Good Morning. Hello. How are You? #1332
milquetoast takes on Founder Mode, Elon and Brazil, RT. My backup system. 20 shots of muscle relaxers into your neck doesn't do as much as you think.
Hello, good morning, yabba dabba doo. Thursday. NC Covid data day. Is the bloom off the rose of this covid rebound yet? Let us check. Eh. Wastewater levels up in 3 of the 9 nearby sewage treatment areas, including the closest one in Carrboro. Not great, could be worse. Still riding the crest it looks like, maybe headed back down soonish? We shall see. Never got info on whether I can pay out-of-pocket (like everything else) for a second seasonal covid booster two months later so still unclear of my strategy here. I would like to be covered from, say, late this month through January before things wear off, which would mean one now, one in November, but… can I? Will anyone let me? Probably, right? A while man paying cash money can do almost anything.
We are listening to the Waterboys, This is the Sea, was a nostalgia re-listen in June, and now I am giving it a re-re-listen as I clear out the “To Investigate” playlist because it’s such a freakin good album. I remember Gordon (now Cindy) Sharp of Cindytalk told me back in 1996 a bunch of stories about Mike Scott, both of them being Scottish. But I did not care about the Waterboys then so I did not pay attention. I wish I did, I care now.
We have 54 minutes left in the “To Investigate” clear-out. Making good progress. Did about 20 hours in two days at this rate I should have cleared out next week, though of course things slow down. Good thing too, we have a giant pile of new vinyl to get through, lol, did you think I was actually going to stop? Nope. I cannot.
Speaking of the “To Investigate” playlist, I found a view in Spotify where you can see how many followers all of your playlists have. Decent numbers for the “To Investigate,” which is the one were I put everything I want to check out (currently 803). Also decent numbers for “All the Good,” which is 7,000+ songs that have meant something to me in life, and “Starred,” which is the decent tracks from this year. Feel free to subscribe to any of them.
Waterboys are over, now we are listening to Health, the fantastic newish goth industrial metal band man they really are great.
Let us move on to Rick’s hot takes on the tech-adjacent hot topics of the week. These are listed here because I am not interested in pithy one-liners on the socials, that is a fool’s errand of a craft. Yet I am still a human who succumbs to this problem we all have where we feel like we need to comment on every current topic. Actually we don’t all have this problem, obviously we don’t all have this problem, but those of us who do have this problem love to pretend everyone has it because it makes us feel better. I’m usually pretty good about just skipping these topics, because it’s my blog and i can cry if i want to and don’t let anyone else force you into writing about a thing you don’t want to, maaan. But i guess I want to.
Silicon Valley VC Paul “Oftenwrong Soong” Graham1 wrote an essay called “Founder Mode.” It has a mostly uncontroversial premise, explored by everyone from De Gorney and Von Grim to Herbert Simon to Laurence Peter to Douglas Adams that companies get too bureaucratic and the consultants start to weigh them down as they get bigger. This is uncontroversial and conventional wisdom, but he put the thing through some sort of GPT I think to pretend it is a new and interesting thought, it was weird. Just larded the thing up with cringe, and got six different billionaires to read drafts of the thing before putting it out. This is the part that stuns me most. Imagine if I needed six people to read a GMHHAY before putting it out, heavens to betsy. And mentioning this at the bottom of the piece is like saying “I don’t know! I am scared to have a thought.” Anyway, people are very up-in-arms about the thing, I am not sure why. Maybe because the whole thing is framed around a Brian Chesky Story. (We’re talking Brian Chesky here, CEO of AirBnb, not to be confused with Ben Chasny, from Six Organs of Admittance, on tour now.) That part is confusing because apparently, at some point, Brian took drastic steps to combat the tyranny of consultants and the Peter Principle and bureaucracy (see! this phenomenon already had names) and they are calling it “founder mode.” I mean Tolkein gave things like six different names so why not Silicon Valley I guess (fun fact, Doriath and Menegroth? Basically the same thing). But I am confused about exactly when he did this Founder Mode thing, cuz… AirBnb sucks now? And sucks more than it used to? So, like… is he still working on it? Unclear. Anyway the tldr is it was a mediocre essay, uncontroversial insight but the craft of which was appalling, but boy are people mad about it.
The Russian Government paid a bunch of shitty American vloggers like Tim Pool a shit ton of money to make fascist, anti-american content. Like… $100k an episode. The DOJ is pressing charges. And the vloggers are all like “what? why I never. Heavens to betsy.” The DOJ does not accuse them of knowing, so they are all, like, saying “I didn’t know and I had full editorial control,” but of course.. you either had full editorial control, in which case you did not make videos for RT (which you did), or you did not have full editorial control, in which case.. maybe you probably knew? All kinda sad. So, yet again, another thing where Russia was interfering in our elections turned out to be true and all those wise old people who told people that it was paranoia to say Putin was doing all that meddling turned out to be wrong again. Pee tape is gonna be real, just you watch. Before I die, I want two truths to finally be confirmed: That the pee tape was real and that MTG was the DC bomber. Do I believe both of these things? Ehhh… yes I guess I do! We all have to have nutso conspiracy theories to hold on to, right? But, man. If and when either turns out to be proven, I will not be shocked.
Elon and the country of Brazil are fighting and it is all very weird. Right wing Indian government asks Elon to ban an account and he bends over backwards, yes massa. Liberal government of Brazil asks him to ban an account and he ignores them, until they threaten him with contempt of court and to arrest their Brazillian representative. So then he pulls all his employees out of Brazil. So then they shut down Twitter in Brazil because he has no representative there. Even “even-keeled” Silicon Valley pundits are both-sidesing this a bit. Acknowledging Elon is acting like a six-year-old and fighting a losing fight, but saying shit like “this is encouraging repressive governments throughout the world.” Well, sure, I suppose it might be a little bit but also, every Internet company in the world has to have a representative in the EU, and it is the law, and if I was like “fuck you and your laws” and the EU shut my company down, well I sure would not be surprised. Because that is their law? There is a part where the judge also ordered Apple and Google to take it out of the App Store. People seem pissed about this but.. it strikes me as a logical extension. And then there is the kinda crazy part where the judge said it would be illegal for your average citizen to download a VPN to circumvent the ban. I do not like that part I think it should be legal for people to use VPNs. Though I guess technically it’s still legal to use a VPN just not do certain things and that’s the case here too I suppose. Can’t use my VPN to hire a hitman or buy E. But yeah, that part’s probably a bridge too far. But boy is it all hilarious.
I think Elon is basically stumbling toward an imaginary finish line where he kind of thinks if he can just make it to the election everything will be okay. He is throwing everything he has into getting Elon elected because he sees that the end is in sight. He knows that another four years of dems will lead to a host of bad things for him: a robust DOJ investigation into his rampant securites fraud at Tesla. The bolstering of SpaceX competition and (maybe! one can dream!) a space litter law ( just a little pet peeve of mine you can ignore it for now). Twitter is going to die, he’s down $24 billion, Delaware is going to negate his pay package again you just watch. The thing is, though, he is wrong on a lot of levels. Donald will help him, maybe, in the smallest ways possible: getting the DOJ off his back. But Trump won’t stick his neck out for Elon if Trump wins. And it won’t get Delaware and Norway of his back. Or the Chonese cheap-ass hybrid tech. He is fucked, he knows it, so he’s latching on to the election as his salvation cuz what else does he have? But a) Trump is probably going to lose and b) dude does not have a super great history of rewarding sycophants.
Ugh that was all so boring sorry. Important local news: the goth lady at the pharmacy is now blonde and was wearing a pink Barbie sweatshirt. Emma swears that this does not mean she is no longer goth, that this is rational goth behavior in 2024 but, man, I dunno.
Got my neck shots yesterday. Man that doctor’s office is run like clockwork. Appointment was at 11:30, they tell you to get there at 11, I was out at 11:20. A+, no complaints. Except you would think 20 injections of muscle relaxers into your neck would do more, but.. nope. So far don’t really feel it. Like almost every pain treatment I get, it’s probably mostly a placebo. Everything feels like MAYBE it is helping a smidge. Nothing is transformative.
My god, imagine a transformative pain reliever that isn’t an opiate. I feel like I read somewhere that one is on the horizon. That could literally change the world.
A reader asked me about my backup process for my photos. You will recall that I have a fantastic photo sorting method that is the best photo sorting method, fight me. But what, the reader asks quite reasonably, about the backups. Deep breath, here goes.
All the photos are stored on my local computer. They are backed up via Time Machine to a NAS in my closet. It is a QNAP. It has 8 drives in it, also does my deep storage and my Plex.
Every night, the entire QNAP — all 128 or so Terrabytes — is backed up to the cloud. I use the QNAP’s internal backup software, and I back everything up to Backblaze B2. I should probably use Amazon Glacier instead, because it is a bit cheaper but a) there seemed to be a bug in QNAP’s Glacier implementation when I set all this up and b) I have grown to like Backblaze’s ease-of-file-retrieval, because I have needed to use it a few times. I have even made use, once, of Backblaze’s service of sending me hard drives with all my shit on it, so I don’t have to spend weeks re-downloaded everything from the internet.
It took forever to make the first backup, but every night it only backs up the changed documents, so that is pretty quick. It’s done in the morning every morning. I neurotically check my QNAP for a minute or so as part of my morning chores, confirming a) no apps need updating, b) there’s no firmware update and c) the Backblaze backup sync happened.
For this Backblaze service I now pay a little over $300 a month. It used to be more like $100, but has grown due to inflation of both file storage and price.
I used to manually remove the drives from my QNAP once a quarter and store them in a storage unit. This ended up costing more than Backblaze. A quarter of Backblze is $900. Eight new 16 TB drives is like $2,500.
What I need to do now is actually run fiber between my houses and buy another QNAP over there and then set my sync to just backup between the two houses. I figure it’s unlikely they’ll both burn down or get robbed. I mean, it’s not quite as safe, but it is safe enough for me, I think. But this whole setup will set me back something like $7k so.. I keep stalling. Even though the thing will pay for itself in about two years. What can I say I have never claimed to be rational. But I swear it will happen one day.
I put the above photo on Instagram, but my Instagram is locked, so here it is for you. Jane made that in, like, 60 seconds. It was her second cover to her story book because she messed up the first one and she was angry. The protagonist in her story is unlucky because her friend was sick and she couldn’t go to the playground with her. I did not point out that maybe the sick friend was actually more unlucky though I suppose that would have been good parenting. Instead I tried to teach her about taxes and indeterminate pronouns at daddy school. Mind you, she asked for both these topics but, boy, then the time came? Vastly preferred jumping around on the bed like a lunatic. Daddy bedtime mostly a catastrophe again, took Emma like two hours to calm her down and get her to sleep. Our working theory now is she loves Daddy Bedtime so much that she gets all excited and can’t sleep, which is a lovely theory for my ego, but not my patience.
We will manage, though, we will manage. All this is a phase. Everything is a phase. Ommmm…
All right Justa Mix today, some of these bands you’ve been seeing a lot of but what do you want from me, I go through phases like the next guy. Forgot about this “new” Velocity Girl song from this summer, it is great. Notice the great title transition from the Waterboys to Lou Reed. New Nick Cave still growing on me wish the vinyl would hurry up and arrive I am mostly over his anti-woke tendencies now he seems to have slightly shifted course on such things. That Have a Nice Life song title really speaks to my current life situation.
Until tomorrow, new Mercury Rev day, very exciting.
This is such a good nickname burn, all the layers of Oftenwrong being applied to Noonien Soong. He was wrong! AI was impossible. Data is a counterpoint to that but also Data’s twin merged with a fuckin alien planet-eating megastructure and directed it to commit a holocaust so you could really argue that Data is just luck and Noonien was actually Oftenwrong, even if in the show they kind of imply the name was, ultimately unfair.