Makura no Soshi

On too big to fail tech …

• How big tech is dragging us towards the next financial crash, Rana Foroohar, The Guardian
  Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to avoid regulation, and thinks it should play by different rules. And like the banks, it could be about to wreak financial havoc on us all.
• Absolute scale corrupts absolutely – apenwarr
  The Internet has gotten too big.
• Silicon Valley Techies Still Think They’re the Good Guys. They’re Not. | Erin Griffith, WIRED
  Will anyone ever write another positive story about a tech startup? I said probably not.
• How Evil Is Tech? – David Brooks, The New York Times
  Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction.
• Nothing Fails Like Success – Jeffrey Zeldman, A List Apart
  Buying something you can’t afford, and borrowing from organizations that don’t have your (or your customers’) best interest at heart, is the business plan of most internet startups.
• How billions vanish into the black hole that is the security industry, Dimitri Tokmetzis and Maaike Goslinga, The Correspondent
  The [EU] Commission has been trying to boost the security industry for ten years now, and nearly €2 billion has already been funneled into security research.

some politics after non-Brexit day …

• The paranoid fantasy behind Brexit, Fintan O’Toole, The Guardian
  In the im­pe­ri­al ima­gi­na­ti­on, there are only two sta­tes: do­mi­nant and sub­mis­si­ve, co­lo­ni­s­er and co­lo­nis­ed. This dua­lism lin­gers. If Eng­land is not an im­pe­ri­al power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a co­l­ony.
• Why we stop­ped trus­ting eli­tes, Wil­liam Da­vies, The Guar­di­an
  The notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians – can represent millions of others.
• Die Politik ist bürgerverdrossen – Indiskretion Ehrensache
  Die Bür­ger­ge­sell­schaft wird als nicht zeit­ge­mäß emp­fun­den – al­lein Be­rufs­po­li­ti­ker ver­stün­den die Welt des Jah­res 2019 noch. […] Zu­sam­men­ge­fasst: Die Be­rufs­po­li­ti­ker möch­ten beim Weg­re­gie­ren nicht be­läs­tigt wer­den.
• Die haben das Internet nicht verstanden? Ich denke, doch.
  Meine These zur neuen Urheberrechtsgesetzgebung und deren Artikel 11 und 13 ist ja, dass die gesamte Novelle vor allem ein Versuch ist, das Internet so umzugestalten, dass es zu einem, – sagen wir mal – konservativerem Verständnis davon, wie Medien funktionieren, passt.
• Über Zugfahren in Europa
  Aber mit der Bahn über eine län­ge­re Stre­cke in ein an­de­res, eu­ro­päi­sches Land zu rei­sen, in eine Stadt ab­seits der paar Me­tro­po­len, die mit dem Rail­team er­reich­bar sind? Das kann ich nie­man­dem emp­feh­len, der nicht voll­kom­men schmerz­geil und mit einem di­cken Not­fall­geld­beu­tel ge­seg­net ist. An die­sem Punkt schä­me ich mich für “meine” Bahn, für “meine” EU.
• Für einen Neubeginn in Europa, Emmanuel Macron
  Noch nie seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg war Europa so wichtig. Und doch war Europa noch nie in so großer Gefahr.

Über Arbeit und ihre Umstände …

• Homeoffice – Klischee und Realität | Das Nuf Advanced
  Wer sich für mehr Homeoffice einsetzen möchte, um Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmern eine bessere Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Familie zu ermöglichen, könnte mehr als zwei Minuten in eine passende Bildwahl investieren.
• Vigilien.
  Ich erhebe die Forderung nach einer Architektur und Inneineinrichtung aus nicht mehr als 10 Materialien und nicht mehr als 5 Formen.
• Wework: Die Kaffeeautomatisierung des Lebens, Michael Seemann auf Golem.de
  WLAN, ein Tisch, frischer Latte Macchiato und schlaue Köpfe hinter Computern: Mit diesen Zutaten wollte die idealistische Coworking-Bewegung die Arbeitswelt revolutionieren. Herausgekommen ist die Plattformisierung vor allem in Gestalt von Wework – modular, effizient und pragmatisch.
• WeWTF, Scott Galloway
  It’s easy to wallpaper over the shortcomings of the business with a bull market’s halcyon: cheap capital. WeWork has brought new meaning to the word wallpaper.
• The Real Story of Automation Beginning with One Simple Chart, Scott Santens
  There’s a chart I came across in 2017, and not only does it tell an extremely important story about automation, but it also tells a story about the state of the automation discussion itself.
• How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen on BuzzFeed
  I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.

On Licenses, Open Source, Communities, etc

• Google: Sorry professor, old Beethoven recordings on YouTube are copyrighted | Ars Technica
  Op-ed: How one German professor had a bad experience with overly broad upload filters.
• You Think the Visual Studio Code binary you use is a Free Software? Think again. | Carl Chenet’s Blog
  Did you download your binary of Visual Studio Code directly from the official website? If so, you’re not using a Free Software and only Microsoft knows what was added to this binary. And you should think of the worst possible.
• The Realities of Being a FOSS Maintainer – Site Feedback – Caddy Community
  Author’s note: This is a more intimate look into what it’s like to be a maintainer of popular open source software. This is written by me, personally, and not as a representative of the company. I’m going out on a limb here, so try to be nice, okay?
• FOSS: passive consumerism kills our community | Carl Chenet’s Blog
  TL;DR: Don’t be a passive consumer of FOSS. It’s going to kill the FOSS community or change it in bad ways. Contribute in any way described in this article, even really basic ones, but contribute daily or on a very regular basis.
• Choosing to stay out of the community
  In the past couple of weeks, there’s been a lot of commotion in the open source / free software world about codes of conduct and specific people (Linus) and specific projects (Linux) and so on.
• FOSDEM annotated, at n-gate.com
  Let’s take a look at my annotated copy of the FOSDEM 2019 main talk schedule, shall we?

GDPR, DSGVO, etc.

• Der gefährliche Quatsch der DSGVO, Marcel Mellor
  Es hätte klappen können: Privacy by Design, Klarheit über unsere erfassten Daten, Datenschutz als Normalzustand. Die Datenschutzgrundverordnung (DSGVO) hat stattdessen den Ruf des Datenschutzes geschwächt und das Internet weiter zentralisiert. Schöner Mist. Und jetzt?
• Wie eine bessere DSGVO ausgesehen hätte, neunetz.com
  Denn eine Flut an Pop-Ups zum Abnicken helfen am Ende weder den Nutzern noch den kleinen und mittleren Anbietern im Netz, sie helfen vor allem den Großen.
• The first cut is the deepest – Nele Heise
  Letzte Woche ist was nicht so Schönes passiert. Es hat mit *drum roll* Datenschutz und DSGVO zu tun. Und mit meinem Kind. Oder vielmehr: allen Kindern. Und Jugendlichen. In diesem Internet.
• A critical reflection on #GDPR, tante.cc
  This text will just look at the GDPR as it is, as regulation.
• How GDPR Will Change The Way You Develop — Smashing Magazine
  GDPR requires you to be more thoughtful about the sites and services you build, more transparent about the ways you collect and use data, more considerate of your users, and more thorough in your development and documentation processes.

On Java …

• A guide to logging in Java, by Marco Behler
  Developers can use this guide to discover, understand and use the right Java logging library for their applications, like Log4j2, Logback, or java.util.logging.
• Introducing Amazon Corretto, a No-Cost Distribution of OpenJDK with Long-Term Support | AWS Open Source Blog
  Java is one of the most popular languages in use by AWS customers, and we are committed to supporting Java and keeping it free.
• Using Java 11 In Production: Important Things To Know | IntelliJ IDEA Blog
  If you stay up to date on news from the Java community, you may have heard that Oracle have changed their support model for Java. Some news is even suggesting that we now have to pay to use Java – this is not true!
• All You Need To Know For Migrating To Java 11 – blog@CodeFX
  Java 11 is released today! Formally it marks the end of a monumental shift in the Java ecosystem.
• Quick Tips for Fast Code on the JVM, by Daniel Spiewak
  It occurred to me that, really, I had more or less picked up all of it by word of mouth and experience, and there just aren’t any good reference sources on the topic. So… here’s my word of mouth.
• The JVM in Docker 2018, by Christopher Batey
  Later JDK versions have made it far easier to run a JVM application in a Linux container.

On cloud computing and vendors …

• Multi-Cloud Is a Trap – Brave New Geek
  It comes up in a lot of conversations with clients. We want to be cloud-agnostic. We need to avoid vendor lock-in. We want to be able to shift workloads seamlessly between cloud providers. Let me say it again: multi-cloud is a trap.
• The Private Cloud Has Failed Us – Chuck’s Blog
  Perhaps there is no deeper disappointment in life than when a cherished concept fails to produce the desired results. Such is the case with the industry’s notion of private clouds. I’m throwing in the towel, walking away – and cursing under my breath. It’s a failed concept.
• Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly (It’s Mostly Good) – Deps
  For companies that don’t want to spend a lot of time learning and dealing with the complexities of AWS, I recommend looking at Google Cloud.
• How do you explain the unreasonable effectiveness of cloud security? – High Scalability
  With the enormous attack surface of cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, why aren’t there more security problems? […] Dr. Byron Cook gave an enthusiastic talk on Formal Reasoning about the Security of Amazon Web Service.
• CloudWatch Is of the Devil, but I Must Use It | Linux Journal
  When you take a hard look at CloudWatch’s complete failure across all 14 Leadership Principles, you wonder how this product ever made it out the door in its current state.
• Jerry Hargrove | Cloud Diagrams & Notes
  Various diagrams of AWS services.
• Re:Invent 2018 Re:Watch Helper
  On the youtube channel, it can be hard to search by description or session level. Try these pages to help you navigate.

On computer and programming history …

• What is Code?
  Software has been around since the 1940s. Which means that people have been faking their way through meetings about software, and the code that builds it, for generations.
• Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983
  In 1983, though, home computers were unsophisticated enough that a diligent person could learn how a particular computer worked through and through. That person is today probably less mystified than I am by all the abstractions that modern operating systems pile on top of the hardware.
• How Lisp Became God’s Own Programming Language
  Lisp transcends the utilitarian criteria used to judge other languages, because the median programmer has never used Lisp to build anything practical and probably never will, yet the reverence for Lisp runs so deep that Lisp is often ascribed mystical properties.
• Should you learn C to “learn how the computer works”?
  I’ve often seen people suggest that you should learn C in order to learn how computers work. Is this a good idea? Is this accurate?
• C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines
  In this article we’ll go on a journey from 4-bit microcontrollers to room-sized mainframes and learn how porting C to each of them helped people separate the essence of the language from the environment of its birth.
• The Coming Software Apocalypse
  A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.