Our culture is very big on freedom and responsibility. I pride myself on making as few decisions as possible in a quarter. We’re getting better at that; sometimes I can go a whole quarter without making any decisions.
Tree, trunk, branch, crown
Climbing up and sitting down
Morning sun becomes noon-blue
All the world is old and new
Road, street, track, path
Ship, boat, wooden raft
Nest, bird, feather, fly
All the world has got its sky
Spreading shadows, setting sun
Crickets, curtains, day is done
A fire takes away the chill
All the world can hold quite still
- All the World, Liz Garton Scanlon, illustrated by Marla Frazee
Beautiful homespun poem, and my favorite book to read to Brooke, bar none. Happy Fathers Day.
Men have been viewed as the default. So therefore, if you understand males, you understand females.
…but even down to the cellular level, that is not the case. The NIH has started to recognize that.
- Martie Haselton, via Edge 👏👏👏
The web, and Google, are the world’s worst doctors.
The problem is, they’re also now everyone’s first doctor.
Turning off Facebook for Bridgy
I announced recently that Bridgy Publish for Facebook would shut down soon. Facebook’s moves to restrict its API to improve privacy and security are laudable, and arguably the right idea, but also mean that users can no longer use third party apps like Bridgy to create posts.
I didn’t realize it at first, but similar API restrictions hit the backfeed (aka listen) feature, which sends comments and likes back to your web site. Bridgy can still see comments and likes by Bridgy users, but that’s a tiny fraction of the Facebook comments and likes that it used to see.
I spent a while looking for a workaround, and even looked into scraping HTML, but you have to be logged into Facebook to see even public posts, on both www and m, so no luck there. [Insert silo snark here.]
So with a heavy heart, I’m shutting down Facebook on Bridgy entirely. Publish will still work until August 1, but listen largely stopped working on May 24, so I turned it off altogether and disabled new user signup a few days ago.
An engineering degree from a top tier university does not qualify you to operate consumer electronics.
Interesting unintended consequence of federated social networks: when you post a link, thousands of different nodes all fetch it at the same time to render a link preview, which results in a small DDoS.
Anyone else excited about this bit of the Emacs 26 release notes?
Emacs now provides a limited form of concurrency with Lisp threads.
Handwritten lyrics to If I Killed Your Boyfriend, one of the funniest songs I’ve ever heard, from Christopher Worth, one of the best musicians I know and a wonderful human being. Check him out if you’re near Portland or his next tour.
New pictures
New pictures are up! Playgrounds, family, skiing, the Wave Organ, panoramic views, and more.
Learned about the Cushing, Oklahoma oil interchange today, one of the largest in the world. Its oil manifolds have automated electrical valves that transfer millions of barrels of oil automatically, just like packets routed through switching fabrics and router backplanes in the internet’s Tier 1 peering points. So cool!
Bridgy Publish for Facebook shuts down in August
Bridgy Publish launched four years ago with the ability to create posts, RSVPs, comments, and likes on Facebook and other silos. It’s created over 30k silo posts since then (details), 7k on Facebook specifically.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook started limiting its API in a number of ways. Notably, it disabled RSVPing yesterday, and will disable posting on August 1, which will effectively kill Bridgy Publish. More background in the docs.
I’ll send Facebook notifications to warn users that they only have a few months left. RIP Bridgy Publish for Facebook, we’ll miss you. So long, and thanks for all the fish!
Notebooks like Jupyter and Observable are great for research, data science, and really any interactive computing or documentation. I want to start using them for ops/SRE projects too. Thomas Kluyver‘s bash_kernel works, but has lots of rough edges. Anyone have any other ideas?