Anyway, taking it in the morning as well as the evening means that I get a nice surge of dizziness, which will supposedly pass eventually (and will get better when I get up to 3x a day). So far I’m not noticing any difference in my pain levels, and I kinda feel like my emotions might be a bit more intense? Last night I certainly had a bout of frustration with technology and drawing apps (I really want to work on comics again and I feel like my tools are actively getting in the way!) but I’m feeling much more even-keeled today at least. Drowsy a lot though.

This is certainly an interesting time for me to be experimenting with my neurochemistry, as I only have a few days left at my current job and am also trying to ramp up on some projects at the AR startup while also juggling an interview process with a well-known and generally-beloved non-profit corporation that I’d love to work at – and so far that’s been going really well! I just hope my brain has stabilized again by the next interview, which is yet to be scheduled. Anyway I’m waiting for that to happen before I go up to 3x100mg of gabapentin.

Oh also I’m finally making progress on redoing my kitchen, which is way overdue. The previous owners had done a really cheap, low-quality job of refurbishing it about 10 years ago, and it’s all been falling apart. I’m taking the opportunity to finally fix some long-standing issues with it, like a lack of storage (caused by a ripple effect from a way-too-large sink) and also switching to a smaller refrigerator and dishwasher (freeing up more storage space). Also going to finally get a new range, with such perfect timing since the oven in the existing one has finally given up the ghost for good. Unfortunately there’s only one range available that actually fits in the space (due to the odd venting configuration) and going with a different solution would require a lot of compromises and be way more expensive (due to the aforementioned odd venting situation), but still, I think everything will be better in the long run.

In any case, given that I’ll soon be working from home most of the time again, it’ll be good to have a space where I can enjoy cooking for myself again.

(I’m also looking forward to getting back in the habit of buying bulk produce and unbutchered meat at my favorite restaurant supplier. And probably doing more sous vide again!)

comments

There’s a little seating area in front and a greeter who watches you to help people out (and probably make sure they aren’t up to Shenanigans). I suspect that there’s actual human intelligence going on and it isn’t purely AI like the marketing leads everyone to believe. Still, I have some ideas for things to test.

Food selection is pretty okay. The prices are fairly reasonable for Seattle. It’s mostly sandwiches and salads and snacks, and I think they’re all made elsewhere (probably at the flagship store downtown).

I ended up getting a “Tex-Mex Salad with Beef” and a caramel latte. The salad was $8.50. The coffee was $1.85, on sale, although the regular price is $2.35 which is still really cheap for Seattle. The cup and lid were Starbucks-branded, but the cardboard cozy thing said Amazon Go on it.

The salad was pretty okay. It had too much quinoa and not enough lettuce for my taste, but it was tasty and more or less filling. It did have an expiration date of today. I wonder when it was actually made.

The coffee was a bit too sweet and also wasn’t very hot by the time I got home and I suspect it wasn’t actually freshly-brewed hot. They did have regular and decaf options, but no non-dairy milks. It tasted okay. They let you bring your own cup, which is nice.

Not a fan of how it’s yet another case of tech displacing workers from jobs and automating everything away while driving even more of a wage gap and an overall wealth divide.

Also the salad selection could be better.

All in all I think it’s a place I’ll go to get cheap, quick coffee but I don’t expect to make a habit out of it.

They’re also opening a gigantic flagship store a block from my home. I look forward to seeing what the anarchists do to it.

comments

I’d asked people who knew not to tell anyone. This is pretty common. I had reasons- during development we couldn’t deal with publicly hashing this out, I was too exhausted to handle some big public thing with Alec, etc. And I was too far removed from Alec’s social circles to really know what was happening there. And lots of other people who had similar experiences with Alec never told me, or anyone. It’s common. I wasn’t keeping Alec’s secret. I was keeping mine. That’s how this happens.

That feels a lot like the shit I’d been holding on to privately for the past 8 years. Nobody wanted to tarnish the reputation of a widely-beloved person, and I’m still afraid of actually directly naming him in these posts. I don’t want to relive the community abuse I experienced, especially if it means being seen as being a “collaborator” or “protector” of a serial abuser, and on the other hand being seen as someone who’s looking for attention or some perceived “clout.”

In the aftermath of my writeup, on Sunday I had a very good conversation with the mutual friend who’d taken on the burden of the wellness check and the estate management. I won’t repeat anything of what he said (that’s his story to tell, of course) but the conversation helped me quite a lot, and I hope it helped him too.

For what it’s worth, the past two days have been the lowest-pain I’ve had in a while.

Seeing the reactions to Scott’s articles, including on the now-quite-toxic backers-only thread on the NITW kickstarter, all I can hope for is that everyone eventually finds their peace with this, and that we as a society start having better, more open conversations about this stuff before it turns tragic.

comments

I am not going to name names, even though the names are easy enough to figure out. I don’t want this to be about me, either, but I am necessarily talking about a thing that happened to and around me, and affected many people in a profound, terrible way.

In particular, I have at least something of an understanding of what Scott Benson is going through right now.

This is probably going to be a difficult read.

Read more... (CW: suicide, abuse of minors)

comments

I slept pretty okay although I had vivid dreams about unpleasant stuff, as always seems to be the case when my neurochemistry is being tampered with.

Woke up at 8 AM, couldn’t actually peel myself out of bed until half past 9, and I felt wobbly/dizzy/tired all day.

Pain was okay in the morning, but at 2:40 PM or so I had a flareup. It cleared up with a snack, though, and I kinda-sorta managed to get some actual work done, ish.

Went home at 6, had dinner, not sure where the past two hours went but I’m really tired and sleepy right now and also flaring like a matroncopulator, and it’s time for my next dose. Maybe I’ll sleep better/longer tonight and feel better tomorrow.

comments

I have a fix for that in mind, but it might cause a potential redirection loop problem in some cases so I’m not going to implement it until I’ve determined the scope of the problem and figured out if I need further workarounds.

Update: Fix is implemented and being tested on this site. Authl and Publ updates pending other folks trying it out.

comments

🎉 🥳 amp-script, a component enabling custom JavaScript on AMP pages, is now available for general use!

We can’t wait to see what you do with it!🤯https://t.co/aXxvHfNfX3

— AMP Project (@AMPhtml) August 21, 2019

Or in other words:

Let’s make a limited subset of the web that guarantees performance! No JavaScript, to keep it lean!

(Two weeks later)

So about that JavaScript thing…

It’s pretty clear to me that it’s less about providing a benefit to the web and more about providing a benefit to google. Like instead of having their own special markup that gets a mobile search fast lane they could have instead published guidelines for mobile-first design and semantic markup with html5 structure tags. You know. The things Safari and Firefox use for “reader mode,” and which are an actual standard.

And then combine this with Google’s tendency to create new projects and then discontinue them as soon as they’re no longer fashionable/cool/fun, and their tendency to try to lock everyone into their platform and sometimes even succeed… (By the way, did you know there are browsers other than Chrome out there?) But in the meantime, Google is prioritizing search results to AMP-enabled websites. You know, Google, that still makes the vast majority of their money off of ad revenue for search traffic. Yeah, no conflict of interest here…

I’ve long described Google as an incredibly curious and intelligent five-year-old with no concept of consequences or history. Right now they are seeming also like they’ve found an original historically-significant manuscript, torn a page out of it, scribbled all over it in crayon, and called it their own original story. And people are rushing to put it on their refrigerators. What the hell.

A few weeks ago, Google announced a revolution in web development: serving HTML directly to browsers.

Today’s AMP Innovation is the ability to run custom JavaScript on your AMP pages. That’s right: for the first time, web developers can write JavaScript. https://t.co/FZ20BthDf6

— Ricky Mondello (@rmondello) August 22, 2019

While discussing this on IndieWeb chat the other day, Peter Molnar asked: “no institutional memory, but they could at least use wikipedia, no?”

Wikipedia wasn’t invented there.

I haven’t worked at Google, but I have worked at Amazon (twice!) and their attitudes are, as far as I can tell, very similar. Google and Amazon both have severe problems with NIH.

At Amazon the common thought process was: that wasn’t built at Amazon so it doesn’t scale. How do we know? Because if it were built by someone who knows how to scale they would be at Amazon.

And this is why Amazon has their own in-house implementations of Stack Overflow, Twitter, GitHub, and Reddit. Which are all inferior to the originals.

And after each one gets built and internally launched, it gets used for two weeks and then forgotten about, only for someone else to decide to make another one a few months later. Or then they decide to invent entirely new paradigms for things internally, like the “simple issue manager” (SIM) which was anything but simple, used a huge pile of overwrought front end and frameworks, had terrible UX unless it was run full-screen on a desktop monitor (which was of course the programmer-designer’s preference for using it), and happened to manage issues “universally” in exactly the way the programmer-designer thought all issues should be managed for everyone. Which meant the only project that it suited was SIM itself.

But of course it became such an important thing to replace JIRA/TRAC/walls of sticky notes that it became the One True Way of doing things, use it to manage your projects Or Else. (Sticky notes worked way better. SIM did have the nice feature of making issues and their prioritization part of sprint planning, but the sprint planning process itself was incredibly onerous and annoying.)

Anyway, back to AMP. The idea behind it was sorta well-intentioned; websites have gotten enormously overly-complicated and Google decided to develop and publish this new specification that makes things lighter and faster, especially for mobile. And then to throw a bone to folks who do React and Angular and so on they “invented” the concept of “AMP server-side rendering,” which just means… having a directive to tell your webserver to render out HTML instead of doing it client-side? Isn’t that called, um, building a web app?

Why have we gotten to the point that web apps are doing client-side HTML rendering in the first place? Why not just have the server emit fully-formed HTML with an API hook or whatever and then the client can download that HTML blob and set container.innerHTML as a progressive enhancement to classic page-based flows? Like if you REALLY need a single-page app (which does have a few legitimate use cases! yours probably isn’t one, but let’s assume it is for the sake of argument) there’s no reason you need to have separate rendering paths for the client side vs. the server side – the server side can just call into the same dang APIs that generate the rendered HTML for the client! And now you don’t need JavaScript for people to view your site or for search engines to crawl it or whatever, and the amount of effort it takes over making a traditional server-based site is minimal (and the amount of effort it takes vs. making a properly-SEOed, accessible, client-side-rendered “app” is WAY THE HELL LOWER).

(Incidentally, Kevin Marks calls that JAH, which I’m sad never caught on, because it makes way more sense than AJAX. Which nobody even calls AJAX anymore because in this day and age people no longer even think about the mechanisms that they’re using when they’re building a web app any more than people think about their car’s spark plugs while they drive. … Do cars even use spark plugs anymore?)

Every now and then I see a CSS tutorial online where someone describes a really simple CSS attribute, and then provides a JavaScript function to add it to an element, with a whole bunch of overhead and assumptions necessary to add it to the element. When they could just… add it… to the CSS?

What the heck, people.

Reinventing the web the long way around, in a way that gives Google even more control of it. No thanks.

comments

So, I finally fixed that.

comments

Also seeing if webmention.io preserves fragments.

comments

Which is good, because I keep on accidentally leaking the dang secret sauce. The first time was when I updated my sample templates with the comment hash generation (and I accidentally left the HMAC key intact), and the second time was when I started building a new Publ-based website and decided to start with my actual app.py as the basis, HMAC key and all, never mind that I later ended up removing about 90% of the beesbuzz.biz custom routes and the Authl config since they’re not actually needed for this site. Yeesh.

Anyway, whatever. Someday I’ll learn my lesson (and maybe I’ll even go so far as to make the HMAC key not even be checked into code!), but today is not that day.

comments

comments

If you don’t know what any of the above means, this update probably doesn’t matter to you. 🙃

comments

• For the last few weeks I’ve been trying only using shampoo on occasion when I feel that my hair is truly dirty, on the theory that hair does a good job of self-regulating its moisture when it’s not being disrupted constantly. I’m finding that my hair is, as such, much more lustrous and also doesn’t tangle as easily. But it still feels greasy all the time.
• Today (Saturday) I finally had the courage to go into Patchwerks and I managed to not completely destroy my wallet or make any regrettable space-chewing purchases. It’s a fun shop, and I played with a bunch of neat things including some modular and semi-modular gear, and I got to nerd out about my SIDstation with the folks who were working there (and one of the other customers talked about his MonoMachine as well). I ended up buying a couple of Pocket Operators, specifically the PO-20 Arcade and the PO-35 Speak. They’re both fun to play with.
• The new Rocko’s Modern Life special (Netflix) was just as frenetic and dissociative as the original show was, but it also had a really good message. Also, yay, positive non-metaphorical trans representation in cartoons!
• She-Ra season 3 (Netflix) was amazing and intense and I watched it all in one sitting. Hopefully Netflix lets this show keep going.
• So is Infinity Train (Cartoon Network), which I watched the first half of. The Cartoon Network app for Apple TV is complete garbage though, especially for serialized content. It’s as if they never even test the thing at all.
• I wonder if HBO Max will be worth it just to get a better CN viewing experience.
• I keep forgetting how badly bulleted lists work for blog posts.
• Huh, HBO Max is going to have a Dune prequel series called “Dune: The Sisterhood,” about the Bene Gesserit presumably in the years leading up to Paul’s birth. Interesting.
• I should have been in bed two hours ago. I wonder if this is why I’m always having fibro flareups these days.
• Oh and I’m back to using my CPAP again. It seems to be helping for now.

comments

I also now have a script to automatically rehash the thread IDs in case the HMAC key leaks, as it did yesterday when I accidentally forgot to redact it from the sample templates repository, oops. I doubt anyone saw that but now it doesn’t matter if they did.

I do want to make a final migration script to try adding thread nesting to comments which quote other comments. I have a good idea of how to do it but it’s gonna be tricky and since Isso apparently uses oldest-to-newest sort on comments I don’t know how useful it’ll be, anyway. But I like doing that sort of thing.

I also have automated backups of my comment database, as well as having it checked into a git repository so I can do simple checkpointing whenever I do something funky with a migration (and it means I can also run the migration on my local machine instead of having to worry about hecking something up in production). And of course since Isso runs as its own systemd unit I can easily take it down while I’m doing a thing. (If you ever notice my comments completely vanishing for a while, that’s probably what happened. Unfortunately there isn’t any easy way to show a reasonable message when that’s what’s going on.)

So, now I feel a lot more confident in the privacy and longevity of my comments. Which is good because I have a lot more private stuff to talk about. 😛

comments

• Unescape <a href> stuff that got converted to <a href> (example) DONE
• Defunge the weirder bits of BBCode where e.g. [quote] turned into [quote:abcde] so it didn’t get converted to HTML (example) DONE
• Clean up some older comments where I was a lot more accepting of Problematic Things (not gonna link to any but yeah they’re there) done, I think
• If possible, reparent comments based on [quote]s (way easier said than done, I’ll probably have to do that manually)
• Update: generate a new comment secret key and fix the thread IDs, because I made an oops DONE
• Looks like when I did the reimport of phpBB stuff I accidentally removed some of the earliest Disqus-based comments (example, also) so I’ll have to do a bunch of reconciliation for that, fun fun… DONE

Also some of my earliest journal comics had comments posted via Movable Type’s comment system rather than phpBB, so I’ll want to also migrate those over (which I never got around to doing back when I was still using Movable Type to run my website); back then I just had “native” MT comments rendered in the MT template, which was Good Enough and I figured I’d get around to fixing it later. Well, it’s later. And that’s done. Even though I’m up way later than I meant to be. Oops.

Oh, and since I set up monsterid for the default avatars I feel like I should try to track down the email addresses of the folks who were posting to Disqus and fill that stuff in wherever possible.

I promise at some point I’ll get back to blogging about stuff other than the website itself.

comments

So, for example, this entry has an entry ID of 4678, and the generated thread ID is (for example) /890824f4d450d4ac/4678, so when someone gets a reply notification the email will say something like:

such-and-such <foo@bar.baz> wrote:

Good point!

Link to comment: http://beesbuzz.biz/890824f4d450d4ac/4678

which will then redirect back here.

It’s not ideal, of course, but it works well enough.

Of course, to do this I had to migrate all of my thread IDs again, but hopefully this is the last time I’ll have to do that, and it also takes care of all my legacy Movable Type-era thread IDs. It does set a bad precedent that I’ll have to migrate thread IDs more in the future if I ever change my publishing system but the fact I was able to get away with not doing that for so long is a pretty good testament to my laziness, which I ended up having to pay interest on in the future anyway. So, lesson learned.

Also, this approach is even better privacy than what I was hoping to get out of the Disqus method; as it stood before, someone on my friends list (or who saw an Auth: * entry) could have theoretically figured out the way I was determining private thread IDs and used that to explore comments on entries they don’t have access to, and also there was an issue that if I ever took a public entry private, its thread ID would remain the same as when it was public. But this way, it’s unguessable as long as my HMAC key never leaks, and if my HMAC key does leak I can just reset it and regenerate the thread IDs. (Edit from the future: Ha. Haha. Ha hahaha ha haha. Ha.)

This approach is also useful for things other than Publ; my advice to anyone who’s using Isso for comments is that instead of using the actual entry URI as the thread ID, they should have some sort of stable mechanism for forwarding an opaque thread ID to the actual entry, and use that. This just happened to be really easy to implement for Publ since Publ already supports opaque ID chasing.

Incidentally, here’s the migration script I wrote:

""" generate the comment migration SQL output.

Converts the old shitty migrated thread IDs to HMAC-signed thread stubs

Usage:

pipenv run python3 migrations/comment-migration-20190806.py | sqlite3 comments.db

"""

import app
from publ import model, entry
from pony import orm

@orm.db_session()
def do_all():
    with app.app.test_request_context():
        for record in model.Entry.select():
            e = entry.Entry(record)
            print_migration(e)

def print_migration(entry):
    sql = 'UPDATE threads SET uri="{tid}" '.format(tid=app.thread_id(entry))

    entry_id = entry.id
    old_id = entry.get('thread-id')
    if old_id:
        sql += f'WHERE uri="{old_id}";'
    elif entry.private:
        sql += f'WHERE uri LIKE "/{entry_id}-%";'
    else:
        sql += f'WHERE uri="/{entry_id}";'
    print(sql)

do_all()

app.thread_id is the function that generates the thread ID/URI from a publ.entry.Entry object, and is also visible to my templating system. I’ll be sure to add this stuff to the example Publ templates as an aside, since it’s a little tricky and non-obvious.

comments

Anyway, this’ll probably mean that I’ll have to redo the comment import at some point, so don’t get too attached to anything you’ve posted so far.

Update: Rather than doing the right thing for now I’ve opted to just use the shortlink as the identifier. This means that future site migrations will be more painful, and also I need to do some more work to migrate in the old comments from older entries, but I guess the idea of a single universal migration path is a bit silly anyway.

comments

• No support for private/hidden threads
• No way to disable random discovery of hidden threads, by design
• They’re trying to make the whole Internet into their own forum rather than providing “just” a comment system (not that anyone even uses it the way they intend)
• Their UX keeps getting more and more cumbersome and annoying

I’m going to look into alternative comment systems, ideally ones I can self-host. Isso looks promising, if a bit sparse. So does Schnack. (I’m going to try Isso first because its setup/requirements are far less onerous.)

Anyway, thanks Passerine for bringing the privacy leak issue to my attention. I figured there was probably something like that lurking in the shadows, but I didn’t think it was quite so close to the surface…

comments

An “interesting” thing has been happening regarding how people deal with my gender stuff lately though.

When I first started doing Song Fight! back in 2001 (my songs are old enough to vote for themselves!) I was pretty openly trans. People played along and used she/her pronouns for me, although there was always a bit of a sarcasm to it. And all that changed when I finally worked up the courage to go to my first live show in 2003; people just immediately stopped acknowledging that and decided that the way I presented myself there meant that I wasn’t “really” trans or at least that I wasn’t particularly serious about it.

In the last two live shows I’ve been to (Berkeley in 2017, and Madison just now) people have been stumbling with my pronouns, which is understandable, but a lot of the talk around it from others makes it seem like this is a brand new thing. To a lot of them it is though, because I just kind of… dropped it all, I guess, back in the day. Because it just felt easier to let people think what they wanted to.

People don’t realize that I’d been on hormones for a while in 2005 (and stopped because I was using gray-market estrogen and got scared), or that I’ve been doing it consistently under doctor supervision since 2011. Because a lot of my medical transition was basically in secret, where I figured that if I couldn’t be accepted socially, at least I could use estradiol to make myself more comfortable on the inside. Which did help but wasn’t nearly enough in the long run.

Heck, I got my GRS before I’d “really” transitioned.

I never really felt safe transitioning, because I never felt supported. The people who I considered to be my support network were just kinda lackadaisical about it and didn’t treat it as a serious thing, and as such I internalized the idea that I didn’t really mean it, that I wasn’t really trans, that I had no right requesting people to respect my pronouns, that this was just a weird quirk that people would roll their eyes at.

And I’m not singling out Song Fight! folks in this. This is a pattern that was most firmly established with my family; I’d dig deep to try to talk to family members about it, and I’d get pushback based on the fact that I hadn’t tried outwardly transitioning before talking about it. Because I needed safety and understanding and help, not people judging my “choice” based on how well I was following through on it. And the same goes for every one of my other communities that I was trying to be a part of; I’d hide gender-related stuff, it would come out in some way, then I’d get ridiculed for it and I’d end up withdrawing further, burying it deeper inside of me, more and more sure that this wasn’t a path I could take.

Anyway, tonight in the car back to my hotel, I mentioned how funny it was how hard it’s been for people to readjust to this thing they’d forgotten, and Jeff said that, yeah, people just decided I wasn’t serious and he expressed regret at how much people even made fun of me for things and didn’t take me seriously and so on. That wasn’t even a thing I’d been considering but him saying that made me realize that… yeah. That was a lot of it, and it hurts. How much time, support, happiness did I miss out on? How much earlier could I have transitioned were it not for this tendency to gatekeep based on superficial understandings of deep issues?

So it felt good to hear him say that but it also felt pretty bad. And even with all that I’m feeling like it’s my fault for not pushing harder, for not being the one to go outside of my comfort zone (and safety) to do this thing I needed.

And I look around at the Song Fight! community and see so many things where everyone else is friends with each other on a level I never managed to find. They’re all a part of each others' lives, and I just ended up pushing myself away because I was just, like, in the same general orbit as them but I didn’t feel safe, or didn’t have that kind of friendship. Every time I hear about all of the relationships and weddings and birthday gatherings and so on that all of the other Song Fight! old-timers have done but where I wasn’t even aware of them until after they’d happened… it hurts, to know what I missed out of and could have been part of.

I could have done a better job of being friends with all of them, but at the same time I never felt like an important part of me was ever there and that just made this divide that felt insurmountable.

It’s never worth trying to second-guess history, and yet… Things could have gone so much differently.

And it’s not like it’s anyone’s fault, it’s just the background radiation of my life that things kept going this way.

The current common late-transition narrative is that someone as an adult finally figures out what was going on all along and then dives head-first into a rapid transition and everyone around them accepts them and sees it as a revelation and so on, but at least in my case, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I knew I was trans when I was a teenager. I desparately wanted to transition as soon as I could, but every time I tried to take a baby step in that direction, I got a gigantic push back from everyone I cared about. And when enough was finally enough and I had to push through it, I’m treated as if this is a new thing that fits that wrong narrative. It’s frustrating.

And I still haven’t figured out a presentation I’m comfortable with, and even now people have a hard time accepting it as “real.” Even people who have only known me post-transition, or people who knew me back when I was loud about it on the Internet and before I decided it was easier to just shut up about it.

The best acceptance I’ve ever gotten have always been from folks in the furry community, and even then it feels like it’s just like… a character that they see me as playing, and not the reality of my self. Even my fucking boyfriend in 2011, the last thing he said to me before he died invalidated my gender. This isn’t something I’ve mentioned publicly before, but yeah. He said “You’re my boyfriend and I love you.”

He only ever treated my gender stuff as an affectation or a quaint/charming thing about how I presented myself online, and was always weirded out whenever I talked about how it was me, not just a character.

I’m left with anger and regret and remorse and frustration, and I don’t think it’s even fair of me to blame anyone for it. So what do I do? Aside from cry myself to sleep and hope that this feeling passes, or at least that I can sublimate it into something else before it eats me up inside and I feel bitter about everything. There’s still one more night of Song Fight! Live, after all, and the whole rest of the time forward with these people who I always wanted to be better friends with but something always prevented that.

It’s pretty fitting that the song that’s stuck in my head is Cassettes, by Jeff.

comments

Anyway if you’re in or near Madison and can make it to The Rigby and want to watch me flail in front of a crowd, now’s your chance.

(We’ll also try to have a live stream although right now there’s some logistics to work out on that front, so no guarantees.)

Anyway I’ll also be in Madison until Tuesday and don’t currently have plans for Sunday or Monday, so if I know anyone in the area it’d be fun to meet up and do something I guess? I mean, assuming I don’t get murdered for my anti-Trump song.

comments

But then I still needed that little dopamine rush, and so I decided to try Twitter again (at least, more than my usual “post some stuff and maybe check my notifications” tendencies), and friends, let me tell you… Twitter is awful.

I’d forgotten just how much of a hellhole of advertising, “engagement”-optimizing, outrage-inducing chatter it is.

On the plus side, a lot of people seem to really enjoy the anti-ads I’ve been running for a few weeks (for $1 a day). I think I’ll expand that out into other subject areas.

But what’s even better is just getting unaddicted to commercial social media. Yikes.

comments

It takes a lot of skill to look at other peoples' code and write tests to exercise it and determine correctness, and to do it well. And to have exacting standards about code quality and testability of the code in the first place.

Nearly everywhere I’ve worked, though, test engineers have been incredibly junior and not particularly skilled. Which made it part of a self-fulfilling vicious cycle; test engineers do poor-quality work (and don’t seem to bring much value to the actual product development), so low-calibre programmers end up being put in those roles, and so then they continue to do poor-quality work. Test engineering seems to be treated as glorified QA in most places.

The most positive test engineering experience I ever had was at HBO, where my team’s build engineer was also in charge of setting quality standards, especially regarding tests, and he did a lot of instrumentation and cat-herding around it. I didn’t really appreciate it initially, but over time I came to understand and even cherish his influence. (The fact that even our build scripts were unit-tested was interesting! Annoying, but interesting, and it seemmed unnecessary until suddenly it wasn’t.)

But the actual QA/testing departmment at HBO (which our buid/test/infra engineer wasn’t part of) was… well, pretty typical.

Amazon’s mindset was basically wish-it-were-devops; put engineers on the line for supporting their own code, the reasoning went, and they’ll have an incentive to make sure the code is correct. But what really ended up happening was engineers would build something that was just Good Enough to roll out, and then find a more lucrative opportunity within the company (or even elsewhere), and then leave the rest of their team holding the support burden, which was often immense.

When I was tech lead on the media services team I decided I would Do Better and actually insist on 100% coverage of my code and full automation/CI/CD and everything. One of the new projects I was working on alone was responsible for raising the team’s overall coverage by a significant factor! But the support burden of older, less-well-factored, not-properly-tested code wore on me and I burned out.

When I was at HBO and actively participating in candidate interviews, one of our common panel questions was, “What makes good code?” Most candidates would say things like, “It needs to be correct, and tested, ideally with automated unit tests.” We’d ask, “And what qualifies as good coverage?” and most candidates would flounder a bit, or say “Oh, 100%, except for exception handling of course,” or whatever. “Why no exception handling?” we’d ask, wondering why the one thing you wouldn’t want to test is how things handle failures…

Anyway, one candidate said something that stuck with me: “It’s all well and good to have 100% coverage, but what’s really important is to make sure it’s the right 100%. You can easily construct tests that get your coverage numbers up while proving absolutely nothing about the code.” This impressed everyone on the panel. I don’t recall how the rest of the interview went, though, or if we ended up extending him an offer. Still, it’s definitely something that we talked about for the next several days.

But where I’m going with this: engineers are very bad at writing tests against their own code. They want to prove that it works, and when they have an idea that something is correct they’re only going to test it based on the assumptions that went into it. And I mean, this is a very very common thing across most humans, as Derek from Versitasium demonstrates:

Being a good test engineer means finding things that will break code, and testing the code in ways that wasn’t anticipated working. Good test coverage not only touches every line of code but every possible combination of conditionals. And it should test things that are outside of the expected range of inputs.

There are a number of jokes about test engineers which are along the lines of:

A test engineer walks into a bar and orders a beer.

A test engineer walks into a bar and orders 4,294,967,296 beers.

A test engineer walks into a bar and orders

A test engineer walks into a bar and orders -1 beers.

A test engineer walks into a bar and orders 🐄 beers.

A test engineer walks into a bar and orders ;drop table orders.

A test engineer walks into a bar and orders ⒊¹

A test engineer walks into three bars simultaneously and orders two different beers from each one.

A test engineer walks into a bar and ‮orders an empty glass.²

and so on.

It might seem silly but real life is full of edge cases and things that go weird. Almost everyone has something in their life which falls into a trap of someone making assumptions. I seem to be a magnet for them, personally:

• Legally changed name, use a different name in my day-to-day life depending on context; in some contexts I use first-initial middlename lastname but expect to be referred to by first-initial. In other contexts I’m just “fluffy.”
• Legally changed gender, but only as a less-bad option and would much rather have an X or something on my identification (even though nobody knows how to handle that); my choice of pronouns depends primarily on who I’m talking to at the time.
• My home is a condo that is a parcel of a historical landmark which didn’t use to be residentially-zoned. The parceling scheme is different than the unit scheme, and the current mailing address is different than the historical street address. There are four distinct, perfectly-valid ways of writing my complete address, and it’s anyone’s guess as to which one the validation system is going to go with.
• I went to the same university for undergrad and grad school, but not contiguously.
• I worked at Amazon twice, multiple years apart. (This messes up a lot of job sites, and also messed up Amazon’s own system internally!) At least both times were under the same name; if I were convinced to go back a third time, who knows what would happen… (I mean, systems-wise. I know what would happen to me emotionally.)
• I got my driver’s license on my 15th birthday (when that was the legal driving age in New Mexico). A few months later, New Mexico raised the driving age to 16. Car insurance providers often reject my license history because that is not a valid age to have started driving, but if I put in the wrong year it doesn’t match the history so that causes a flag too. Fun³
• My email and primary website have a .biz domain and I am, amazingly, not a spammer.

Anyway. Early on in my career I never really appreciated test engineering (or even testing in general), and it took me a while to get on board with it. And these days I absolutely appreciate test engineering as a distinct discipline. But I notice all around me that most of the industry is still stuck in the mindset that testing is the drudgery that should be offloaded onto unskilled engineers. Test jobs get significantly lower salaries than product engineering, and have experience and requirements in keeping with junior, entry-level engineers, even though this is a part of the industry that a lot of other things rely on. Internet services in particular are constantly under attack from people who care deeply about exploiting whatever minor issues they can find. Correctness of code also makes a huge difference with keeping private data private, and ensuring that the right things are being cached for the right people, and that business requirements are being met. But test engineers don’t seem as important as product engineers.

I asked other people who appreciate test engineering about this and the most reasonable take on it was that testing isn’t seen as making new features or shipping code, it just sort of gets in the way of things being released, and in agile shops in particular the prevailing attitude is “move fast and break things.” But that’s how we end up with an Internet where everything is insecure by default, malware spreads like wildfire, and peoples' private information becomes not-very-private while their machines get taken over by bitcoin miners.

In my own personal projects I have been generally pretty remiss in the testing process. Especially now that Publ is getting to a point where it’s handling private data that varies by viewer, I’m finding little issues now and then where proper testing and planning around it would have saved me a lot of trouble at times.⁴

My next major Publ milestone is all about testing and documentation. Backfilling these shortcomings is easily going to be as much work as writing Publ so far has been. And it’ll feel so, so satisfying.

comments

I wonder if it’ll also boldface 😙 it…

Although strikeout 💔 wouldn’t surprise me at all.

Edit: It doesn’t seem to happen on every browser. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on Safari on macOS 10.13:

comments

For me, a big part of the problem with social media as it stands today is that everything’s about fast, immediate, in-the-moment dissemination of Hot Takes and viral propagation and so on, and that’s a design that so many of the other indie-focused social networks are trying to replicate. I’m not much a fan of microblogging or protocols which exist to make it the norm (which is why I’m still not particularly interested in supporting ActivityPub natively in Publ!) and I like being able to take some time to expand on my thoughts and not have to chunk things up into 280-to-500-character chunks and worry about fixing my spelling and grammar and phrasing right then and there.

I like being able to sit on things for a few days, and add addendums without it being a whole new post, and I like having feedback come slowly and measured. Yes, I get quick replies and a variety of favorites-like reactions via Webmention and other things, and I do appreciate that in this little nichey corner of the web this is a way that people can interact with me, but I’m not really writing for an audience so much as writing for me and my friends, and hoping that the things I write also maybe resonate with folks who happen to read it.

I still use Twitter and Tumblr and Mastodon quite a lot (much more than I’d like, really) but that’s not how I prefer to interact with folks. I don’t even try to read everything that people post there, and I have no idea how anyone can think of timeline-oriented streams-of-updates services as a place where you’re going to be able to. I just occasionally glance at them to see what’s going on and maybe interact with others in the moment, and spend much more time wondering why the hell I even bother trying to communicate in that way beyond “it’s how everyone else communicates today.”

My big concern about my blogging habits here is that I’m mostly talking about the platform itself. Blogging about blogging is so dreary. Hopefully soon the new-toy shininess will wear off and I’ll get back to using this as a means of talking to my friends about other stuff. I certainly have a lot of other stuff coming down the pike, at least. Hopefully some of it turns out well.

I guess it’s mostly just that what I have to write about is what I’m working on, and this is (mostly) what I’m working on. If I were working on other things they’d be getting posted to other parts of my site.

Not-unrelatedly, I really want to get back into making comics.

comments

Think of it as the sound of one hand yapping.

comments

There’s a few things I wish were better, though, and I think these can all be addressed by the endpoint itself, while remaining within the specification as it’s written today. I would be tempted to write an endpoint that works this way, if I weren’t already overwhelmed with other projects.

1. Definitely support the webmention.io API. There’s a lot of folks already using that to retrieve mentions to display them on their site, and I see no reason for that to change.

2. Having some form of moderation would be nice. Mentions at their core should be kept perpetually but with a disposition of accept/reject/pending, and domains should also have a default disposition (which defaults to pending). When a new webmention comes in, it should get the domain’s default disposition (along with an unmoderated flag), and then when moderating them, the user should be able to change the default disposition for the domain.

3. Mentions should be periodically refreshed to see if they’re still valid. The refresh interval can be some form of slow exponential growth, like the Fibonacci sequence or something. Whenever the status of the mention changes, that should reset the refresh interval. Mentions which have disappeared should not be rendered while they’re invalid, and the moderation queue should also show a section for “approved but disappeared” mentions.

4. When a mention is sent or refreshed, it should also get a source and destination pointer; track the mention in terms of the original URLs provided, but they should be displayed and fetched based on what their current URL is, after chasing redirections or the like.

5. Relatedly, multiple incoming mentions should be consolidated based on what their source and destination URLs resolve to. For example, if Alice pings Bob from http://alice.example.com/1/first-entry → https://bob.example.org/blog/hello.html, and then Alice’s URL updates to https://alice.example.com/blog/1/First-Entry, if Alice’s site re-sends backfill pings, the endpoint should only report a single ping that comes from https://alice.example.com/blog/1/First-Entry. Likewise, if Bob’s URL changes to https://bob.example.org/weblog/hello, when Bob’s site retrieves mentions for the new URL it should also include mentions that went to the old URL.

   Obviously for this case there will be a period of time between a site’s URLs changing and the original pings being refreshed, but maybe a new mention to an older target can also trigger a refresh of existing mentions to see if they’re subject to consolidation.

   Also the consolidation should only happen at the retrieval level; the original source/destination URLs should always be preserved, since it’s always possible for an old URL to become unique again.

6. There should also be some automatic consolidation of pings that have the same URL aside from the scheme; webmention.js handles this on the rendering end but it’d be nice if the endpoint could do this automatically. For example, if a ping comes in from both http://example.com/12345 and https://example.com/12345, they should be consolidated to both have come from the https: version, probably. It would also probably make sense to do some sort of intelligent auto-consolidation based on domain aliases, like www.example.com vs. example.com. (8/28/2019 update: Or use <link rel="canonical">.)

7. Support for private webmention.

8. Support for Vouch, both from a validation perspective and providing UX to make it easier for folks to present their whitelist (like maybe when a domain is whitelisted it can also be added to a vouch list).

9. Also maybe some form of conversation threading would be nice? I’m not sure how that could be reasonably implemented (aside from supporting Salmention and hoping others come along with that) but it’d do a lot to address the UX problems with Webmention as a conversational platform.

comments

Supposedly it’s okay to take both nortriptyline and gabapentin, so maybe I’ll try combination therapy once I’m back to my previous homeostasis (which was livable but not great).

Meanwhile, I really hope I’m able to do a song this weekend… it’s a gift for someone and I need it to be done by Monday, and I just plain haven’t had time to work on it.

comments

I didn’t really get to see a lot of friends on the San Francisco side of things (although I had some good times with my brother and my friend Mark) but that’s okay, since I got a lot of stuff done on Publ. Or, specifically, on Authl, the authentication layer, and the Publ integration with it. I have sign-in by email, IndieLogin, and Mastodon working! I will also probably add direct auth for IndieAuth at some point, now that I know how easy it is to implement an OAuth basic authentication flow. Hopefully soon I’ll have friends-only entries going up on this site!

Pain-wise I’ve been doing a lot better. I’ve been tapering off the nortriptyline, but I’ve been taking magnesium supplements. I still hit a crash point in the evening pretty easily, so it’s not like this has, like, solved everything, but it’s at least doing more for me than the nortriptyline alone was. I’m currently at 20mg and taper down to 10mg tonight, so this is where I’ll probably start to see if it really was a placebo early on.

Gender-wise, something rather interesting has been happening this trip: I’ve been going into the men’s room as usual (because when I travel and am in “boy mode” clothing I don’t want to cause a panic), and pretty much every time, someone’s taken it upon themselves to point out that I was in the men’s room and redirected me to the women’s room. At the same time, I still keep getting “sir"ed a lot, although I don’t know how much of that is people changing their mental alignment for me after they hear my voice. (Probably a lot.) I don’t feel like my appearance has changed at all over the past year, so I dunno what’s going on there.

Also gender-wise, a lot of people have been respecting the use of she/her pronouns for me, and that just feels… off. Still. I think I’m back to thinking of they/them as my primary pronoun. Honestly, the main reason I switched to she/her was because if I was requesting they/them, people would just treat it as unspecified and still default to he/him. I think my way of specifying pronouns is going to switch to "they/them, but she/her is fine.” Because if someone’s going to misgender me I’d rather it go to the femme side of things.

And a really cute thing happened at my nephew’s 1st birthday party: Camille, one of my nieces (who just turned 6 yesterday), wanted to get to know me better, and the first question she asked me was, “Are you a he, a she, or a they?” And I sort of fumbled over things and I eventually said “it depends but ‘they’ and she are ‘fine.’” Anyway, I wonder where she picked that up from. Wherever it was, it fills me with hope for the future. It’s also what got my mind grinding away about, like, which situations call for which pronouns. I think generally it’s they/them for folks my age or younger, and she/her for folks who are stuck in their ways regarding “proper” English.

Anyway, I guess that’s all for now. Unless something else occurs to me in the next hour fifteen minutes, apparently before my flight boards.

Edit: oh yeah, I think I need to switch to a backpack as my only conveyance. They’re kind of cumbersome for keys and wallet and stuff but purses are heavy and lopsided, and having both a backpack and a small purse is really awkward. My current backpack is great for just carrying my laptop to work but it’s garbo for actually organizing all my needs. My larger purse carries my iPad and all my other regular needs but it hurts my back after a whole day of using it. Any recommendations for better backpacks (ideally ones which are femmy and have room for an iPad, a laptop, some sketchbooks, and makeup et al) would be appreciated.

Edit 2: oh and another thing: fuck all the plastic straw bans, seriously. I’m gonna start just carrying my own plastic straws with me everywhere. I swear, people see one injured sea turtle and suddenly all people with disabilities and sensory issues just get completely thrown under the bus…

Edit 3: oh god only 4 weeks until my next big trip why is everything happening all at once

comments

comments