Originally posted on 2021-05-08 at Medium

#articles

Photo by Laurent Grattepanche on Unsplash

What is up folks? Well, that’s a ridiculously simple answer this week, the great big rocket hurling down into earth and disintegrating in the process. Wait, you didn’t know? So, apparently a launch uhhh…bugged out a bit and 30 ton fuel tank accidentally got to low earth orbit and it’s coming back down soon. Current projections show it will probably land late on Sunday (tomorrow). It makes for fun content such as “Good morning, we have some rocket falling to earth updates”

Once it has reentered atmosphere, the fuel tank will mark the second biggest crash and burn of May, after Basecamp, earlier this month. It has been a wild ride, and I am not equipped to fully describe the situation, so please have this timeline Verge article instead. Special mention to Casey Newton’s incredible investigative work on getting the real story (which was quite different than what the announcements originally painted). On a personal note, Jason and DHH, the Basecamp founders had been people I looked up to for quite a while. To see them so spectacularly mess this up was kind of otherworldly.

Some highlights:

  • They kept a list with funny sounding customer names for over 10 years. Notably, their email product, Hey, is centered on privacy 👀
  • During an all hands Jason was asked to condemn white supremacy, only to respond “I’m not here to share my personal views on anything”. I dunno dude, but in 2021, it feels like “condemning white supremacy” should really be your company view by this point
  • Jason and DHH, both middle-aged white males, killed the company’s young grassroots D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) initiative, then appointed themselves as overseers of among others, “moral quandaries”. It sounds like a pretty immoral thing to do, so not sure they’re starting on the right foot there.
  • More than 30% of the org has left since the start of this debacle, including the heads of design and marketing (honestly, if I was tasked with marketing after this, I’d leave too)
  • There was spinoff conspiracy theory that this was an intentional self-goal just to prepare for an upcoming event which is… as shaky as it sounds tbh.

Okay, so let’s start with the normal stuff, shall we?

It’s another day in a world where a lot of programs don’t support UTF-8. As someone who had to learn how to navigate multiple different bugs in my flight schedules or passport applications because my last name had the crime of having a dash in it… fix yo shit. I’m not infallible either, in 2020 we discovered that one of our production applications was failing to render Czech city names, so there’s no shame in it. Fix yo shit.

A new proposed bill may allow companies in Nevada to create local governments and take a wild, wild guess which multi-billionaire dogecoin enthusiast has already demonstrated interest. Honestly, I can see him (Elon) grabbing the entire world of Bioshock Infinite and rolling with it as a functional government.

If you’re not familiar with “WeRateDogs” it’s a twitter account reposting pictures of dogs and assigning grades ranging from 10/10 to 20/10 or more. But why are they featured here? Well, they just handed out their first 0/10…

Signal took out attack ads on Facebook, wait scratch that, Signal got Facebook to take out attacks adds on itself? You know what, after they self-banned their own news page two months ago, I’m somehow not so surprised. So, what happened here is that Signal used Facebook’s ad system to create ultra-targeted ads that expose just how much they know about you. Facebook was not a fan of the idea so they banned the ads, because Facebook is in a banning mood lately, though Facebook was definitely not in a banning mood for the Myanmar military before they executed a full fledged genocide and only took action on March 1st. Interestingly, while the oversight board chose to uphold the ban on Trump (yay!) they did return the responsibility for the future decision back into Facebook, which was exactly what the company was trying to avoid, hoping to maintain its large share in boomer conservative segments as newer competitors such as TikTok seem to appeal more to “kids these days”.

Kids these days, right? They haven’t yet seen things you people wouldn’t believe, they’re asking why someone 3d printed the save button, and they don’t even know about Napster. What was Napster? Well, the grandfather of music piracy of course! Napster was followed by Limewire, known most famously for its abundance of viruses. Limewire was followed by ThePirateBay and Rapidshare (even though I’m sure the RapidShare legal team will strongly contest that), then eventually people figured out that the average listener is not against paying, but against overpaying and Spotify took over.

So stay a while, and listen

But what did Napster in? There was a public campaign against this primarily in the US led by the popular band Metallica that contributed largely to the legal turmoil that Napster found itself into and gave rise to the “you wouldn’t download a car” ads. The various copyright consortia, funded primarily by big music and movie production companies soon found themselves in open ground on the internet fight which evolved — TPB was proven impossible to take down due to an abundance of legal and technological defenses. So they turned to more legislation, passing the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) in the process, which has been dubbed (by me, thanks for asking) as a “copyright handgun”. The way it basically works, is you can send a DMCA takedown note to a website if they are hosting content that you have the legal copyrights to. Companies automated this process massively and automated takedown notes are issued by the thousands per minute. Since this process was so automated and the legal costs were generally high, the default response for most systems, such as YouTube was to take down the offending content with very little oversight. Fiascos such as the following ensued.

The Family Guy reverse takedown_
This week’s episode of Family Guy included a clip from 1980s Nintendo video game Double Dribble showing a glitch to get a free 3-point goal. Fox obtained the clip from YouTube where it had been sitting since it was first uploaded in 2009. Shortly after, Fox told YouTube the game footage infringed its copyrights. YouTube took it down._

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo

The Starmen
Real astronaut Chris Hadfield published to YouTube a cover of David Bowie “Space Oddity” shot in actual space. It’s massively cool, watch it. Sony hit his video with a DMCA and it was unpublished. David Bowie publicly requested a reversal of this decision, which happened just a few months before he passed away.

YouTube takes down your channel at 3 strikes, no questions asked. For some folks, that was their entire career gone in a couple of automated HTTP requests. Content creators evolved to prevent automated takedown strikes in realtime, since especially streamers may at any given moment, I dunno, maybe listen to music? In response, copyright free channels such as Monstercat and later everybody’s favourite LoFi beats girl skyrocketed as people searched for something they could listen to without getting the bot police on their doorstep. Twitch, a leading streaming platform was bought over by Amazon and the DMCA bots only intensified.

Which brings us to February 20, 2021

https://twitter.com/Slasher/status/1362901765029527553

But on the bright side, somebody created the classic game of snake in a new way, so there’s that I guess, right?

In the last newsletter, we started off with the “Government censors traffic to our website”. That government was Russia. Looks like they’re following that up with a ban to all twitter links, which accidentally instead banned everything that contained “t.co” instead. We get it, regex is hard even if you’re an authoritarian-regime-serving software developer. You can even count on StackOverflow… to have had an outage due to a bad regex

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Speaking of idiots in positions of authority btw, “CEO gets canned for taking LSD at work” has everything you need.

Btw, for all you thirsty code folks, here’s a nice command (for the life of me, I can’t find where I got it from :/ ) to drop into your ~/.gitconfig (or wherever that place is in Windows). It tells you about all the branches you were recently working on in a repo. You can use it like git wip

[alias]
wip = for-each-ref –sort=’authordate:iso8601’ –format=’ %(color:green)%(authordate:relative)%09%(color:white)%(refname:short)’ refs/heads

Okay I love this, and I know a few readers of this letter are ML enthusiasts which makes me love it even more.

https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1367575109305794563

But alas, machine learning teens are not all there is. I know there are some of you with a deep affection for low-level languages, so at the end of all this, I’m going to leave you with a beautiful file. Here’s a short explanation of what those codes are. It was written by a Google engineer for whom, I read a few things and was quite impressed, then I read more things and was quite depressed (2020 in a nutshell), because apparently she made a petition to install the Google CEO as president of the US of A. Now that Nevada bill probably hits different, eh?

Keep the mystery alive, kids