matto

Watch­ing My­self Program

A Bet­ter Web is Coming

So­cial me­dia: de­signed to be bad for you & for society

• matto 15 Aug 2022 20:30 UTC

  25 points

  15

  on: The Parable of the Boy Who Cried 5% Chance of Wolf

  This echos an excellent post by Dan Luu that touches on problems you face when you build larger, less legible systems that force you to deal with normalization of deviance: https://​​danluu.com/​​wat/​​
  
  The action items he recommends are:

  Pay attention to weak signals

  Resist the urge to be unreasonably optimistic

  Teach employees how to conduct emotionally uncomfortable conversations

  System operators need to feel safe in speaking up

  Realize that oversight and monitoring are never-ending

  Most of these go against what is considered normal or comfortable though:

  1. It’s difficult to pay attention to weak signals when people build awful attention traps (eg. tiktok, youtube, etc.)

  2. People are commonly [overconfident](https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​ybYBCK9D7MZCcdArB/​​how-to-measure-anything#Step_2__Determine_what_you_know).

  3. Uncomfortable conversations are uncomfortable. In certain cultures, it’s better to straight out lie rather than deliver bad news.

  4. Few organizations have set up channels for upwards communication where front line employees can flag problems. It’s better to not rock the boat.

  5. Constant oversight and monitoring are mentally and physically draining. These are also the easiest activities to cut from a budget because they’re not visible until an accident happens.

  What the boy should have done is establish an organization (Wolf-Spotters) whose responsibility is monitoring for signs of wolves. This organization could be staffed by professional or volunteer observers. They need to do periodic trainings and live-action drills (perhaps using a wolf suit). To the fund this, the boy should have first created a PR campaign to make people aware of the cost of unspotted wolves (death), then use that to get support of some local politicians.

  (It’s basically a fire department).

  If the boy was open to using the dark arts, he could have executed a false flag wolf attack. That would incentivize local politicians to support his cause.

• matto 29 Oct 2021 12:16 UTC

  25 points

  on: An Un­ex­pected Vic­tory: Con­tainer Stack­ing at the Port of Long Beach

  Has anyone found a way to measure the impact the of this change? It seems it should be simple to look and see that some throughput of containers has increased, but I have had no luck in finding any kind of dashboard for this data.

  The closest I’ve come is marinetraffic.com, which still shows quite a lot of ships around the port of Long Beach. The same site shows a simple bar graph for “congestion”, but it only shows 8 weeks of data if you register a free account, making it hard to see any trends.

  (There’s a free trial, which I may check out during the weekend).

[Question] How did you make your way back from meta?

Why Im­prov­ing Dialogue Feels So Hard

[Question] Where to start with statis­tics if I want to mea­sure things?

The Web is Turn­ing into Cable TV

• matto 20 Mar 2022 17:33 UTC

  18 points

  on: How to pre­vent com­mu­nist re­volts?

  This is a problem I’ve been wrestling with for some time. The recent invasion of Ukraine brought it back to the forefront of my mind, but so far I haven’t found concrete actions an individual can take.

  At the moment, it seems to me that the key to keeping authoritarianism at bay is repairing and strengthening institutions because my assumption is that a well-functioning collection of institutions (aka. a state) is what prevents people from turning to bloody revolution. In other words, if people trust the government to get their needs met, they will not wish to overturn it.

  There are many forces destroying institutions. Many are internal, such as corruption and bureaucratic cost disease. These things decrease the trust in institutions, making people upset and pushing them toward fixing issues on their own. At best, this means self-help groups, but at worst, this turns into armed militias. There are external forces as well, ranging from nature (disasters, pandemics, etc.) to other states (propaganda, blockades, etc.--depending which country you live in).

  I recently read an article about how Estonia is strengthening its defenses against Russian hybrid warfare. It boils down to how hybrid warfare damages social contracts (formal/​informal, small/​large institutions), decreasing the legitimacy of the government and of democracy itself, potentially weakening Estonia’s reaction against a Crimea-like land grab. It set my mind thinking about how it should be possible to apply reverse-hybrid warfare to instead strengthen the social contracts that hold society together.

  But it seems like all of this is large scale, long term work, and nothing an individual can get going in a month or six.

  Like I said, I don’t have concrete ideas for individual actions, but this line of inquiry has pointed me in some direction as opposed to wandering randomly. It has also made visible to me concrete examples of things that damage liberal democracy, such as the tweet you posted, perhaps helping me take on a more defensive posture.

To Make Bet­ter Soft­ware, Do What Artists Do

• matto 24 Aug 2021 17:28 UTC

  12 points

  on: We need a new philos­o­phy of progress

  I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this ever since I read Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History”, wherein he brings up “techno-pessimism” as something that exploded during the 20th century on account of both world wars. You could probably trace it back to Romanticism, but I haven’t gotten that deep into the rabbit hole.

  What captured my attention about anti-progess is how pervasive this meme is. Subjectively, it appears to span countries, cultures, political ideologies, and age brackets. I know people who flinch away progress because it destroys family traditions. I know people who flinch away from it because all it does is produce pollution, surveillance, drones, etc. The older people in my life complain about the speed of change and the destruction of values. The younger seem to focus mostly on the destruction of the environment.

  I think the part the worries me specifically is that this feels like such a utopian view. That if we only “went back” to an earlier stage, all would be good. Or if we somehow got to keep our ipads, but switched to hunting wild game instead of eating processed meat. But all of these seem to ignore how complex and deeply rooted progress is and how reverting a few larger pieces may involve the premature ending of hundreds of millions of human lives.

  I’ll follow rootsofprogress as I’m curious about the broader pro-progress landscape.

• matto 11 May 2022 23:10 UTC

  11 points

  on: Crises Don’t Need Your Software

  This is a trap that software engineers appear to be especially susceptible to. If you hang out in places where they congregate, like Silicon Valley, you’ll eventually hear about solutions to all sorts of problems, from homelessness to the opioid crisis.

  Being one myself, I attribute this to solving problems every day and getting rewarded for that, then falling under curse of thinking that since you just solved Very Complicated Problem X, you can probably solve Very Complicated Problem Y, except that Y is in a domain you have so little context in that it seems simple. Dan Luu wrote about this: https://​​danluu.com/​​cocktail-ideas/​​

  When the invasion of Ukraine was just beginning, I thought to myself: if only I was a doctor/​architect/​carpenter/​policy expert/​general/​etc., I could do something. Then I began donating money across a portfolio of charities, which didn’t fully alleviate the feeling of being useless in this situation.

De­bug­ging Writer’s Block

The Open So­ciety and Its Ene­mies: Sum­mary and Thoughts

• matto 4 Oct 2021 4:13 UTC

  10 points

  on: How fac­to­ries were made safe

  It seems to me that a similar shift in thinking is taking place in the software industry under the label of “SRE.”

  (Disclaimer: I’m a site reliability engineer)

  You write:

  Thus, accidents were typically attributed to worker “carelessness.” (...) Since the contribution of the work environment to safety was not yet acknowledged, accidents were seen as largely unavoidable. (...)

  Replace the word “accidents” with “bugs” and you have a pretty accurate picture of software development up until about 2000, or so the greybeards and some of my history readings tell me. Basically, each aspect of writing a program was highly individualized, with developers collecting cool tricks like efficient algorithms or highly reusable functions. Some of this was passed on person to person, but a lot of it simply vanished when someone changed jobs.

  Then, things started to get better, with things like automated testing becoming mainstream, until we started building applications that ran on distributed systems. That level of complexity couldn’t be adequately handled in order to provide a reliable service. This was at a time when stuff like google maps or email were becoming ingrained in people’s daily lives. So we began talking about “devops”—a way for developers (who built applications) and operations (who ran the applications) to collaborate. And to cut a long story short, at some point the SRE paradigm was born, which I consider an implementation of the ideas that devops generated. SRE itself is very similar to this:

  The new corps of safety engineers began fixing the root causes of injuries. They put guards and enclosures around the moving parts of machines. They invented locks for the machines, so that they couldn’t be turned on unless those guards were in place. They created automatic shutoff mechanisms.

  My day to day involves tracking down (root-causing) outages, improving observability (ensuring good signal about system health), automating everything from deployments to developer tooling in order to decrease the risk of a breaking change making its into production and taking the service down. The key difference now is that my work doesn’t save any lives, but I like to think that it makes the lives of my users and colleagues better.

  Also, this rings extremely true:

  The new corps of safety engineers began fixing the root causes of injuries. They put guards and enclosures around the moving parts of machines. They invented locks for the machines, so that they couldn’t be turned on unless those guards were in place. They created automatic shutoff mechanisms.

  I’ve gotten a good deal of pushback from experienced developers who consider the whole devops/​SRE thing a passing fad, who also think that minutes or hours of downtime is part of the game, and that there’s simply no way around bugs and that we’re all doomed to mitigate outages at 3am on Sundays.

[Question] How do you do post mortems?

Pro­duc­tivity Notes I

• matto 1 Jun 2022 22:46 UTC

  8 points

  on: Wield­ing civilization

  Thanks for sharing this. I often catch myself thinking this way, about how, for example, the outlet in the very room you’re sitting in is connected to another strand of wire, and another, and another, until the very generator in some powerplant somewhere. And since other outlets in other buildings and cities are connected to the same state, you could say that there is almost a complete circuit between your room and every other room connected to the same grid.

  Or go up a level: consider that all this infrastructure is being operated by humans, and that connecting each human is an invisible line—a contract, a duty, a responsibility, an agreement—but of course it’s never just one line, it’s actually a whole infinitely complicated web of them. Imagine the person that agreed and committed to emptying the mailbox on your street and taking the contents to a drop-off location. And the next person who agreed and committed to collecting all the bags of mail and putting them through a sorting machine. And then the next person who agreed to and learned to load up trucks with all these bags. And then all the drivers, complete strangers, who agreed to show up at a certain place in time to pick up some bags and drive them over to another place. And… and then the whole system of judges and inspectors and operations people who make sure that everyone else keeps their commitments, so that you can put a piece of paper in one box and another person can retrieve from another box on a different continent.

  It’s quite something, this machine.

• matto 28 Nov 2021 18:40 UTC

  8 points

  0

  on: The bonds of fam­ily and com­mu­nity: Poverty and cru­elty among Rus­sian peas­ants in the late 19th century

  The question for me is how much these observations apply to peasant life in other places and at other times.

  These observations would apply to Polish peasants at around the same time as well. A good way to summarize this, I’ve found, is that the polish word for peasants—”chłopi”—is likely rooted in the old-slavic word for slaves, which they were, albeit not in the American sense because they could not be bought or sold as individuals. Instead, peasants were assigned to parcels of land, so when land was bought or sold, the peasants were transferred with it.

  There were also different sets of laws for peasants and nobles. For example, a peasant hitting a noble would be punished severely, perhaps by cutting of his hand or even executing him. A noble hitting a peasant would commonly not merit any punishment unless he killed the peasant, which may entailed paying a tiny amount of money to the dead peasant’s family (if lucky).

  I think it’s also worth adding that peasants were not considered Polish for a very long time, at least until the 19th century by those who we would label as progressive and well into the 20th by those we wouldn’t. Peasants spoke ultra-local dialects (their families usually stuck to a piece of land for centuries and they were completely an oral culture), which made it difficult for them to even communicate with nobles or city-dwellers. This probably contributed to the feeling of Otherness around them and made it easier to be cruel to them.

  Poland makes for an interesting case because it was partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the 18th century remained that way until WW1, so it didn’t exist as a uniform state at that time. How Polish national identity coalesced is a story for another time, but this setup created a sort of natural experiment: the lands belonging to the Prussians and Austrians developed the partitions they ruled over: they build railroads, schools, and functioning bureaucracies that helped usher these parts into modernity similar to what Western Europe looked like. The Russian partition, however, was kept in an almost unchanged state, and was a picture of misery that Semyonova describes.

  But Poland’s history is close to Russia’s history because these places and peoples are so close geographically. It would be most interesting to learn how peoples fared in places farther away.

  (My source for all of the above is Norman Davies’ “God’s Playground”)