R. A. Dehi @radehi@qoto.org

Folks are treating the recent tech layoffs as something spontaneous. They were not. The current layoffs were orchestrated by a hedge fund (TCI Fund).

This hedge fund demanded that the big tech companies lay people off because they were being paid too much. Let that one sink in: a hedge fund manager saying that you're being paid too much.

Note that TCI is demanding that Google lay off more people.

Back in my college days, I spent a fair amount of time trying to understand how to compile functional programming languages through self-study, and got introduced to the idea of category theory by way of Ocaml, but frankly never learned anything useful about it. Now, some 35 years later, I'm trying again, with the gentle introduction of Eugenia Cheng's How to Bake Pi, as an audio book during my commute. #wishmeluck

I hope the two guys that keep Google Scholar going as a pet project didn't get laid off. Just as a quiet reminder of the fragile contingency of this core academic service.

We love free software. With much thanks to the talented @SachaChua for illustrating the reasons. See https://www.sachachua.com/blog/ for emacs news and more!

Ten yrs ago, a friend exited this world in a gut wrenching manner, prompting an existential reckoning in my mind. His death rearranged my relationship to / engagement with mental health, the tech sector, and the production of knowledge. My heart mourns for hours spent arguing with one another about sociological ideas. Posthumously, he became a martyr to some, an idea more than a person. But what I miss the most is my flawed, principled, stubborn, passionate friend who challenged me every day.

I have the first five @oshwassociation@twitter.com certifications in China- who do they let run, and sit on the board? Two Chinese men without a single certification between them. The @oshwassociation@twitter.com rank and file is 100% ok with this, there was no outcry, it was never publically addressed.

𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘮𝘦 𝘢 10𝘧𝘵 𝘱𝘢𝘺𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘭, 𝘐’𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢 12𝘧𝘵 𝘭𝘢𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘳!

Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information.

You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter

The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.

This site shows you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.

https://12ft.io/

Satisfying work for the day. One of the items in the Vello pipeline where profiling revealed performance could be improved was computing the bounding boxes of paths. I was using atomic min/max for each path segment to compute bbox union, and that was expensive (1.3ms for paris-30k on M1 Max).

I figured out a way to do it with monoids instead of atomics, and it's now 400µs. The trick is "segmented reduction" which works amazingly well.

I might blog this, but not sure yet; other things to do.

@michael_nielsen Btw, I consider any type of axiomatic characterization in mathematics as a form of discovery fiction.

For example, Shannon entropy was characterized by Faddeev as the only continuous function from probability distributions to real numbers that satisfies a very natural chain rule.

I first learned about this from a nice paper by Leinster:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1903.06961

Okay, we know... We made fun of Adobe when its cloud service went down. We've made fun of Corel Painter and Clip Studio. We joined in the protest No AI Generated Images protest. We made our stance on NFT's clear. But this is beyond making fun of. This is EW! EW! EW!

@krita wow, it's almost like Stallman was right all along, when he warned decades ago, that proprietary software can and will spy on its users.
And everyone were saying "that's crazy talk, why would anyone want to spy on MY stuff???".

I keep saying journalists should leave Twitter and use Mastodon, which is better for them in every way. At TechDirt I've posted a somewhat lengthy why-and-how: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/04/journalists-and-others-should-leave-twitter-heres-how-they-can-get-started/

“Not your keys, not your coins” now has legal precedent. The judge in Celsius’ bankruptcy hearing ruled that the deposits in yield-bearing Earn accounts belong to Celsius, not the individual holders of those accounts.

Won’t this cause a run on exchanges?

https://www.axios.com/2023/01/04/celsius-bankruptcy-earn-accounts

every website that handles private information should do what Discord does in the javascript console

I remember how excited I was in the nineties, thinking that a shaggy, open, unpredictable, democratic internet had triumphed over AOL and the other closed commercial networks. Then came surveillence-driven social media.

Could a phoenix be rising from the ashes of Twitter?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/mastodon-highlights-pros-and-cons-of-moving-beyond-big-tech-gatekeepers/

Two thoughts on the Forbes location tracking story.

1 - Tiktok issuing a statement that they knew wasn't true is quite concerning.

2 - That journalists, reporting on a company, have trouble blocking their location from that company is shocking. This isn't blaming the reporters, but rather the people who've designed the location tracking infrastructures, cross-application linkage, and ability to control all that.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/12/22/tiktok-tracks-forbes-journalists-bytedance/