Codex

I first heard of it from Joel Spolsky’s blog and wikipedia also credits that article with popularizing the concept. In it’s original formulation, it was based on remote procedure calls being hidden in APIs. Because a remote computer call has all these limits of latency, packet/info loss, and possible connection loss, it is impossible to make a perfect abstraction that allows the programmer to treat the remote call as though it were local. The reality the abstraction tries to hide “leaks” in those fundamental limits.

All of contemporary global society is such an abstraction; that’s one of the principles of post-modernism. When you buy clothes online an entire invisible work force of shippers, manufacturers, resource procurerers, and more lies beind each article of fabric.

Pressure from climate change, tariffs, global war, and more are straining the foundations of society and the comfortable abstraction is starting to crack.

The dip in usage comes just as Microsoft has been forcing full-screen ads onto the machines of customers running Windows 10 to encourage them to upgrade.

Yeah no shit! When my computer does full-screen, disruptive things that I didn’t tell it to do, I figure out how to remove that malware. I’ve been off Windows at home for about a month now, thanks Linux Mint! Getting some games to work has been challenging, but most things have just worked and quite a few work much better!

Performance is up overall, and my confidence that my computer isn’t running a bunch of secret ad and spy ware is way up. Hardware like my gamepad and microphone would randomly disconnect and have issues on Windows, all working perfectly now.

Unfortunately I’m still deep in MS land for work, but there’s almost a comedic quality to it. Everything’s very slow, everyone has constant issues with Teams, or Office online, or Dynamics, or copilot shoving it’s tendrils into everything. Watching businesses struggle to keep operating in the face of Microsoft’s inadequacy is like being a mechanic watching a motor grind to a halt because the owner/manufacturer replaced all the oil with syrup.

Like yes, it’s my problem to fix, but I’m just glad it’s not my car.

I had in some ways the opposite 23&Me experience and goals. My parents told me growing up that I had some small native ancestry. This is actually a common myth many Americans have either been told or somehow deluded themselves into believing.

So I did the DNA testing (which I now regret from all the obvious enshittification and privacy reasons) to prove that my ancestry was boring and predictable. Which it was, no indigenous ancestry, just the expected European countries that my great grandparents came from.

They also do a lot of nice health screening things and I think that’s probably the much more valuable aspect of it. It really is very American that people are so much more concerned with what DNA says about one’s race or ethnicity than about their health and wellbeing.

Every 5 minutes, at max volume:

YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US. ALL AVAILABLE OPERATORS ARE HELPING OTHER CUSTOMERS. PLEASE STAY ON THE LINE.

2 minutes later:

DID YOU KNOW <COMPANY> IS WORKING TO SAVE CUSTOMERS LIKE YOU MONEY? UPGRADE YOUR PLAN TO ULTIMATE TODAY AND SAVE! YOU CAN ADD BASIC CABLE TO YOUR INTERNET PLAN FOR FREE FOR 3 MONTHS. MAKE ANY SOUND AT ALL TO LEAVE THE SUPPORT QUEUE AND SPEAK WITH A NEW ACCOUNT SPECIALIST RIGHT AWAY.

returns to playing compressed elevator music through an old can

Sounds like the octopus wrangler knows how to leverage the behaviors of the various animals around it towards it’s own ends. Pretty interesting! I’m also curious about their potential follow ups to see if they have memory for and can recognize previous group members.

Is it just me, or is it worrying how companies keep packing up and selling off the only parts of their businesses that actually, you know, make stuff, in favor of becoming full time bullshit peddlers?

“Trending on Occupied Twitter”

I’ve been thinking we need to get aspirational and take it to the next level:

Instead of “X (formally know as Twitter)”, the time has come for “Twitter (currently called X)”.

Ah Texas, where children can’t make decisions or be held accountable in any way, unless they’re brown skinned and can be accused of a crime, then they must he tried as adults and sentenced to life as an imprisoned slave.

Out past the planets is the heliopause, the final boundary between the solar system and interstellar space. Voyager discovered it, but other probes have confirmed it. The radiation and particles emitted by the sun create a pressurized bubble around it, where plasma (energized particles, mostly hydrogen) is much denser than past the heliopause. Cosmic rays are more prevalent outside it.

I’ve heard it compared to the empty zone around where a sink faucet first hits, creating a little “wall” of water around it as the splashing water pushes back the standing water.

“Empty” space is anything but. There’s tons of particles and energy flying though it, just not as dense.

Ah man, living the dream!

I do wonder what’s up with fascist nerds and Tolkien names.

Pretty neat! I guess I’m one of those naive folks who would have said that it’s obvious it goes in reverse. I also don’t see why this would be so hard to just test. Submerge a sprinkler, attach a pump to the hose, observe it moving in reverse as each arm sucks water up, right?

There’s a cool old documentary about the place called Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, narrated by John Waters. It goes into the history of the place and shows a little of how dilapidated and decayed it now is (well, now was, when it came out in 2006).

It tries to livin up the modern day stuff by showing some of the “colorful” characters who lived there. I have to imagine there was a lot not being said, and I’m sure 20 years of further decay have not made it the friendliest and funnest place to be.

Edit to add: Apparently some enterprising soul has uploaded it to YouTube: https://youtu.be/8TjGAWxL23c

Delightfully confusing inded! Ah, this is worse than figuring out which way to vote on state amendments! (it’s voting day, haha) Well, who knows, but yes the rumor mill is a grand time, one of humanities oldest past times! Certainly a primary reason to hang out online, haha

This is an interesting move, especially the timing seems funny to me. Microsoft, who run that board let’s be real, just finished a big developer’s conference called Ignite. Every session was focused on the use of MS “AI” (called Copilot now) in various aspects of development.

A big push was using their studio tools to generate new front ends and capabilities targeted specifically at your customers, and using their “AI” tools to generate content and interactions with customers. It goes far enough that they’re basically asking businesses to hand over decision making power to the MS algorithms.

So in that light, MS pushing big to become THE infrastructure that underlies AI-controlled businesses, maybe Altman and co were too mouthy about their idealist directions that AI should go in? Or maybe they oversold the capabilities of their software and now that MS is staking big on it, they want to see results?

I was worried about structural integrity, but they seem to address this. The self-assembling mechanism is a very cool discovery here!

Another interesting application for this as a structural material is that I’m not sure you’d need conduits? Like a block-house made mostly of this material, you could just put sockets directly into the concrete, and then hook the whole building up to the grid. I presume you’d need sturdy, well insulated walls to prevent accidents, haha.

Actually, would a box made of this (a parking garage say) act like a Faraday cage?