I met Brad Turcotte, who goes by the professional name Brad Sucks, back in the Age of the Blogosphere. He was, and is, an indie musician who embodies the spirit of the open Web. He’s also an awesome song writer, singer, producer, and one man band.

Weirdly, we have been friends since way back when – Why weirdly? Take a look at the photo – although we’ve only met in person twice, including today. Brad was in town, so we had a long beer and a longer conversation. What a pleasure. And, frankly, a privilege.

You should listen to his music because it’s good. You should support him at Patreon because that’s one of the services that actually helps artists. We should all be working to enable creative people like Brad to flourish; he’s what the Web was made for.

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A geeky mailing list I’m the least geeky person on has been discussing whether https://yoursite.com is preferable to www.yoursite.com. I have no pony in this race, and am in fact against pony racing if only because it requires impossibly small jockeys, but here are my:

Top Ten Reasons to prefer www to https://

1. Easier to parse than a ragbag of ill-fitting punctuation that exists nowhere else in the language.
2. No existential Angst about whether it’s http or https.
3. No one [1] knows what “http” stands for.
4. Pleasing mountainous silhouette 
5. Cannot be confused with an Internet abbreviation for “hat tip”
6. Wouldn’t you rather locate your site in a place than a protocol?
7. Old-timey feel and the aroma of rising bread
8. Al Gore is a www sort of guy
9. Encourages the use of the charming vocal abbreviation “dub dub dub”
10. Gently reminds people that the goddamn World Wide Web still exists

[1] You’re special and do not count

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This is a re-play of something I wrote during the 2016 election. The premise is that the Clinton campaign is auditioning stand-ins for Trump to rehearse the 2016 debates with.

Note that Louis CK not yet disgraced, and in any case I the last paragraph of that one is really unclear. You see, he’s snapping back to the question, and talking about how Trump treats workers.

Also, the Anthony Wiener reference is, thankfully, dated now.

I have to say that I’m a little proud of the Quentin Tarantino story, though.

Louis CK

Clinton: Mr. Trump, not only have your businesses gone bankrupt, you’ve stiffed honest working people, refusing to pay them for their work. If you scam your own workers out of money, how can Americans trust you?

CK: I do that. I’m a terrible person. Really. I’m a rat bastard. I don’t mean to be. When I’m hiring someone, like a brick layer, I’m thinking: Wow, that guy works so hard. And you know something? He does something I couldn’t do in a million years. Give me a literal million years, and I’d still be laying bricks that looked like they were done by a two-year-old playing with her own poop. Uneven. Tilted. The cement between them would sometimes be the thickness of the chocolate in a Milano cookie, you know, so little it’s really there just so they can put on the package that it’s got chocolate. But it’s really like the fruit juice they add to a children’s drink so they can say “Made with real apples” when really it’s like they use apples in the paste on the labels. You can’t argue: it’s made with real apples. And then right next to that brick, the concrete would be like you split open two double-stuffed Oreos and stuck them together. Never in a million years could I do what a bricklayer does, and I’m in awe of them.

And next thing you know I’ve misjudged how many people want to get on a smelly bus to Atlantic City for four hours, and I’m like, “Hey, sorry, Mr. Bricklayer, but, go home and starve with your kids. But thanks, really.” I’m just such a rat bastard.

Malcolm Gladwell

Moderator: Mr. Trump, independent economists have estimated that your tax plan would cost the country as much as ten trillion dollars

in lost revenues. How would you pay for your ambitious new programs?

Gladwell: The best economists are with me. 100%. All of them support me. They’ve looked at my plan and they compare it to FDR. Franklin Delaney brought us out of the Great Depression. He was a cripple, you know? Still a great guy, though. Lot of brain. The world’s best economists look at my plan and what that tell me is that it’s like in 1875 when a peanut roaster by the name of Samuel Bridewell made a surprising discovery: the plants harvested from the western edge of his 30-acre farm in Virginia were slightly darker in color, slightly larger, and – this was the true revelation – when mashed at a temperature between 140 and 150 Fahrenheit, formed a glutinous mass that when cooled would hold whatever shape it was formed into. Bridewell began a lively, but local, business selling mashed peanuts in the form of farm animals, then Fathers of the Constitution, and then, as a wave of Irish immigrants spread the through the area, saints.

Bridewell’s Legume Figurines would today be forgotten if the nephews of a chemist named Robert Michelson had not been traveling through Virginia and came upon a box of the faded Figurines at a farm stand along a country path in Pebble Corners, eight miles south of Richmond. They opened one of the packages, but the youngest of the nephews, Chad Hemmings …

Moderator: Time is up, Mr. Trump.

Gladwell: … chipped a tooth on a desiccated miniature statue of St. Sebastian. He threw the statue down, where, by chance, it landed in a bowl of “lemon invigorator,” a punch being offered at the price of two drinks for a penny.

Moderator: Time, Mr. Trump.
Gladwell: The reaction of the peanut compound to the acidity of the lemons was immediate and startling …” John Podesta: Thank you.

Bryan Cranston

Moderator: Mr. Trump, you have said that you would consider withdrawing support for our NATO allies unless they made larger contributions to the financial cost of the treaty. Doesn’t that send a signal to Russia that it can invade countries with impunity?

Cranston: You’re worrying about Russia invading? You don’t understand. When invaders knock on the door of Crimea, I’m not Crimea and I’m sure as hell not its allies cowering in the dark. I am the one who knocks.

Clinton: I’m sorry, you’re now threatening to invade Crimea? I think we need to take this down a notch…

Cranston: Hey, lady, the screw only turns in one direction, and it you’re either the one doing the screwing or you’re on the pointy end…

John Podesta: Thank you Mr. Cranston. We’ll get back to you.

Terry Gross

Moderator: Mr. Trump, the next president may have the opportunity to fill up to three Supreme Court seats. Are there any litmus tests you would apply to candidates?

Gross: A litmus test? They’re completely unreliable. A hoax. Total hoax. You know who wants us to believe in litmus tests? The Chinese. [To the moderator] You should know that. Your father was a chemist, and your mother taught biology, right? And when you were fourteen, your father announced that he was gay. So how has growing up in a house full of scientists, one of who was a closeted gay man, influenced your sense of how reliable answers to any question can be, and the sort of follow-up you…

John Podesta: Thank you for your time, Ms. Gross.

Quentin Tarantino

Clinton: Politifact, the non-partisan fact checking site, says that you tell more untruths per hour than any candidate they’ve ever seen.

How can you lead the country when you have no problem knowingly telling outright lies?

Tarantino: You know who’s a liar? The biggest liar? God. I call him Lyin’ Jehovah. Lyin’ Jehovah. And you know the biggest lie Lyin’ Jehovah ever told, which makes it the the hugest lie in history? Huge. Really incredible.

You know Job, right? From the Old Testament. That Job. And it says right there that he’s the most righteous of his generation. He’s the guy. He does everything right. He prays. He sacrifices goats or whatever it says he has to sacrifice. He does it right. And it’s not easy. One little screw-up and you’re elbow deep in goat guts and it doesn’t count for anything. In fact, it shows God, who’s sitting there watching every detail just because He can, it shows God that you didn’t really mean it. If you meant it, you’d get it right. And Job gets it right. He totally does. God says so, flat out. And God rewards him with wives and children and goats and land. So Job is honoring God, all day, honoring, honoring, honoring.

And how does God respond? He basically gets into a drunken bet with Satan. Satan! Satan barely exists in the Old Testament, but he shows up just so God can have someone to bet with. Because who else is going to bet with God? God is always going to win. You know why? Because He’s God! The Creator. So, God bets the only schmuck arrogant enough to bet against Him that Job isn’t in it just for the wives and the goats. No, Job is righteous because he loves God. So what’s the test? Take away everything Job owns. Wives, children, land, goats. Give him boils, take away his HBO Go. Everything. Boom. Now instead of being the most righteous, he might as well be the town loser who takes a dump in the public swimming pool, you know what I mean? Job’s got nothing not because he was bad but because he was the most righteous. That’s why God picked on him.

So, Job asks God why this is happening to him, it’s so unfair. And asking God takes some Satan-size cojones because Job has seen what God can do. So, God replies with the greatest lie in the history of mankind. God — Jehovah, — to Job out of a freaking whirlwind and says, “Who are you to question me?” And God really rubs Job’s nose in it. Do you know about every freaking sparrow that falls? I didn’t think so. I couldn’t explain it to you if I wanted to, God says. And that’s it. That’s the lie. How do we know this? Because the Old Testament tells us exactly why it happened to Job: It was a bet. There’s nothing to understand except that God is being a total dick. But God can’t say that. So He lies. He lies!

But, I gotta say, Lyin’ Jehovah won the bet. He’s the ultimate winner.

John Podesta: Thank you, Mr. Tarantino.

Anthony Wiener

John Podesta: Next!

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Back when I was a lad, we experienced the absurdity of life by watching as ordinary things in the world shed their meanings the way the Nazi who opens the chest in Raiders of the Lost Ark loses his skin: it just melts away.

In this experience of meaninglessness, though, what’s revealed is not some other layer beneath the surface, but the fact that all meaning is just something we make up and project over things that are indifferent to whatever we care to drape over them.

If you don’t happen to have a holy ark handy, you can experience this meaninglessness writ small by saying the word “ketchup” over and over until it becomes not a word but a sound. The magazine “Forbes” also works well for this exercise. Or, if you are a Nobel Prize winning writer and surprisingly consistently wrong philosopher like Jean Paul Sartre, perhaps a chestnut tree will reveal itself to you as utterly alien and resistant to the meaning we keep trying to throw on to it.

That was meaninglessness in the 1950s and on. Today we still manage to find our everyday world meaningless, but now we don’t see ourselves projecting meanings outwards but instead imagine ourselves to be in a computer simulation. Why? Because we pretty consistently understand ourselves in terms of our dominant tech, and these days the video cards owned by gamers are close to photo realistic, virtual reality is creating vivid spatial illusions for us, and AI is demonstrating the capacity of computers to simulate the hidden logic of real domains.

So now the source of the illusory meaning that we had taken for granted reveals itself not to be us projecting the world out from our skull holes but to be super-programmers who have created our experience of the world without bothering to create an actual world.

That’s a big difference. Projecting meaning only makes sense when there’s a world to project onto. The experience of meaninglessness as simulation takes that world away.

The meaninglessness we experience assigns the absurdity not to the arbitrariness that has led us to see the world one way instead of another, but to an Other whom we cannot see, imagine, or guess at. We envision, perhaps, children outside of our time and space playing a video game (“Sims Cosmos”), or alien computer scientists running a test to see what happens using the rules they’ve specified this time. For a moment we perhaps marvel at how life-like are the images we see as we walk down a street or along a forest path, how completely the programmers have captured the feeling of a spring rain on our head and shoulders but cleverly wasted no cycles simulating any special feeling on the soles of our feet. The whole enterprise – life, the universe, and everything – is wiped out the way a computer screen goes blank when the power is turned off.

In the spirit of the age, the sense of meaninglessness that comes from the sense we’re in a simulation is not despair, for it makes no difference. Everything is different but nothing has changed. The tree still rustles. The spring rain still smells of new earth. It is the essence of the simulation that it is full of meaning. That’s what’s being simulated. It’s all mind without any matter, unlike the old revelation that the world is all matter without meaning. The new meaninglessness is absurd absurdity, not tragic absurdity. We speculate about The Simulation without it costing a thing. The new absurdity is a toy of thought, not a problem for life.

I am not pining for my years suffering from attacks of Old School Anxiety. It was depressing and paralyzing. Our new way of finding the world meaningless is playful and does not turn every joy to ashes. It has its own dangers: it can release one from any sense of responsibility – “Dude, sorry to have killed your cat, but it was just a simulation” – and it can sap some of the sense of genuineness out of one’s emotions. But not for long because, hey, it’s a heck of a realistic simulation.

But to be clear, I reject both attempts to undermine the meaningfulness of our experience. I was drawn to philosophical phenomenology precisely because it was a way to pay attention to the world and our experience, rather than finding ways to diminish them both.

Both types of meaninglessness, however, think they are opening our eyes to the hollowness of life, when in fact they are privileging a moment of deprivation as a revelation of truth, as if the uncertainty and situatedness of meaning is a sign that it is illusory rather than it being the ground of every truth and illusion itself.

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The first in a series of six posts about my experiences learning how to train a machine learning system has just been posted here. There’s no code and no math in it. Instead it focuses on the tasks and choices involved in building one of these applications. How do you figure out what sort of data to provide? How do you get that data into the system? How can you tell when the system has been trained? What types of controls do the developers have over the outcomes? What sort of ways can I go wrong? (Given that the title of the series is “The Adventures of a TensorFlow.js n00b” the answer to that last question is: Every way.)

I was guided through this project by Yannick Assogba, a developer in the machine learning research group — People + AI Research –I’m embedded in at Google as a writer in residence. Yannick is natural born teacher, and is preternaturally patient.

The series is quite frank. I make every stupid mistake possible. And for your Schadenfreude, five more posts in this series are on their way…

.

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I’m not sure why I bothered to write a joke that is in the form of a joke but is not funny. I am further bothered by the fact that I am posting it.

It was in response to a news item that a Ford dealership in Chatom, Alabama, was offering a free Bible, flag, and hunting rifle with each car purchased.

Here goes, and remember that this won’t actually be funny.

So, a Jew, a Canadian, and an eco-activist walk into a car dealership. The salesperson says, “We’re having a special sale. If you buy a car, you get three special gifts: A bible, a flag, and a rifle.”

The Jew asks “What type of bible?”

“King James,” says the salesperson.

“That’s not my type of bible,” the Jew says, and walks out.

The Canadian says, “I’m ok with the bible, but what type of flag?”

“American.”

“That’s not my type of flag,” the Canadian says, and walks out.

The eco-hippie pacifist seems not to notice and asks to be shown the most powerful, least eco-friendly car.

“Sure,” says the salesperson, slightly worried. “It’s this one. But don’t you want to know what type of rifle it is?”

“Is it high powered?” 

“It would take down a moose.”

“That’s all I need to know” says the eco-activist

“But aren’t you going to say that it’s not your  type  of rifle and leave?”

“Nope, it’s exactly my type of rifle.” says the eco-activist as she turns and puts a slug through the engine block of the car.   

“But that’s definitely not my type of car.”

YES THAT IS THE END OF THE “JOKE.”

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Daily Nous has run a guest editorial by C. Thi Nguyen defending “public philosophy.” Yes! In fact, it’s telling that public philosophy even needs defense. And defense from whom?

Here’s a pull quote from the last paragraph:

To speak bluntly: the world is in crisis. It’s war, the soul of humanity is at stake, and the discipline that has been in isolation training for 2000 years for this very moment is too busy pointing out tiny errors in each other’s technique to actually join the fight.

And this is from near the beginning:

We need to fill the airwaves with the Good Stuff, in every form: op-eds, blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, long-form articles, lectures, forums, Tweets, and more. Good philosophy needs to be everywhere, accessible to every level, to anybody who might be interested. We need to flood the world with gateways of every shape and size.

So, yes, of course!

Who then is Dr. Nguyen arguing against? Who does not support increasing the presence of public philosophy?

Answer: The bulk of the article in fact outlines what we have to do in order to get the profession of philosophy to accept public philosopher as an activity worth recognizing, rewarding, and promoting.

If that op-ed is a manifesto (it is), sign me up!

[Disclosure: I am an ex-academic philosophy professor whose writings sometimes impinge on actual philosophy.]

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At long last I’m getting around to updating Joho’s look, for several reasons:

First, my last redesign made the page look like it was designed in 1999, although I actually did the redesign about seven years ago, I think.

Second, CSS has made it easy enough to avoid using a table as the container for all of the contents of the page. That was always a hack but, it was easier than dealing with floats, etc., for a multicolumn design.

Third, it was especially easy to move away from using a table because I’ve given up on a multicolumn design. That has meant for now stripping out some early 2000s goodness, including my link-rotted blogroll, categories list, and archives. I plan on adding back my blogroll, if only as an historic artefact, via an overlay.

Fourth, the page page needs to be more readable in the mobile camera phones that the kids all use what with their Facebooking, and Chapnapping, and all the rest. I have by no means done all the work required to make this page truly responsive (Everyday Chaos is my best attempt at employing a modified a responsive template), but I’m hoping it will be responsive enough for the kids who are used to their Facebroking and Snoopchitting and all the rest.

Fifth, Medium.com‘s elegant design redefined what a blog should look like. Yes, that was like 18 years ago, but I was too busy with my Facebokchoying and Schnapssbapping to get around to it. Medium not only transformed our expectations about the tools for writing a post, but also about the reading experience: easy to take in, elegant, content-focused. So, I have increased the font size, removed the distracting sidebar, and I hope made it a more inviting page.

I’m obviously not done. For example, I haven’t yet gotten around to updating the page that shows a single post. But I’m happy so far with the redesign. Or, to put that more accurately, I’m somewhat less embarrassed by the page.

Until design tastes change again.

Aaaand, they just did.

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Princeton has published the ongoing results of its “Dark Patterns” project. The site says:

Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions.

So, Nudge gone evil. (And far beyond nudging.)

From the Dark Patterns page, here are some of the malicious patterns they are tracking:

• Activity Notification: Influencing shopper decisions by making the product appear popular with others.
• Confirmshaming: Steering shoppers to certain choices through shame and guilt.
• Countdown Timer: Pressuring shoppers with a decreasing count-down timer.
• Forced Enrollment: Requiring shoppers to agree to something in order to use basic functions of the website.
• Hard to Cancel: Making it easy for shoppers to sign up and obstructing their ability to cancel.
• Hidden Costs: Waiting to reveal extra costs to shoppers until just before they make a purchase.
• Hidden Subscription: Charging a recurring fee after accepting an initial fee or trial period.
• High Demand: Pressuring shoppers by suggesting that a product has high demand.
• Limited Time: Telling shoppers that a deal or discount will expire soon.
• Low-Stock Notification: Pressuring shoppers with claims that the inventory is low.
• Pressured Selling: Pre-selecting or pressuring shoppers to accept the most expensive options.
• Sneak into Basket: Adding extra products into shopping carts without consent or through boxes checked by default.
• Trick Questions: Steering shoppers into certain choices with confusing language
• Visual Interference: Distracting shoppers away from certain information through flashy color, style, and messages.

Home page:https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns/

Academic paper:
https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns/assets/dark-patterns.pdf

Nathan Mathias has put a front end to this data at the Tricky Sites site: https://trickysites.cs.princeton.edu/

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I just posted a new page at the Everyday Chaos web site. It lists media coverage, talks, and other ways into the book.

Take a look!

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