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The Most Human Human: By Brian Christian

I heard Brian Christian on a recent podcast in my feed earlier this month, talking about computer science, decision making and other subjects. His more recent book, 2016’s Algorithms to Live By wasn’t available at my local library, but this 2011 book about the Loebner prize was, so I picked it up instead. I’ll admit, it took me a while to get into it. I had other things in my reading list I was trying to work through simultaneously, but once I got through those and was able to spend some more time with it I did enjoy it.

The Most Human Human is a chronicle of Christian’s experience in the 2011 Loebner prize, a Turing Test competition where chatbot programs and their human confederates compete against each other, each trying to convince a series of judges that they are the most human. Christian tells his story of trying to prepare for the competition, trying to figure out what he can do during each five minute round of chatting to convince the judges that he is not a computer. Within this story, Christian covers the history of computer science, from Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, to the first chatbots like ELIZA, onto more advanced concepts like compression algorithms.

Christian has a dual degree in both computer science and philosophy, as well as a MFA in poetry, and he puts all of this to use in the book. There’s a lot of discussion about art, music and poetry, as one would expect, and lots of quotes to break up the various sections. He spends a good deal on chess, mainly as it relates to computer science and the Kasparov vs. Deep Blue matches. The book is informative without being jargony. I was fairly familiar with most of what he covers in the book, but I was pleased that the book was more in depth about general computing concepts that just about the details of the Loebner prize competition, which was probably one of the lesser interesting parts of the book.

The book is only eight years old, but I fear it doesn’t really age well due to the prevalence of discussion around the pick-up artist (PUA) scene, notably Neil Strauss, Mystery, and the techniques employed by them like negging and neurolinguistic programming. I was involved in the PUA scene, around the mid-aughts, and it’s notable how that subculture became aggressively toxic. It’s quite a distraction in this age of #meToo and incels and the like. It’s also apparent that Christian really liked Dave Matthews Band when he was writing this book, but who am I to judge.

One of the things I really liked from this that Christian writes is about what he terms the anti-parliamentary debate, modeled as the antithesis to the Lincoln Douglas debates which are typical of primary and secondary school debate clubs. Instead of an adversarial process, opposing sides have to come together to work on joint legislation, which they then present to the judges independently, each side explaining why the legislation supports their position. These collaborators are scored jointly, with individual scores based on joint participation scores across several rounds. It’s a shame it hasn’t taken off.

As someone interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning, this book is a good read. It’s right in the sweet spot for general audiences and people like myself that have more of a technical background. A mix or art and science, if you will. One of the takeaways that is going to stay with me from reading this is the ever-moving target that we humans present to these questions around synthetic minds. The goalposts keep moving. Each time a computer beats us at a particular task, that task is no longer seen as a creative endeavor. First checkers was solved, and we’ve been beaten by computers in chess, now Go and other games. But these defeats ultimately allow us to determine what is it that separates us from the machines, that makes us uniquely human? And ultimately, Christian’s book is about his mission to discover those things, and is what the reader is left thinking about afterward.

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Choice overload

I don’t seem to have issues finding flow. I guess I’m lucky like that. I don’t have any problems delving into a problem for hours on end and really disappearing into it. I seem to have a different kind of problem. Focus. It’s a situation where I find myself with too many options and I’m not sure what to do next. I guess it borders on feeling overwhelmed, but I don’t really feel that stress. The only thing that stresses me is the feeling of the immediate, the reacting. As one that works in support, I call it firefighting, those situations where something is broken, a server down, or some other critical application or service that brings me out of flow and forces me to go from what I want to do to what I have to do. Sometimes these situations are self inflicted, but other times they’re just disasters. A virus on a client server that brings them to a standstill, and requires my full undivided attention until the issue is resolved. These are the only moments in my life when I’m truly stressed.

The other problem I struggle with is deciding what to do next. It’s probably a prioritization issue, and I’m either ignoring my list of todos or otherwise procrastinating. I pulled out my copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done and skimmed through the first third. I read it years ago and tried to implement some of it as a best practice, but I’ve struggled to really find something that works. I started using index cards for the wife and I to keep track of things. We’ve tried Trello in the past, but she didn’t really stick with it. I personally found Nirvana to be the most pleasant for me, but I quickly ran up against the limits of the free plan. Of course when I do pay for something, I quickly forget about it, and once I’m reminded about the bill and cancel the service, I start using it again.

The golden age of apps that we currently live in presents more and more of a choice paralysis for me. My various clients have their own stack, but it seems like every new startup has their own, and I seem to get bogged down in figuring out what works, what’s new, how to manage it, and most importantly, how to get buy in from the team. I could think of dozens of examples, the choices are everywhere. As someone who makes their professional calling as the ‘trusted advisor’, I get lost in a sea of possibilities. It’s hardest when you’re planning a new organization, or one that is using a lot of manual and paper processes.

In the past, it’s been trivial to take a few simple steps to get an organization moving along. A few examples: creating mailing lists where the organizer was using personal email; Setting up Google Apps for email and file sharing; registering a domain and setting up a basic website. But the longer I go on with this, the harder it’s proving to nail my preferences down to a few apps. And depending on the organization, it’s proving almost impossible to get buy in from everyone. I have one volunteer group I’m part of where they still insist on massive group chats. I recommend Signal, and things go nowhere. Trello, or Asana for task management, and everything falls off after a few weeks. The more involved I get with an org, the more convoluted things get. Having different apps for time tracking, billing, CRM, issue logs, and so on and on just gets cumbersome. Having these apps talk to each other is nice, but trying to design a solution over and over again is just sapping the energy out of me.

Which is how I found myself playing around with Basecamp last night. I need a system that I can use for my freelance work, that will allow me to add clients as needed and allow me to collaborate with them and their clients. I’m not saying that it’s the answer, but it does seem to do a lot of what I think is needed within a team. It doesn’t do it all, and I’m not sure that it’s best at all of these things, but I’ll settle for simplicity right now. What I need is less options, so that I can get back to work, and stay in flow. I need something with which I can track tasks, assignments, time entries, billing, documentation, source code if need be. There’s just too many solutions out there, and at some level it seems like some sort of entrepreneurial masterbation to be messing around with all of this crap.

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Labor markets and pricing your time

As someone who’s been trying to take the plunge from employee to freelancer, I spend a lot of time thinking about pricing and value. The immediate comment that one might think of is what happens when someone retires from a job in the public or private sector, and goes right back into the organization, doing the same job at twice the pay. What usually doesn’t get mentioned in that conversation is the cost of doing business that salary or hourly employees don’t have to deal with: the payroll taxes, Social Security, healthcare, and all the other regulatory and accounting steps that need to happen as cost of doing business.

I’ve done some of everything in my career. Besides the hourly/salary track, I spent several years running my own small business. (I’ll cover that in another post, I promise.) I’ve worked at small firms, a Fortune 500 company, and was the first hire at the new franchisee that I’m still at almost seven years later. Besides information technology, I’ve done construction, telemarketing, day laborer, dishwasher, and busboy. I’ve been down to the point where I was living on couches for months. I’ve been on unemployment. I’ve been evicted after it turned out that the gent I was subleasing from was taking my rent money and spending it on drugs. There are other stories to tell about those down days, but this post isn’t about them. Today I’m up to the point where I have everything I need: loving wife, two beautiful children, steady paycheck, and my health.

Right around the time I took my current position purchased a business license. I’d done enough odd tech work that it seemed sensible to have one, even if it was just for a sole proprietorship. I’ve kept it up over the years, even when I wasn’t doing anything, just so I would be able to point back in a decade and say that the business is ten years old. Now that I’ve started to become more and more dissatisfied with the company (and the industry) that I’m working in, I’ve been putting more and more thought into what success is going to look like moving forward for me, and how I’m going to build those relationships moving forward.

One thing that I constantly hear from the freelance world, especially the creative side, is the non-clients who try to leverage free work for the magical exposure. As someone whose skills are a bit more technical, I don’t have to worry about that so much. I do have to deal with the near constant stream of familial support requests. I’ve become much better at saying ‘no’ to these. And I’ve become much better at putting a price on my time. There’s a freedom to it, of course, being able to adjust fees for various reasons. But software development gets a bit tricky, especially when one starts dealing with open source packages for most of one’s work.

So I’m starting small, right now. Charging a modest retainer for the clients that I think will bring me toward the career that I want. Right now I’m working with a small ‘venture’ firm — more of a small scale accelerator, if you will — where I’m managing domains and infrastructure. I feel that I’ll probably get sucked into more of the support stuff eventually, but it give me the freedom to start, again and again, on project for these brand new businesses. And while the pay isn’t enough to live off of, I can work on these small projects, solving some real business problems, and earning stake in some of these nascent small businesses.

I know that the current paradigm of managed services, managing small businesses networks, providing admin and helpdesk support, is doomed. Even here in our market, there’s too many players. Too many people who think they can do it. Race to the bottom so to speak. Specialization in cybersecurity is the hotness right now, but most small businesses are loathe to take things seriously, or just don’t care. I think the big money moving forward is in business process and automation. What Celerity and others call Robotic Process Automation. A lot of the businesses I deal with are headed by boomers. Service companies, HVAC, medical and dental providers. These independent shops are starting to age out. And I don’t see the next generation rising up to fill the gap.

There’s a lot more to unpack with today’s economy, with regard to skilled and unskilled labor. People taking on more side hustles. I know for me it’s more of a creative outlet that what I’m doing now, but I see how hard it is to maintain good help with the compensation that can be afforded by some of these companies. We just had a roof put on our house last week, and the owner and most of the crew were a bunch of old, weathered men who looked like they were going to be doing it until they dropped dead. The rest of the crew were a bunch of younger hispanic guys. We’ve got generations of American’s, (myself included,) who have traditionally been taught to look down on the manual trades.

I’m not sure how things are going to turn out in the next decade, but we are rapidly approaching a point where the only ones capable of doing the job are either too old to do it, too tired to care, or too expensive to hire.

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The Nation Magazine: June 14/24, 2019

Gag Order by Aviva Stahl: The cover story of this issue is about the force-feeding of hunger striking prisoners in America’s ‘most secretive prisons.’ One of the things we must remember in a free society is the way in which we treat our worst, most despicable criminals reflects on us. The men profiled in this story are convicted terrorists, some of whom were responsible for the 1990 World Trade Center bombings. These men have been locked away in high-security prisons, isolated from others for long stretches of time under special administrative measures, or SAMs. These SAMs mean that they’re limited who they can meet with, letters to family may take six months to be reviewed and delivered, and they’re confined to the cell for 23 hours a day.

The justification for these SAMs are not disclosed to the prisoners, or their lawyers, and there is no appeals process for getting them reviewed. For these reasons many of the men under these restrictions go on hunger strikes. And many of them have been subjected to forced feedings, some as many as 200 times. And the details of these tube feedings sound abusive, if not borderline torture.

Unfortunately for these men, their plight is hidden from sight. Access to them is severely restricted, and many of these stories can only be told because the men in question have been released to lower security facilities. The author notes that when the world became aware of similar abuses taking place at Guantanamo Bay, the public outrage eventually led to reforms. Not so with these men, but perhaps this feature will change that. I remain skeptical, that given all of the issues with criminal justice going on in America at this time that we will see much happen with this under the current administration. It remains to be seen whether there recourse in the courts of justice, as I do not see the court of public opinion swaying on this one any time soon.

Renters Revolt by Jimmy Tobias: As we mentioned in yesterday’s review of the Home Improvement issue of Jacobin, housing justice has been growing in importance on the Left recently, and this report details progress in organizing renters. The author list three reasons that rent has become unaffordable for so many in America: lack of wage growth; demand for rental housing following the 2008 crash, which has led to a 50-year low in home ownership; and a Wall Street buying spree which has focused on buying apartment complexes and mobile home parks from family-owned business. From there, a number of tactics are deployed, either to force renters out so that new tenants can be brought in under a higher rent, or in the case of mobile homes, which are anything but, the tenants must either abandon their property or pay the higher rent. This latter situation was detailed by Last Week Tonight:

As was detailed in the Jacobin issue, New York City remains the focus of renter organizing efforts. As New Yorks rent-controlled housing stock dwindles, the upward rent pressure increases. But the rest of New York State appears to be without these rent protections at all, and thankfully there are signs that newly elected state legislators are taking a pro-renter position in order to correct these ills. Similar progress seems to be taking place in California and in the Pacific Northwest.

Efforts to organize renters, and their willingness to fight back against slumlords and exploitative landlords should be applauded, and we look forward to seeing more of how these efforts progress.

Manifest Destinies, by Rashid Khalidi: Review of Our American Israel by Amy Kaplan. Given all of the media time that US/Israeli relations have been getting lately, it seems appropriate that one examines the history of those relations. How did the Israel and Palestinian conflict, and criticism of the Israeli state, become such a hotbed issue in American politics. When I brought the issue up with my father, a red-blooded, gun-owning (former) Trump voter, his response was wrapped in acknowledgement of the Holocaust. Like the Germans, it’s seemingly argued, the Palestinians pose an existential threat to the Jewish people. Hostilities against them are therefore justified. Similarly, so was the 1982 war with Lebanon, which was before my adulthood, and likewise seems to be either forgotten or forgiven by most of the American public.

The Zionist evangelical movement in the United States gets mentioned as well. [I know we are playing with some dangerous terms here, boys and girls, but nothing we’ve written here should be taken in any way to be anti-Semitic.] I’ve always understood it from the aspect that the state of Israel is some sort of prerequisite for the return of Jesus and the Rapture. Still, the willingness of the religious right to put up with so much horror to fuel this dream still boggles the mind. I should not be shocked, I suppose.

This past week we’ve seen Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar barred from entering Israel on a recent trip, as President Trump continues to his mission from God to protect the state of Israel. Need we remind the reader that during Obama’s last term, Bibi Netanyahu was invited to address a joint session of Congress. As support builds on the Left for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and as the centrists, liberals and the right backlash against these efforts, it’s important for people to realize how we got here.

Whether the presentation of Israel as the America of the Middle East is accurate, knowing how this relationship has been managed over the the past eighty years will help us deal with the issues in the Middle East. Not just with regard to the West Bank, but with Iran as well.

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Jacobin Issue 33: Home Improvement

Housing justice issues have been getting a lot of attention from the Left lately, DSA’s Stomp Out Slumlords campaign has garnered a lot of attention. Recent studies of eviction rates listed seven Virginia localities in the top 20 for the nation. Jacobin magazine has made it the theme of their Spring 2019 issue.

Rent control seems to be the overarching proposal here, as there are several mentions of the decrease in controlled units in New York City over the past few decades, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s “right to buy” program, which saw a vast portion of public housing in Britain sold to the public market, transferring it to speculators and other private interests.

One of the main complaints from the Left is that housing has long been treated as a commodity instead of a basic right. The arguments between renting and buying aside, the crux is that the private markets incentivise property as investment, which increases rent-seeking, making housing more unaffordable for those at the bottom. There’s also the matter that private development trends toward higher income units, increasing gentrification. This leads to market failure, where lower income individuals are unable to find shelter, and higher priced units go unfilled. As many have pointed out, there are enough empty housing units in the United States to house every homeless person.

There are more articles within this issue that detail the difficulties of homebuying, Pete Buttigieg’s ‘war’ on the homeless in South Bend, what a Green New Deal for housing would like like, Soviet modernism, as well as a one about perhaps the only 70’s rock band out of Germany: Ton Steine Scherben, which fomented the squatter scene in Berlin during those years.

As far as solutions go, the Jacobin editors acknowledge that the most effective ones, public housing and rent control, are the least politically feasible. Likewise, the most politically palatable ones are also the least effective. What was most interesting to me, though, were the examples of public or cooperative housing that were held up as examples. My favorite might be the LILAC (Low Impact Living Affordable Community) units in West Leeds. It reminds me of a similar local effort, but geared toward a more affordable, equitable model.

It’s clear that the past few decades of increasing economic inequality, not to mention the 2008 housing crisis, have made it more and more difficult for individuals to find affordable housing. Organizers will need to continue working toward reform, urging and educating legislators and officials about tenants rights issues. Thankfully, Virginia’s 2019 session was able to pass various reforms around eviction issues, but there still need to be more of a push toward public housing, organizing tenant unions, and building cooperative housing models.

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Jack of all trades

I seem to oscillate between obsession and undecidedness most of the time. Either I have a hobby that I attack with full throated-ness, or I’m stuck flitting between one thing or the other in rapid succession. My wife jokes about my six-month hobbies, and whether she likes them or not: cooking, auto simulations, politics, crypto, and so on, &c… She says she like the cooking one the most. My mother is the same, going through phases of creativity in different projects: craft painting, stained glass, hiking, feltcraft, and so on, &c…

The problem was worse when I was a child in school. I never really had deep relationships with anyone, at least those with the opposite sex. Maybe in hindsight that’s not a bad thing, but growing up it felt like I was attracted to a number of girls and it felt like ‘going with’ someone closed the door on others, and I was always glad to be around any number of girls in school. Of course, there were always the ones that weren’t interested or otherwise unavailable that I always fell hard for. My wife, when we were in classes together, was always involved with some dude and I was like another one of her girlfriends, listening to her escapades and so on. It was part of pattern I seemed to be stuck in until my mid-twenties, when I got into pick-up culture. But that’s a story for another day.

The way in which I’ve been deeply committed to whatever obsession du jour has been has influenced my career in many ways. Since computers have been at the heart of many of them, I’ve been able to grow up with a set of skills that has benefited me greatly professionally. In a way, I still consider myself a jack-of-all-trades, as I can’t really say that there’s one thing that I excel at more so than anyone else around me. If I had to pick one, I might say that I possess a confluence of technical ability and business acumen, but I don’t really think that’s even my strong suit, given my failures in business and in technical projects as well.

I’m getting ready to head back to school in another week, to begin the last of two semesters I need before I finish my bachelors in computer science. I’m conflicted about this whole process. When I began going back to school after a 13 year hiatus, I saw a BS as a necessary box that I needed to check off to get past hiring algorithms, to take my salary to the next level. When I decided to take a ‘semester off’ all those years ago, it was because I didn’t know what I wanted to study, let alone what I enjoyed doing. It might actually have something to do with getting fired from my first tech job and being blinded by the quick money and glamorous life that I thought I had found during the heyday of sales and telemarketing at MCI.

What’s ironic is that now, after 5 years of part time schooling and tens of thousand of dollars in debt in pursuit of this degree, I am in no way interested in working for any company that would use it as a qualifier for hiring me. I have zero interest in going to work for a large corporation or other organization where people are interchangeable cogs in a machine.

Hopefully the groundwork I’m starting to lay will pay off, and that I’m not still scattering seeds that I’m hoping will pay off in one way or the other. Since politics has almost been completely shunted to the side, I can focus on school. But I still have a day job, and am picking up additional work still. I am handing off a project that I’ve spent dozens of hours on over the past year, as I don’t feel like I’m the one to drive if forward given my other commitments. It feels like another failure to be passing it on, uncompleted, but I have learned so much from it already, and was basically working for free on it anyways. Whether the promise of equity ever materializes or comes to amount to anything remains to be seen.

I still remain committed to crypto markets, despite all of the crazy action of the last eighteen plus months, and my stack of next actions and projects continues to fill and be sorted from next to later to someday. It will be nice to be able to close a project one day. Not one of the server implementation projects that I’ve done a million times, not something I’ve had to do to repair a car or a house out of necessity, but something that I thought of and brought completely into fruition. Until then, I’ll keep tucking unfinished projects aside, abandoning ideas, and plowing forward to the next thing.

Onward.

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A path for legal psychedelics?

We’ve explored the use of psychedelic drugs here previously, and have mentioned MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) before, and there’s been a few developments recently that warrant further exploration.

I’ve been a big Tim Ferriss fan for years, I’ve got a copy of The Four-Hour Workweek on my shelf and have been listening to his podcast regularly for some time. He’s talked often about his mental health issues that he’s had in the past, namely his struggles with depression and how he came close to attempting suicide. There’s obviously some trauma or abuse in his childhood; he hasn’t gone into details, but has made it clear on numerous occasions, and even talked about it at TED. Over the past few years, Tim seems to have been dealing with these problems in a healthy way, apparently relying on MDMA and other psychoactive substances to help him confront this abuse and deal with the trauma. The effects were so profound that he even decided to stop his venture investing and dedicate large sums of money to the research and development of MDMA as a therapeutic treatment.

Michael Pollan’s latest book, How To Change Your Mind, does what Pollan does best, bringing his journalists eye and voice to the story of psychedelics, past and present. It mixes the history of the LSD and the backlash, with Pollan’s explorations as he tries psilocybin and other mind-altering substances for the first time. It also looks at much of the recent work being done, both underground and within the confines of FDA-approved research. Here’s Pollan on Ferriss’s show.

A recent podcast by Peter Attia, featuring MAPS founder Rick Doblin, really shows how far things have come. Doblin, who has spent the last thirty years and has made it his life’s mission to make these substances available for therapeutic use, believes that we are within one to two years of MDMA being rescheduled to a therapeutic treatment. Through MAPS, he’s been able to get the MDMA treatment for PTSD to a Phase 3 clinical trial, meaning that it’s possible for people with treatment-resistant PTSD to seek this therapy now.

What’s unique about this trial is the way it blends the pharmacological substance with a therapy protocol. This isn’t a treatment where patients will just get a couple of tabs of MDMA and go home to trip, patients will have two trained guides with them while they’re under the influence, and will spend the night at the treatment center before undergoing additional time to integrate what they experienced. Most of the studies that were performed as part of this trial indicate that one or two sessions with MDMA in this manner have a profound and long lasting effect on PTSD.

There are other signs that this class of substances can also help with the treatment of addiction and depression, and the protocol that has been worked out with the FDA for the MDMA trial is also being used for psilocybin. The hope is that it would quickly follow rescheduling. Eventually, Doblin says, this would eventually pave the way for treatment centers where people can experience psychedelic trips for these kinds of mental health treatments, couples counseling, or even what he terms “personal exploration”.

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Neil Gaiman’s American Gods vs. Starz adaptation

I’m not the biggest Neil Gaiman fan, as I suspect some people are. I like his work. I wasn’t terribly impressed with the television version of Neverwhere, which I believe was my first introduction to his work, but I had always heard great things about Sandman and was not disappointed when I finally got my hand on the Sandman Volume 1 compendium. Likewise, I found a copy of the Sleeper and the Spindle online and was so taken with it that I bought a copy to read to my daughters.

My wife and I are both big Ian McShane fans, from his work on Deadwood, and so of course we watched the first two seasons of American Gods with vigor. I had tried to checkout a copy of the 2001 novel from the local library, but never got around to it until this past week, when we were a third of the way through season three. There was a bit of dialog between three African American gods that touched on race — as the show has often done — and I was determined to find out how much of that was from the twenty year old book. So I finally reserved a copy and read through it over the past few days.

I was immediately struck by the changes that were made. A lot of it made sense for a television adaptation of a novel that probably wouldn’t translate well to the small screen. Several characters have been given extended plotlines in the show where they were either killed off or not given as much attention during the story. I assume this was done to give more variety to the show, whereas the book centers almost entirely around Shadow and his interactions with others. The timeline was shuffled about quite a bit as well, as the carousel bit at the House on the Rock, which occurs early in season 3 happens in the first chapters of the book.

I would say that the book caught up with season three less than half way through. Then the book took a long detour as Shadow hid out at Lakeside for what seemed like an eternity. I felt like I was reading an adaptation of Fargo, and it’s anyone’s guess whether it makes it to the show. Given the lack of action that happens there until the epilogue, I would be very surprised. Seems almost like it would take a whole season of the show for them to cover that, and would make for awkward television.

After Shadow leaves Lakeside, though, I couldn’t put the book down. I think I spent two and a half hours last night reading through to the end of the book. Gaiman is a terrific writer, and really crafted a wonderful book. I’m hoping that the producers of the Starz show can stay focused long enough to bring the series to a satisfying conclusion. There seems to have been enough changes from the source material that they may yet be able to surprise me for the finale, but the pre-WWII musical episode that I just watched has me worried that they’ve jumped the shark.

The show does have some of the most gorgeous visual production that I’ve seen. The carousel trip was especially good. But besides peppering elements from Gaiman’s Anansi Boys novel, I’m worried that Starz may be dragging out production of the series to a schedule beyond what it can support. I just hope they don’t try to stretch it out for four more seasons or something as a cash cow. Depending on where season three leaves off, I would think 5 total should do the trick.

Now excuse me while I add Sandman Volume Two to my wish list.

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Deciding to keep a secret

So today marks one month since I started my one-month blog challenge. I managed to only miss two days, minus a bit of backdating posts, but for the past week or so I’ve managed to make writing a habit; one of the last things I do before I turn off the screen for the day and wind down with some reading. We really didn’t have a goal going into this experiment, if you will, but wanted to treat it more as an exercise to see what happens. Part of me is a bit disappointed that there’s bit virtually no traffic to the site, but that was never the goal in the first place. All of the content has been written in a single session, with no review or editing afterward. Of course, that limits the quality and length of what I can write, I think around a thousand words or so in an hour. I have been known to write longer pieces for certain projects, but this has been more about getting into the habit and developing a voice, or coming up with various ideas to allow time for my mind to figure out what it wants.

I’ve been struggling with the question of pseudo-anonymity, identity and privacy here. There are enough people that I’ve met IRL that know who daHIFI is. I have taken steps in the past to obscure things by removing my real name from profiles where they could be found. But since I am no longer under the public eye, so to speak, I think it’s safe for me to be honest about things without having to worry. Part of me does value the fact that I have a bit of privacy here, that I’m putting things out into the world for others to see, but that I’m not advertising it to people within my family or networks.

On the other hand, I think some of the seeds of things I am working on here have potential for further work elsewhere. I want to continue to write daily, but likely will either have to devote more time than the 30-60 minutes a day that I do now, or will have to reduce the published output to allow more time to develop something. I just don’t know what that something is yet. In the past I’ve had random pieces pop the search engines and go crazy, so you never know what will work.

For now I’ll just keep writing for an audience of one. This is a place for me to write some of the things I’ve wanted to say for a long time, to deal with stuff that I’ve never wanted to admit, either to myself or to others. Again, being able to say things without worrying who’s reading it is liberating in it’s own sense, but being limited to anonymity isn’t really as comfortable either. I haven’t figured out a way to maintain the balancing act yet, hell, I haven’t even put out the high-wire yet. In a way, I’ve always struggled at figuring out what what I want.

I know that maintaining control of the medium is important, that’s why I’ve always felt more comfortable maintaining my own site than trusting a third party with it. Recent discussions about Tumblr’s great porn purge is another example of why this is important. I like Medium as a publishing platform, but conflating this identity with my normie one there, crossposting and maintaining separate publications just seems like the wrong way to go.

Perhaps part of the reason I’ve been loathe to ‘promote’ this space is that I’m disappointed with the archives, or with the lapses over the years. Perhaps I’m afraid of it being ignored, and so by making sure that it’s ignored I can inoculate myself against any feelings of rejection. Who knows. Maybe there are things that I haven’t said yet that I’m not ready to write — there are — and that I’m giving myself space to grow comfortable with the idea of getting that out in the open.

So for now, we’ll do as we have with the other habits that we’ve picked up lately, and extend it out further. Maybe I can find a way to integrate this private life with my public one. Maybe they’ll stay separate and I’ll just have to accept that. Maybe no one will read these words but me and the search engine spiders. Maybe one day I’ll write a post that no one else has and that finds an audience, guiding me where to go next.

For now, I’ll just keep following my own voice, and will keep writing.

Posted on

Doesn’t mean they’re not after you

I occasionally have to procure and setup new laptops and workstations for new employees for my various clients. As happened today. I drove into the office this morning to wait for FedEx to deliver a laptop that was ordered on Friday, and I didn’t even have to unpack my gear as the delivery was waiting for me when I got to the reception desk. I grabbed it and immediately drove back home, without even five minutes at the office. Got a good hour of my podcasts in on the round trip. Wasn’t even any slowdowns. Not bad for a Monday.

I got home and went to unpack the laptop, and noticed that the box had been opened. Usually Dell has a small round plastic sticker that goes over the cardboard tab that locks the lid to the box. But it and the cardboard around it had been ripped clean off. Weird, I thought. I removed the laptop, and opened it up, and there was a small piece of orange, plastic tape crumpled and stuck to the case. Double weird. I went to turn the machine on. Dead. Usually they ship with enough charge to run them for a few minutes. Triple weird.

Now I’m not usually paranoid, but this just seemed to rub me the wrong way this morning. Nothing looked damaged, so I plugged in the charger and told my boss about it. We had ordered this thing for an employee that was starting tomorrow, so if we needed to go through the trouble of returning it to our distributor, then we needed to act fast. I called the distributor, they said that the box wouldn’t have gone out opened — they don’t accept opened returns — so it probably happened during shipping. The sales rep said they would send a new one out for a return, but I was torn about our timeline and said I would think about it and make a decision soon.

I was concerned about this mainly for an operational security perspective. What if the machine had been compromised? What if someone had opened it, installed malware, then sealed the box back up? What was the risk? What was the likelihood. I told my boss I was going to call the client and see what they wanted to do. As soon as I got the client on the phone and started to explain I realized that this was a mistake. I told them that I didn’t think there were any problems, but that I wanted full transparency. I probably rambled on for about five minutes before we agreed to let it go.

Since the machine didn’t show any obvious signs of tampering besides the box, I wasn’t worried about physical damage or anything like that. I was worried about the device being compromised. A rootkit, or other piece of malware that would lead to a security breach. This laptop had shipped with a smart-card reader, so it was obviously going to be used in a secure environment. What were the chances that the device had been compromised in the warehouse by an employee? What if my client was being targeted?

I went ahead and set the machine up, and made sure our antivirus deployed. Not that I have any illusions about any vendor solution out there that can catch a properly customized virus payload. A sufficiently determined adversary, if you will. One of our neighbors at my office is a team of ex-Special Forces personnel that specialize in security assessment and tactical training. Physical intrusion, surveillance, all that kind of government/military engagement stuff. I hear enough background chatter from them in the office next door to know that they have access to some crazy shit. And of course Twitter has been all about the DEFCON conference last week. My feed has been full of USB cables that contain all kinds of hidden components that will steal and exfiltrate your data. If had enough proximity to this kind of spook-level stuff in my career to know that it’s out there.

Eventually, what gave me piece of mind enough to forget it about it was that I saw the seal ripped off the box. If it was government or corporate espionage, they sure were sloppy. Must have just been something else, a more plausible, unexplained occurrence.

Nothing to worry about. Right?