Christopher Nolan’s 2020 sci-fi action thriller Tenet is a heist film in which the titular organization attempts to stop the end of the world through time travel.1 Due to the sensitivity of the main characters mission, they use a call-and-response passphrase: “We live in a twilight world.” and “There are no friends at dusk.” This phrase is used to identify…
#essays
27 posts
21 Mar 2024
25 Feb 2024
Welcome back, stranger. Remember, its about their needs, not yours. From Q4 2022 through Q1 2024 the tech industry has seen a shit-ton of layoffs. These are due to a combination of factors: The end of the ZIRP: Zero Interest Rate PolicyZIRP era, higher interest rates means investors demand profitability (instead of growth) from portfolio companies. In 2017, Section 174…
20 Dec 2023
Six years ago, I wrote a summary of my experience working with Ember for a year. I had been with Cinch Financial for a year, building their web & mobile apps with Ember and Elixir/Phoenix. After Cinch I joined Salsify, a leader in the Ember ecosystem, and shipped some great products built with Ember during my five-year tenure. I built…
1 Apr 2022
Software engineering, knowledge work, or most broadly any type of white collar labor is, primarily, the production of our own psychology. Our mental capacity is our means of production. We embody the values of our work. Our identity is tightly bound up with our careers, knowledge, skills, methods, company, and our industry—we are our work. Having our identities bound to…
27 Mar 2021
Readers of my site may have noticed the many references to Guy Debord in my writing over the years, and especially since 2016. This is largely because I’ve been writing a new edition of his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle adapted for our present moment. This edition is out now on the web. A hardcover edition will be…
4 Sept 2020
The United States was started as a rational experiment in democratic capitalism based on ideas that inspired its forefathers. They were influenced by ideas coming out of the Enlightenment, specifically Adam Smith, Locke, Rousseau, and the conception of humans resorting to “the state of nature” and acting in bad-faith with one another. fuck the monarchy, let’s experiment with a rational…
24 Jun 2020
Good Evening, my name is ███████ I am a 10 year resident of Ward █ in Somerville. The first steps to address the problem of systemic racism in Somerville is two-fold: Defund the police by at least 60% or more; and Hold the Mayor accountable to direct these funds to non-disciplinary social programs; and stop internal line-item transfers to the…
5 Jun 2020
Looting is an obvious response to the glorification of consumer products— commodities in a society that worships conspicuous consumption. The very act of looting is resistance to the celebrity status of these commodities and what they imply: inanimate objects celebrated for the image, status, and privilege they create, and the way that privilege is assumed to confer the protection of…
15 Mar 2020
A central issue of contestation is elasticity versus discipline, elasticity for me and discipline for you, alchemy of banking and money funding for me, austerity and borrowing/payment for you. Like 2009, the (coming/arriving) financial collapse of 2020 will reveal the asymmetry of power between the financial sector and the rest of the economy, and it’ll especially highlight how the financial…
25 Sept 2019
Fascism is an expensive to maintain state-of-siege by the capitalist economy attempting to defend itself by an irrational means. Fascism rallies to the defense of the conservative bourgeois ideology of the family, private property, the moral order, and patriotic nationalism. It unites the petty-bourgeois, the unemployed who have been hurt by the crisis or disappointed by the impotence of the…
16 Apr 2019
Gibsons “San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide” is worth reading, his take is that San Francisco has become too successful… inevitable to decline into some expensive backwater due to “the rent is too damn high”. He paints a compelling vision of the ills of appalling levels of income inequality, the monoculture of white-male-American tech-workers, and the metastasis of the city into the…
1 May 2018
Alarm goes off, time to wake up. Snooze alarm, and then repeat: check email, check Facebook, check Twitter, check Snapchat, rinse; repeat again; no new posts? Check again. No second spared to compose a thought; dreams fade away. Day continues just the same way — rise, rinse, repeat, repeat. Can’t spare time to sit and relax, can’t let your mind…
10 Dec 2017
Privacy is a fundamental human right. It is the right to control to whom and to what information is shared with others. Privacy protects the criteria used to determine how information is deemed private. Simply put, it’s ones right to keep or share information they themselves deem as private; something is private when one deems it thus. Since the advent…
9 Oct 2017
In early 2015, I was working at an artificial intelligence startup. My team was planning to build a web application to connect to our neural network platform. The team as a whole had experience (on the AI–side) with Python, and the web team had a lot of experience using Django. We’d implemented a hybrid-app in Cordova using Backbone.js the previous…
16 Jan 2017
Before Trump takes office, I want to create a picture of the high-water mark, something I can point to and say “That was how it was” without the fog of time, or the distortions of propaganda and ideology. I was inspired by Sarah Kendzior: Fellow Americans, I have a favor to ask you. Today is November 18, 2016. I want…
6 Nov 2016
In 2011 I wrote: Travel opens my mind to new perspectives and allows me to recontextualize existing systems of thought. While true for me at that time, for that trip; there is nothing magical about travel itself that opens the mind to new perspectives nor helps to “recontextualize existing systems of thought”. One must be ready and “in the mood”…
5 Nov 2015
Application logs are useful for many reasons. They are the primary source of troubleshooting information. Logs are essential to forensics during any rigorous security analysis. Web server logs are often used for analysis in order to gain insight into usage, audience, and trends. Logging Logs are time-ordered streams: there is no beginning or end, but rather an ongoing, collated collection…
Not too long ago, there was a great debate between two sides of the web. The “Responsive” web vs the “m.” web. One pushing for a single codebase that responds to user-context and another pushing for a second, mobile-only approach (typically using a subdomain starting with m.) It’s clear now, the responsive web has won. A Retrospective — Responsive Design…
3 Nov 2015
Docker is getting a lot of hype these days, for good reason. There are plenty of articles touting the merits of Docker but most are written without context and are limited to examining the the benefits of Docker independently of its’ practical everyday use in a software development project lifecycle. This article aims to examine the benefits of Docker within…
3 Aug 2015
I’ve seen many articles and discussions online discussing the merits of merge and rebase when integrating parallel branches into the main branch. It seems there are two camps arguing “which is better” when in reality, both have their own use cases. The task we need to accomplish is to determine which workflow is right for your project. This article will…
2 Aug 2015
When introduced to someone for the first time, I stay away from asking the cliché question “so what do you do?” This seemingly benign question is steeped in the cultural heritage of the New England colonial Puritan/Protestant work-ethic. Hard work, frugality, perseverance in the face of hardship (without complaint) is the mark of Grace and this will allow you to…
31 Mar 2015
Lets face it, Do Not Track (DNT) is dying a slow death. Content providers are either ignoring the setting, or giving lip service to DNT while taking no action behind the scenes. Worse yet, if users are able to find the browser preference, they don’t understand its purpose or value. Enabling the feature is confusing, and quite inconsistent between browser…
17 Mar 2015
In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the shift in western society from an agrarian economy to an industrial economy as a template for the next shift from an industrial economy to an information economy. Another characteristic reversal after passing a road break boundary is that the country ceases to be the center of all work, and the city ceases to be…
1 Mar 2013
Every selector you write is additional complexity that will need to be maintained. Can you generalize or abstract that selector so other components can use it? Write your CSS selectors to be as concise as possible Write your CSS selectors to be as performant as possible, efficient as possible and even more efficient Don’t overqualify your CSS selectors Use the…
1 Dec 2011
Travel opens my mind to new perspectives and allows me to recontextualize existing systems of thought. I had casually studied Roman history over the course of a few years, prior to my travels to Italy. My understanding was built upon a small collection of books and two excellent podcast series. While one can learn a great deal from books, podcasts,…
14 Dec 2003
A Literature Review The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the existing literature concerning speech segmentation, categorical perception, and some other issues concerning bilinguals of English and Japanese. It will touch on some of the differences in the two languages and how they affect learning the L2. The paper will start by providing background information about…
1 Jan 2003
Hikikomori/Otaku Japans Latest Out-Group - Creating Social Outcasts to Construct a National Self-identity
0xADADAIntroduction Hikikomori (Jap. 引きこもり) and otaku (Jap. おたく) are considered today’s most prominent social problems. Hikikomori refers to the recent state of middle and high school students who drop out of school, and withdraw completely from society. Otaku are the deeply obsessed fans of a particular subject who commit their free time (and sometimes lives) to the complete memorization of…