children yet unborn will reap in joy What we have sown in tears</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/20/patrick-lawrence-why-cant-blinken-and-sullivan-get-china-right/" source="Scheer Post" author="Patrick Lawrence">Why Can't Blinken and Sullivan Get China Right?</a> <bq><b>The bitter truth is that Joe Biden’s best and brightest are too paralyzed by the ideology of American primacy to come up with a single, solitary new thought</b> as to how to address other great powers as we enter an historically new era.</bq> <bq>Blinken used to meet Chinese counterparts with the professed intention of “easing tensions” or building his famous guardrails so that <b>when the U.S. provokes and provokes and provokes the Chinese they understand that we are for peace and freedom and things need not get too far out of hand.</b></bq> <bq>Xi did not let Blinken know he would receive the American secretary until an hour beforehand. To put this bit of protocol in context, Xi recently spent several days with French President Emmanuel Macron; Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian leader, had lengthy meetings with Xi during a five-day visit last month. <b>This is how the Chinese conduct diplomacy after a couple of millennia at it: Language is but one medium, gesture another. The take-home here will be obvious.</b></bq> <bq>China respects U.S. interests and does not seek to challenge or displace the United States. In the same vein, the United States needs to respect China and must not hurt China’s legitimate rights and interests. <b>Neither side should try to shape the other side by its own will, still less deprive the other side of its legitimate right to development.</b></bq> <bq><b>China expects to be addressed as an equal</b>, you ought to pay more attention to our legitimate rights as a sovereign nation, your controls on technology exports are intentionally damaging to our development, and you should stop swanning around the world telling others how to live.</bq> <bq>“<b>State-to-state interactions should always be based on mutual respect and sincerity</b>,” Xi said. “I hope that through this visit, Mr. Secretary, you will make more positive contributions to stabilizing Sino–U.S. relations.”</bq> Oof. Ouch. <bq>[...] <b>what Blinken got back from the Chinese was subtly conveyed indifference to his presence</b>, as if they received him as a courtesy only after months of pestering, and a few reminders that, while they would like to step beyond hostile relations, <b>they have no intention of flinching in the face of American hostility.</b></bq> <bq><b>It seems the best Sullivan can do, given the severe limitations his dedication to neoliberal ideology impose on his intellect.</b> After voters sent Hillary Clinton packing in 2016 and he was for a time out of work, Sullivan wrote a long essay for The Atlantic making the argument that America had to “rescue and reclaim” its exceptionalism so that it can lead the world again despite all the suffering and destruction our claim to exceptionalism was by then causing around the world.</bq> <bq>During the 2020 campaign season Biden once called Sullivan “a once-in-a-generation mind.” The thought has long fascinated me. <b>It is hard to single out the most preposterous nonsense our president has tried to sell Americans, but this is a contender in my reckoning.</b></bq> <bq>Now, the idea that a “new Washington consensus,” as some people have referred to it, is somehow America alone, or America and the West to the exclusion of others, is just flat wrong. <b>This strategy will build a fairer, more durable global economic order, for the benefit of ourselves and for people everywhere.</b></bq> Jake Sullivan still has to say <iq>ourselves</iq> even though it would be included in <iq>people everywhere</iq> because the basic instinct is to always consider your own needs specially, and primarily. <bq>[...] <b>“de-risking” is merely a disguised admission that “de-coupling,”</b> the previously fashionable term, <b>was never more than an impossible dream</b> entertained by geopolitical ideologues with a poor grasp of 21 st century economics and the realities of globalized production.</bq> <bq>At the just-concluded Shangri–La Dialogue, an annual gathering of Pacific Rim defense ministers in Singapore, <b>Li Shangfu, China’s defense minister, all but slammed his hotel room door on Lloyd Austin</b> when the American defense secretary suggested a conversation on the sidelines.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/17/seymour-hersh-partners-in-doomsday/" source="Scheer Post" author="Seymour Hersh">Partners in Doomsday</a> <bq><b>The underlying and even fundamental cause of the conflict in Ukraine and many other tensions in the world . . . is the accelerating failure of the modern ruling Western elites” to recognize and deal with the “globalization course of recent decades.”</b> These changes, which Karaganov calls “unprecedented in history,” are key elements in the global balance of power that now favor “China and partly India acting as economic drivers, and Russia chosen by history to be its military strategic pillar.” <b>The countries of the West, under leaders such as Biden and his aides, he writes, “are losing their five-century-long ability to siphon wealth around the world, imposing, primarily by brute force, political and economic orders and cultural dominance.</b> So there will be no quick end to the unfolding Western defensive and aggressive confrontation.”</bq> <bq><b>“Truce is possible, but peace is not. . . . This vector of the West’s movement unambiguously indicates a slide toward World War III.</b> It is already beginning and may erupt into a full-blown firestorm by <b>chance or due to the incompetence and irresponsibility of modern ruling circles in the West.</b>”</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/great-convergence-equality-branko-milanovic" source="Foreign Affairs" author="Branko Milanovic">The Great Convergence</a> <bq>But slipping in the global income rankings does have real costs. <b>Many globally priced goods and experiences may become increasingly unavailable to middle-class people in the West: for example, the ability to attend international sporting or art events, vacation in exotic locations, buy the newest smartphone, or watch a new TV series may all become financially out of reach.</b> A German worker may have to substitute a four-week vacation in Thailand with a shorter one in another, perhaps less attractive location.</bq> I wonder if the author understands how arrogant this sounds to people throughout the world---but also those in the West who've never even come close to the middle class. <bq>Aid is both insufficient and irrelevant. It is insufficient because rich countries have never devoted much of their GDPs to foreign aid; <b>the United States, the richest country in the world, currently gives away only 0.18 percent of its GDP in aid, and a significant portion of that is classified as “security related” and used for purchases of U.S. military equipment.</b></bq> <bq>It produces effects like those of the “resource curse,” in which a country blessed with a particularly valuable commodity still underperforms: <b>it experiences tremendous initial gains without any meaningful follow-up or more sustainable, broadly shared prosperity.</b></bq> That’s your explanation for it? That the country just mysteriously fails to profit from its bountiful resources? Rather than simply acknowledging that the modus operandi of the West is, and has always been, to simply steal whatever it can? That "plunder" is the reason that some countries can't benefit from the resources that ostensibly belong to them? <bq>The inability of African economies to catch up with wealthier peers (and thus fail to produce a future reduction in global income inequality) will spur more migration and may strengthen xenophobic, nativist political parties in rich countries, especially in Europe.</bq> Gosh, we just can't figure out why they can't catch up. It's a complete mystery. It couldn't have anything to do with the boot on their neck. This article is breathtakingly elitist. It just assumes that a sub-Saharan would be perfectly willing to leave their homeland just to be able to earn more money in another country. It doesn't mention that that person would much rather just stay in their homeland---<i>they just need Europe to stop bleeding it dry.</i> It also doesn't mention whatever increased income they do earn in the country to which they emigrate is quickly sucked away into a much more expensive society. <bq>Africa’s abundance of natural resources combined with its persistent poverty and weak governments will lead dominant global powers to vie over the continent. <b>Although the West neglected Africa after the end of the Cold War, recent Chinese investments in the continent have alerted the United States and others to its importance.</b></bq> You see? Breathtakingly elitist. Those darned sun-charred folk are just locked in persistent poverty despite their abundance of natural resources. Must be that "resource curse" rearing its ugly head again. Time to pick up that white man's burden and "help them out" a bit, ammirite? <bq>The prospect of an African growth surge that could meaningfully suppress global inequality in the coming years is slim.</bq> Because the west won't allow that to happen. It will not allow China to buy favor with <i>actual favors</i>. It will burn the whole fucking thing to the ground first. It will let loose the CIA to engender one civil war after another, ending everything in conflagration. <bq><b>As for the downward trend in global inequality, it requires strong economic growth in populous African countries</b>—but that remains unlikely. Migration out of Africa, great-power competition over the continent’s resources, and the persistence of poverty and weak governments will probably lie in Africa’s future as they have in its past. And yet a more equal world remains a salutary objective.</bq> A <iq>salutary objective</iq> indeed. What an arrogant cunt. <h><span id="journalism">Journalism & Media</span></h> <a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/06/30/of-course-greta-met-with-zelensky-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/" author="Caitlin Johnstone" source="Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix">Of COURSE Greta Met With Zelensky</a> <bq>The reason you seldom see people change despite their stated intent to do so is because your behavior doesn’t change just because you know it should, it changes when you fix the underlying forces within yourself which drive that behavior. It’s the same with the US empire. <b>The US empire is inseparable from the forces of neoliberal capitalism, war profiteering and unipolarism with which its true leadership has intertwined itself</b>, so while the odd empire manager may say “end the wars” it never happens, because everything in it is oriented toward war. This is the same reason we keep destroying our biosphere despite being acutely aware that we need it to survive. <b>Every system we’ve set up to drive human behavior and organize human civilization is pointed toward ecocide, despite all the science saying that’s a bad thing to do.</b></bq> <bq>I know a lot of people are worried about neural implants turning the public into mindless servants of the powerful, but <b>if it makes you feel any better the powerful have already achieved that with propaganda anyway.</b></bq> <h><span id="science">Science & Nature</span></h> <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synchronize-when-people-interact/" source="Scientific American" author="Lydia Denworth">Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact</a> <bq>[...] was also immediately obvious—strikingly so—that <b>there were very high levels of interbrain synchrony among the bats, especially at high frequencies.</b> The patterns were so similar that the researchers initially didn't believe what they were seeing, but the data convinced them.</bq> <bq>When Yartsev and Zhang repeated the experiment by letting the bats fly freely in identical separate chambers rather than in the same social environment, the correlations fell apart. <b>There was no synchrony in the bats' brain activity, even when the researchers piped in the sound of other bats calling.</b></bq> <bq>What they are seeing goes well beyond previous research on so-called mirror neurons, which represent both the self and another. (<b>When I watch you throw a ball, it activates a set of mirror neurons in my brain that would also be activated if I were doing the same thing myself.</b>)</bq> <bq>A 2021 study led by Maimon Rose and Boaz Styr, then both members of Yartsev's lab, revealed that when one bat emits a call, it induces collective brain coupling among all listening bats. And as in the mice, separate sets of neurons became active depending on which bat in the group vocalized, meaning individual neurons in the bats' brains encoded identity, with some representing the self and others representing other individuals. <b>The signals were so distinct that the scientists could tell which bat was calling just by looking at the recordings of neural activity.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the group is also asking whether the content of the stories changes levels of alignment and whether each pair's relative enjoyment of the process is linked to a greater or lesser degree of synchrony. Like Sid and me, most people reported preferring the joint storytelling exercise to the individual tales, but that wasn't true for everyone. <b>Are synchronized brains more creative? Or do they just have more fun? The answers will have to wait for further analysis.</b></bq> <bq><b>Without synchrony and the deeper forms of connection that lie beyond it, we may be at greater risk for mental instability and poor physical health.</b> With synchrony and other levels of neural interaction, humans teach and learn, forge friendships and romances, and cooperate and converse. We are driven to connect, and synchrony is one way our brains help us do it.</bq> <h><span id="philosophy">Philosophy & Sociology</span></h> <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/23/ted-kaczynski-we-hardly-knew-ye/" source="CounterPunch" author="Nicky Reid">Ted Kaczynski We Hardly Knew Ye</a> <bq>I won’t sit here and try to pretend that Ted Kaczynski was some kind of folk hero. He was a killer and most of his victims were just innocent civilians. So, why then should I mourn the death of such a ghastly creature? If I had to answer this vexing question in the simplest of terms, I would say that it’s because Ted was a fellow outsider and in spite of all his many sins, he was also right about far more things than any truly evil person ever could be. <b>Burn me at the stake if you must but I feel that this lonesome bastard has at the very least earned himself the right to one obituary that acknowledges the uncomfortable fact that he was indeed a human being.</b></bq> <bq>Kaczynski lays down an airtight case against civilization in general as an existential foe of individual liberty and technology in particular as a steroid that has grown that invention to downright apocalyptic proportions. <b>Ted’s basic argument was that technology makes an already toxic civilization truly lethal by reducing the individual to a product with a barcode number.</b></bq> <bq><b>Ted posits that technological civilization has resulted in the creation of a superstructure that cannot function without total capitulation to conformity.</b> Humanities inevitable inability to live up to the rigid standards of such a constraining system leads to a growing plague of increasingly crippling social sicknesses.</bq> <bq>Ted’s biggest mistake was foolishly believing that he could somehow liberate himself and the rest of us by matching the cruelty of our shared tormentors and speaking to us in the language of terrorism which they invented. <b>Our biggest mistake, if we so choose to make it, is to disregard Ted’s lessons simply because the messenger lost his soul to deliver them to us.</b></bq> <bq><b>One man alone in the wilderness is a hermit, one Billion is a wildfire that no superstructure can contain.</b> Just call this eulogy a spark and pass it along.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-jersey-barrier" source="Hinternet" author="Justin Smith-Ruiu">The Jersey Barrier</a> <bq>I thus see Deneen and Amy Coney Barrett and all the others as engaged in a most unholy, an all-too-human endeavor. I see their illiberalism in fact as much like the current LGBTQIA+ dogma, which has abandoned the ideal of a neutral public sphere in favor of <b>a set of state-enforced substantive commitments that, increasingly, must not be only publicly affirmed, but, to the extent that this can be monitored (an extent that is growing with new technologies), must also be inwardly felt — at least if you want to keep your de-facto social-credit score up.</b></bq> <bq><b>Stokely Carmichael said repeatedly that he did not want to make white people stop hating him; he just wanted enough guns for his community to ensure that, if that hatred were to boil over into physical aggression, it could effectively be nipped in the bud.</b> But today, in large part because we have these exciting new technologies, and because, it turns out, so many of us are such incurable blabbermouths, <b>the state, together with its subcontracted enforcement apparatuses in the tech industry, no longer sees any reason to stop at the policing of how we use our bodies in public</b>; it now has a fairly effective technological means for “going to work on our souls”, to put it in Foucauldian terms.</bq> <bq>Do you support capital punishment? Definitely not, under no circumstances. Do you support the abolition of factory farming? Yes, immediately. Do you support nuclear power? No, I’ve been too close to Zaporizhzhia too many times in the past few years to believe human beings are anywhere near responsible enough to maintain nuclear plants indefinitely into an unknown future. <b>Do you support economic redistribution? Within reason, and if it is pursued in a rigorously responsible way; I agree that every billionaire is a policy failure, but I do not wish to see professorships handed out more or less at random to peasants who support the party that controls all the perks under the new regime,</b> [...]</bq> <bq>Economists and policy analysts can debate ad nauseam the long-term consequences of, say, opening the borders of EU states to Syrian refugees. I don’t know if admitting them makes a given society, on balance, worse or better. <b>All I know is that there is only one acceptable stance towards a refugee, and that is hospitality. They say they need to come in? You let ‘em in.</b></bq> <bq><b>I have no illusions at all about the role of the American empire in the world, or about the massive violence that was required to work this country up from a few scrappy colonies into the enforcer of a global Pax Americana.</b> And when Putin speaks in a way that is similarly free of these illusions, what can I say? I find that I agree with him, even if I know, obviously, that this man is hardly a righteous porte-parole for the wretched of the earth.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>what I have just acknowledged about America: there is nothing exceptional about its violence.</b> Nothing is more routine or unsurprising in world history than to learn that a hegemonic power has played rough in order to get where it’s at.</bq> <bq><b>That a significant swath of liberal America can, overnight, mostly without any prior geographical or historical knowledge of the relevant region, go in for a form of war boosterism that is little different from what we see in the world of sports</b>, is perhaps one of the most disconsoling, heart-of-darkness experiences of my adult life.</bq> <bq>I happen to think, however, that <b>it is a failure of imagination and of collective will to continue to act as though trench-war over disputed territory is anything we are still compelled by reality grudgingly to consent to in the twenty-first century.</b></bq> <bq><b>I think the primary purpose of the Democratic Party in the US is to maintain American global power at all costs.</b> Surprisingly, in its own boorish and inarticulate way I think the Republicans have done at least a somewhat better job over the past years of imagining alternative scenarios for the survival of our country in a multipolar future.</bq> <bq><b>I’ll say that I am a class-first anti-imperialist pacifist left-winger</b>, who recognizes that these commitments cannot be fully defended within the parameters of political debate as we ordinarily understand it</bq> <bq>I am more sympathetic than I am supposed to be, than anyone concerned to keep their social-credit score up is supposed to be, to the general spirit of recent American populism as expressed, again with tragic inarticulacy, under the aegis of MAGA. <b>I think every community, including the community of rural white Americans, that feels politically disenfranchised, probably is politically disenfranchised</b>, and this is in no way disproven by their habit of seeking out scapegoats. <b>I think the elite liberal consensus, that poor whites are nothing but racist yokels who need to be marginalized even more, is profoundly damaging to the American body politic</b>, perhaps as damaging as whatever Trump himself has unleashed.</bq> <bq>Christian Lorentzen described the late-career author himself, for whom, at least in the case of this novel, our hero is at least some sort of ersatz), has just been quoted reflecting that sex is the only means we’ve got to register our protest against death. Well actually, the reviewer notes, there’s also love, which in the long run turns out to be a much sounder investment. This struck me as a profound bit of wisdom at the time —I wouldn’t have remembered it otherwise—, though I think its full significance has only begun to come clear to me recently. Roth himself never seems to have discovered this other investment strategy, and what makes him such a great writer is that <b>his work amounts to a painfully lucid account of what the world looks like when you don’t know, or refuse to see, that it is perfectly permeated by a hidden resource that does not only permit us to protest against death, but to vanquish it.</b> In this respect, Roth’s work perfectly demonstrates this general truth, that the greatest secular art amounts to a form of negative theology.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/are-social-justice-politics-serious" source="SubStack" author="Freddie De Boer">Are Social Justice Politics Serious, or Not?</a> <bq>[...] <b>identity politics and socialist politics are not incidentally at odds, but are rather inherently and existentially incompatible.</b> The heart of left-wing practice is communitarianism, putting the group before the individual, and the fundamental complaint of identity politics is “hey, what about me?!?” People really don’t want to confront this incompatibility because it’s socially and professionally uncomfortable for them, and <b>most self-identified socialists understand that if you were to force people to choose, you’d end up with an even smaller rump of American socialism than we have today.</b></bq> <bq>[...] political movement, but <b>it’s also a set of discursive tools, and one of its central tools has always been a vociferous rejection of criticism, typically enforced through bringing intense social and professional shunning to bear.</b> Whether the danger is real or perceived, a lot of people remain terribly afraid of appearing to defy this consensus. A lot of mainstream liberals have nursed private doubts about the social justice project for years, but they’ve also seen the potential costs of doing so publicly,</bq> <bq>I personally feel in a very visceral and deep place in my heart that <b>being condescended to is so much worse than open antagonism.</b></bq> <h><span id="programming">Programming</span></h> <a href="https://claudioholanda.ch/en/blog/svelte-kit-after-3-billion-requests" source="" author="Claudio Holanda">Thoughts on Svelte(Kit), one year and 3 billion requests later</a> <bq><b>Reactive declarations and statements feel like powerful magic, and they are, but it’s very easy to hurt yourself by writing code that is almost impossible to debug, and end up having to refactor all your component tree that mixes with this reactivity.</b> Reactive declarations and statements are useful features, just remember not to abuse them, otherwise you may end up switching Svelte’s productivity by headaches and infinite debug sessions, which may directly affect your deadlines.</bq> Duh. Stop mixing reactivity into your component tree. <bq>I hold immense respect and admiration for Rich and his remarkable work not only in Svelte, but also Rollup, Ractive and many other technologies. Rich and others in the Svelte ecosystem are also brilliant minds, but I don’t see them engaging in this dance with the other brilliant minds anymore. <b>Without this active engagement, I fear that Svelte may not be remembered as it should by the audience.</b></bq> Too fucking bad. Take it or leave it. It's Not enough that the tech is great, you have to be a dancing monkey evangelist too, or people won't use your amazing free thing? No wonder Rich ducked out a side door. That's toxic. Fuck them. <hr> <a href="https://yotam.net/posts/linux-namespaces-are-a-poor-mans-plan9-namespaces/" source="" author="Yotam">Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces</a> <bq>Plan 9 had two major ideas, that everything else was built on. The first was the idea that everything is a file. You might think that in Unix everything was already a file, but it was only partially true. In Plan 9 they took this idea to the extreme. <b>Everything including the input and output of the system, process management and network connections were all accessed through the file system instead of the usual syscalls.</b> The second major idea is, you guessed it, per process namespace.</bq> <bq>[..] popular example is the drawterm terminal, which connects to a remote machine, and binds the client display and input devices into the process namespace. <b>That makes for an elegant remote desktop solution that doesn’t require a custom protocol</b> [...]</bq> <hr> <a href="https://ferd.ca/embrace-complexity-tighten-your-feedback-loops.html" source="Fred Hebert" author="My Bad Opinions">Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops</a> <bq>If you've ever worked in a flat organization, like the one in the middle here, is that even though you have little management structure to speak of, power dynamics and decision-making authority still exists. <b>People who have no power attached to their role are still going to be consulted or inserted in the decision-making flow of the organization, they're still going to be influential and have the ability to make or break projects, but just with less obvious accountability.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the way people work every day is often different from the way people around them imagine their work is being done. <b>The gap between how work is thought to be done and how it is actually done is a major but generally invisible factor in how systems work out.</b></bq> <bq><b>People will imagine things like, for example, writing all the tests before writing or modifying any code and that code coverage could be ideal and then that it will all be reviewed in depth by an expert, and will enshrine this as a policy.</b></bq> <bq>[...] the vast majority of answers, <b>nearly 60%, came from people saying "my time tracking was always fake and lies,"</b> with some people stating they even wrote applications to generate realistic-looking time sheets.</bq> <bq>Part of the reason for this is that every day decisions are made by trying to deal with all sorts of pressures coming from the workplace, which includes the values communicated both as spoken and as acted out. <b>People generally want to do a good job and they’ll try to balance these conflicting values and pressures as well as they can.</b></bq> <bq>Locally for you as a DevOps or SRE team, there is a need for the awareness of what the organization and customers actually care about. <b>Some availability targets become useless metrics because they’re disconnected from what users want, and you’re just going to burn people out doing it.</b></bq> <bq>[...] wait a few hours for the code owners to get up and fix it at a leisurely pace. <b>We're going to accept a bit of well-scoped, partial unavailability</b>—something that happens a lot in large distributed systems—<b>in order to keep the system stable.</b></bq> <bq>When I went up to upper management, they absolutely believed that engineers were empowered and should feel safe pressing a big red button that stopped feature work if they thought their code wasn't ready. The engineers on that team felt that while this is what they were being told, in practice they'd still get in trouble. <b>There's no amount of test training that would fix this sort of issue. The engineers knew they didn't have enough tests and they were making that tradeoff willingly.</b></bq> <bq>[...] you have to be able to call out when your teams are strained, when targets aren’t being met and customers are complaining about it. It means you might be right, and some deadlines or feature delivery could be deferred to make room for others. <b>How do you deal with capacity planning when making your biggest customer renew their contract prevents you from signing up another one that’s as big? Very carefully, by talking it out by all the involved people.</b></bq> <bq><b>You assume that when the site is down and slow, people are mad, and you make being up and fast a proxy for satisfaction.</b> But then that signal is a bit messy and not super actionable, because it can include user devices or bits of the network you don't control, plus it's hard to measure, so you'll settle for response time at the edge of your infrastructure. This loses fidelity into the signal, but it'll get worse as you suddenly find some teams have more data than others, and they use features differently, so <b>you either need a ton of alarms or fewer messier ones, but you're getting further and further away from whether people are actually satisfied.</b></bq> <bq><b>Metrics that become their own targets and are gamed of course lose meaningfulness</b>; this is one of the most common issues with counting incidents and then debating whether an outage should or shouldn’t be declared in a way that might affect the tally rather than addressing it directly.</bq> <bq>[...] re-evaluate your metrics often, and change them. I guess there’s also a lesson to be learned that improvements can also cause their own uncertainty and that these successes can themselves lead to destabilizations.</bq> <bq>[...] writing a procedure means little unless people actually see its value and believe it’s worth following. Conversely, it means that <b>if you can demonstrate the usefulness and make some approaches more usable, they’re likely to get adopted regardless of what is written down as a list of steps or procedures.</b></bq> <bq>I used to try and weed my lawn a whole hell of a lot and pull the weeds hours a week until someone explained to me that weeds grew easier in the type of soil I had (poor, dry, unmaintained soil) than grass, and pulling the weeds wasn’t the way to go, <b>I needed to actually make the soil good for the grass to crowd out the weeds.</b></bq> <bq>[...] <b>there's a warning here about trying to change the decisions your people make with carrots and sticks—with incentives. They are not going to fundamentally change what pressures the employees negotiate.</b> The pressures stay the same, all you're doing is adding more of them, either in the form of rewards or punishments, which makes decision-making more complex and trickier. <b>Chances are people will keep making the same decisions as they were already, but then they'll report it differently to either get their bonus or to avoid getting penalized for it.</b></bq> <bq><b>SLOs aren’t hard and fast rules. When the error budget is empty, the main thing that matters to me is that we have a conversation about it, and decide what it is we want to happen from there on.</b> Are we going to hold off on deploys and experiments? Are we able to meet the objectives while on-call, with some schedule corrective work, some major re-architecting? Can we just talk to the customers? Were our targets too ambitious or are we going to eat dirt for a while?</bq> <bq><b>Seeing non-compliance is not necessarily a sign of bad workers.</b> It may rather be a sign of a bad understanding of the workers' challenges, and point to a need to adjust how work is prescribed.</bq> <hr> <a href="https://cohost.org/tef/post/1764930-how-not-to-write-a" author="tef" source="CoHost">how (not) to write a pipeline</a> <n>Note: The author probably actually meant to title this article <i>how to (not) write a pipeline.</i> but the author also doesn't use capital letters, so I guess maybe that's the best we can hope for. The content is nevertheless excellent.</n> <bq>you open a dm, it's best to avoid an audience. people get touchy about their code.<bq>This is great work, it's good to prototype these things out</bq><b>Remember: Don't be a dick about it.</b> Don't squeal and wail, not matter how much you want to. <b>People really don't like being told "You can't do it that way. You do not understand why."</b> It's a bad look all round, even if it's true. Establish common ground, reframe problem, work towards common goals. Then you can be a dick about it, later. Remember: It's only a little bit less of a dick to be Socratic about it, and ask questions you already know the answer to, so try and be nice where you can.<bq>I don't see a lot of error handling.</bq><b>There's never any error handling. The message broker is always running, the queue always exists, and the workers never make a mistake, either.</b> That's how prototypes look, sure, but that's how pipelines will look, years later.</bq> <bq>[...] <b>the point of raising this isn't "this has to be fixed"</b> but "we need to understand how it can fail, and how much time will we waste fixing it."</bq> <bq>[...] it's a good moment to take a step back and ask "how come it worked out this time"<ul>your coworker actually believes you when you share your experience you aren't forcing people to reinvent your exact solution <b>not every issue is fixed, despite being identified</b> <b>it wasn't about someone being right, or someone being wrong, it was about lowering operational costs</b></ul></bq> <bq>sometimes it's a little bit like solving a race condition. no-one believes it can be fixed, and when people ask for help, they just want to move the problem elsewhere. <b>turns out "have you tried explicitly ordering the operations on the shared mutable state" is not a popular answer, despite being correct. people hate eating their vegetables.</b></bq>