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Drawing from Debord and Heidegger, this film examines our subjective experience of time throughout history. It reveals how the relentless pursuit of productivity has shaped society and our perceptions of time, creating a perpetual present driven by an autonomous economy and accelerated by surveillance capitalism. The film explores the societal obsession with busyness and advocates for reclaiming…
We stand on the brink of a precipice. In front of us lies a society driven for the sake of productivity, the mechanics increasingly directed by artificial intelligence to serve corporate interests. Behind us lies centuries of experiments in social organization that provide the historical and material foundation of society. Some failed with communism’s collapse in 1991, while the capitalist…
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 those on the inside of the mission from…
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 of the US tax code changed,…
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 their Catalog Sites product using an Ember admin app and…
Denis Villeneuve, expert of visual storytelling, frequently employs the panning shot with an extensive use of the parallax effect to immerse viewers in his films, allowing them to experience a sense of place, scale, and depth like never before. He uses these teqniques most visibly in “Blade Runner 2049” (2017), “Enemy” (2013), and “Dune” (2021), highlighting how his use of the panning shot and…
Oscar the Grouch, a character from the popular children’s television show “Sesame Street,” can be seen as a modern-day embodiment of the Hellenistic philosophical tradition of Diogenes the Cynic. Like Diogenes, Oscar rejects the trappings of mainstream society and embraces a simpler, more ascetic lifestyle. In Oscar’s case, this means living in a trash can and rejecting the consumerist values of…
Throughout its history, a certain Japanese automaker has offered its customers stripped-back, homologation models ready for the track. This Subaru BRZ is a nod to those cars. In 2020 I wrote about the potential of the Subaru BRZ but its lack of a track-oriented trim level: If we want a truely lightweight track-oriented weapon like the 2002 WRX STI Spec-C Type RA, we’ll need to build it ourselves……
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 our work, and most…
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 going on sale at my publisher, █ Unredacted Word and other book sellers…
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) is an interactive film in which viewers are periodically asked to make decisions for the main character Stefan Butler, the decisions then result in different scenes, and paths through the film, resulting in a branching path to a variety of endings. Think “choose-your-own-adventure”, but in interactive video. Since television viewers are conditioned to be passive…
The Subaru BRZ RA Racing is a Japan-only edition of the BRZ that is designed to compete in the Japanese 8Beat 86/BRZ one-make spec racing series. It comes with a factory rollcage, 4-point Takata harnesses, air-oil cooler, no trunk interior trim, no radio or sound system, unpainted door handles, 16” steel wheels, and no underbody panels. The idea is you’d replace much of these parts yourself in…
2020 Elections are coming up, and beyond the Trump vs Biden theatrics, in Massachusets we have a ballot referendum on the Right to Repair . TL;DR: Vote ‘Yes’ on Question 1. Currently auto manufacturers must provide independent auto repair shops access to the same diagnostic and repair information about a vehicle as the manufacturers’ dealers have, but the current law doesn’t include telematics,…
Set the current user accounts profile photo (displayed on the login UI) using a local JPG image. dscl . delete "${HOME}" JPEGPhoto dscl . delete "${HOME}" Picture sudo dscl . create "${HOME}" Picture "${PWD}/avatar.jpg" Replace Time Machine with Volume on the menu bar defaults write com.apple.systemuiserver menuExtras -array \ "/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/AirPort.menu" \…
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 government…
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 SPD. The weapons and practices we use abroad always…
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 the police,…
This articles describes the difference between how component invocation differs when using curlies {{...}} , angle brackets <...> or an (...) s-expression in Ember templates. Ember has three methods for invoking components and helpers in a template, either of the three can be used to invoke both classic and modern glimmer components. The “classic” syntax in the form that uses curly braces…
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…
The Laughing Man 笑(わらい) い 男(おとこ) (warai otoko) is a fictional character in the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex . This lil’ project is an animated SVG using CSS transforms to rotate the text. The Laughing Man logo is an animated image of a smiling figure wearing a cap, with circling text quoting a line from Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye , which reads: “I thought what…
Released a tiny npm package today: @0xadada/random-emoji , a javascript random emoji function with zero dependencies. $ yarn add @0xadada/random-emoji $ node > const random = require('@0xadada/random-emoji'); > random() '😁' let a = random(); // defaults to 'emoticons' let b = random('emoticons'); let c = random('food'); let d = random('animals'); let e = random('expressions'); console.log(a, b,…
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…
I love bookmarklets, those small and elegant lines of javascript that you can bookmark and which do random functions in the browser when clicked. uri-editor.js is 1-line of HTML that’ll run a text editor in your browser. Drag the link into your bookmarks to save it as a quick browser-based editor tool for those moments you need a quick editor nearby. #!uri-editor.js
This talk was presented at the Boston Ember.js Community meetup at Salsify, Inc about a unique usecase for deploying FastBoot in order to do server-side rendering of Ember applications at scale. I review traditional, single-page web applications, I discuss server-side rendering by introducing Ember FastBoot. I showcase our architecture and provide a quick summary of how we use FastBoot in…
2019 has been a great year for Ember so far, so while my peers are focused on setting direction for the framework for the rest of 2019, I wanted to take stock of the existing addons ecosystem. In this article I’d like to present a list of Ember addons that I use in most of my projects. I’ve been using Ember for the last few years as my go–to framework for developing web applications, and many of…
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 “hinterlands…
A browser extension adds features to a web browser. They’re created using standard web technologies— JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Extensions can run JavaScript permanently in the background or can run on any page the user visits. Extensions can also specify popup windows and options pages. All modern browsers increasingly support a standard called the WebExtensions API. This API provides extensions…
★★★★★ Review of the manga “Opus” by Satoshi Kon. “Opus” is a brilliant postmodernist introspection of the challenges of writing, creativity, and the cliches of pop culture; delivered in a manga format. Author Satoshi Kon worked on this manga between 1995-1996 as it was serialized in “Comic Guy” manga magazine until the magazine closed abruptly in 1996. The final 3 chapters were never finished.…
I came across an interesting interview question, along the lines of ”How would you make this work?” add(2, 5); // multiple arguments style > 7 add(2)(5); // currying, a chained invocation style > 7 add(1,2)(3,4) // both > 10 I thought this was a very interesting question, so took some time to implement a multi-argument / curried function. Heres what I got: A solution to the multiple argument style…
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 wander not five minutes, no unstructured thought or…
This talk is a code walkthrough, implementing a date picker to showcase the power of ember-changeset and contextual components. Given at the Ember Boston Community meetup. Ember-changeset is an addon that provides an abstraction over Ember models such that only valid data will ever be set in a model. Contextual components are a set of conventions that allow a developer to build a component that…
A summary of my notes taken while reading Programming Phoenix . Ch.1 The layers of phoenix, the endpoint is where the HTTP connection contacts phoenix, from there it goes to the router which directs a request to the appropriate controller, passing through a series of pipelines. Pipelines chain functions together to handle tasks that span across multiple controllers, such as browser requests vs API…
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 of the first banner-ads on the web,…
system-font-i18n-css provides twelve variations for the Sans-serif family of system font. This font stack provides more consistent character typesetting across multiple languages and all modern operating systems. system-font-i18n-css is optimized to select the best system font on a per-character basis, based on the unicode range of that character. system-font-i18n-css provides twelve variations…
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 year. My task was to evaluate the…
ember-i18n-changeset-validations is an Ember addon providing internationalized validation messages to ember-changeset-validations . This addon adds the ability to translate ember-changeset-validation messages using the ember-i18n addon. Available on NPM at ember-i18n-changeset-validations and on github at ember-i18n-changeset-validations .
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 you to write about who you are, what you have experienced, and what you have…
I finally got around to converting my avatar from a raster graphic to a vector format. I wanted to be able to animate the polygons using JavaScript and CSS. Another great advantage of a vector format is how the format lends itself to generate a PNG or JPG in any size. Massaging the SVG File Format First things first, I took the source image and ran it through the delaunay triangulation - image…
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” to open ones mind and experience life from a new…
This is the first set mixed in nearly 12 years. Working in an open office space means many hours of my day are spent listening to music with headphones on, cranking away at software code. For me, this means listening to music that doesn’t distract from the task of writing and problem solving. This set was designed in the spirit of musicForProgramming.net . This set was heavily inspired by sci-fi…
In the style of Michael Chladek , I thought it would be useful to my future-self and others, if I wrote up a summary of installing Arch Linux on Apple MacBook hardware. Of course there are other guides out there, but this one is specific to the needs of someone looking for a minimalist, reproducible, secure, performance oriented installation of Arch Linux. In following this guide, I’ve made some…
Notes from the book: JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford Index JavaScript: The Good Parts Primitives Execution Flow Equality Loops / Enumeration Object Literals Arrays Delete Global Abatement Reference Reflection Functions Prototype Function Invocation Pattern Constructor Invocation pattern Closure Modules WTF JavaScript: The Good Parts A walkthrough many of the useful code examples…
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 of…
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 The mark of a master woodworker is his/her…
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 the context of a software company with…
The RASpec Impreza is a 2002 Subaru WRX “bugeye” chassis purchased in 2011 and fully restored from 2013 to 2015. The car was built by DENT Sport Garage and German Performance Service in Massachusetts. I built the RASpec Impreza as a cross-campaign race car capable of competing in time attack, time trial, hillclimb and wheel-to-wheel racing series up and down the East Coast. This car was originally…
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 attempt to provide an overview to the…
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 achieve salvation. You are your…
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 vendors. Goggle Chrome hides the feature…
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 the center of leisure. In fact, improved…