S. and I are up in Victoria for a brief pre-Christmas holiday vacation; mostly just lounging about. We’re sitting in Saint Cecilia as I write this, which I strongly recommend if you’re into coffee. They do great hand-brews. One of the non-lounge activities, though, was Craigdarroch Castle. Craigdarroch Castle from a slight distance — it’s a big Romanesque Revival stone building. ...
I’ve lived in big modern apartment complexes with decent courtyards, but this post is on target despite the existence of exceptions. And even my apartment courtyard was a restricted access area, only open to apartment residents. I spend a lot of time thinking about back to office, hybrid work, remote work, and so on. As is usually the case, Charity Majors has good thoughts on this. Her company is fully remote and distributed, and I believe that was true even before the pandemic; like many of us, she’s found that you still need that physical presence from time to time. Here’s how she does it. ...
Pitchfork dug deep for this review of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 1-3. Cool for the music but also cool for the esoterica. Anyone who claimed to be Crowley’s kid and had a passion for folk music is worth investigating in my book. Alejandro Galindo seems like a really interesting director. A fair amount of his movies are available on the commercial-based streaming services. I wonder if these weren’t an influence on Roma? ...
Mmm, a whole month’s worth. Look! Finally an article about “the average rural voter” that doesn’t turn out to be about a local Republican activist! I need to remember to check out this online course about modern Ukrainian history from Yale. The trap everyone falls into with technical debt is basically the result of the fact that human instincts are terrible at risk analysis. “It’s been OK so far!” And then your entire airline stops being able to fly. ...
Sarah Polley haș some absolutely wonderful thoughts about making a movie ( Women Talking) with a mostly female crew. If you’re really fretful about assigning any behaviors to genders in particular, consider it as a piece about how much value there is in challenging norms. “They crafted a budget based on 10-hour days, shot in and near Toronto, so everybody could be home for bedtime.” Can’t wait to see this one. ...
Recovery from covid continues. Allow me to express the sentiment that wearing a mask is a very small price to pay for avoiding literally three weeks of reduced capacity, one week of which was complete downtime. I installed an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, so if you’re a Mastodon person you can effectively follow this blog at @Bryant@popone.innocence.com. This works very well for me, because it means I can easily put my longer-form permanent thoughts here and everything I post on my main Mastodon account ( @BryantD@dice.camp) can be transient. ...
Iger’s moving quickly. Kareem Daniel is out, not surprisingly at all. But what’s really interesting, from his internal email: I’ve asked Dana Walden, Alan Bergman, Jimmy Pitaro, and Christine McCarthy to work together on the design of a new structure that puts more decision-making back in the hands of our creative teams and rationalizes costs, and this will necessitate a reorganization of Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution. Pitaro and Bergman were on my short list of internal candidates for the successor job. I also mentioned competitive tryouts. Huh. ...
Predicting internal politics at Disney: always one of my favorite things. I haven’t worked there in years and I wasn’t in a position to have good internal scoops on this stuff anyhow, so that’s my disclaimer. What we know for sure: Bob Iger just returned to Disney; it was announced late on a Sunday night. Bob Chapek is completely gone. He just had his contract renewed this summer. Iger has a two year contract and will explicitly be responsible for developing his successor. This is all very sudden. ...
Dave Troy is still killing me. No, actually, I would not. I would expect Elon Musk (which is who he means) to maintain Twitter (which is what he means) in a functional state no matter how much it cost so that they could pile information chaos on top of economic chaos. Why would you stagger those two things? Blow up Twitter now and the world has time to recover. Fucking terrible. At some point I’ll write up a general debunk. ...
Phew. No big Paxlovid bounce, thankfully. This is what I thought of when I heard about Tesla engineers coming over to validate Twitter code. It’s both true that the author seems pretty savvy and that the culture over at Tesla is focused on velocity over anything. Good times. Let’s get all the Twitter stuff out of the way! Evelyn Douek has smart things to say about Twitter’s regulatory challenges. Not just in the US, not just in the EU – India’s going to be a huge headache. This layoff guide for Twitter employees is worth reading for anyone who’s nervous about their job. Or anyone, really. Use your work laptop in a way which will enable you to execute on those precautions quickly. One billion dollars in infrastructure cuts? This is already working out badly (original). Sympathies to the guy who just went on call for a bunch of systems he doesn’t know. Gergley has a good thread on the problems ahead. Here’s another SRE still employed by Twitter, and he thinks it’s gonna be ugly. Rakyll is a well-respected principal engineer in the reliability biz; she’s pessimistic (original) and thinks people are leaving. Tangentially related: Starlink is inevitably having to throttle bandwidth. Some math: Starlink wants $5K/month for 2 terminals with a total of 350 Mbps download. That’s cheap and cool but the existing mobile solutions can deliver bandwidth in the Gbps range. OK, that’s enough horrified observation of the train wreck. Mastodon is treating me OK so far. ...