I just posted this on Twitter, but I may as well post it here as well:
Be skeptical when people try to explain why something that doesn’t appeal to them will appeal to other people they don’t really understand.
rc3.org
Strong opinions, weakly held
Month: August 2008 (page 1 of 3)
The Presidential campaign this year has me thinking about the topic of experience. The Democrats have nominated the relatively inexperienced Barack Obama for President, and now John McCain has selected the even more inexperienced Sarah Palin as his running mate. It has me thinking about how I evaluate experience.
The approach is the same regardless of whether I’m deciding who to vote for in an election or which programmers to bring in for interviews based on their responses to a Craigslist ad. I see experience as a relatively primitive criteria for making decisions.
If I am looking at two programmers, and the only thing I know about them is that one has ten years of experience and the other has only one year of experience, my initial assumption will be that the more experienced programmer will be more capable when they start the job. Nobody competent would stop their evaluation at that point. Generally speaking, I read the résumés, Google them to see if they blog and to see what kind of things they’ve posted to online forums, and if they seem promising, bring them in for an interview.
What I really want to see in a programmer is desire, curiosity, intelligence, talent, and knowledge, probably in that order. Experience doesn’t tell me a whole lot about any of those qualities, what it mainly demonstrates is that they haven’t given up.
The nice things about political campaigns is that the media exposure given to candidates enables us to judge them by criteria beyond their level of experience. We learn how they’ve used their time in office, what they did before they entered politics, how they respond to the pressure of the campaign, and their knowledge and insights into the issues of the day. (Or at least what their political sense tells them to say they think about the issues of the day.)
Right now people are talking about Sarah Palin’s level of experience because we don’t know a whole lot more about her. But by November 4, we’ll have seen enough of her to be able to make judgements based on other, better criteria. Sadly we’ll have to listen to people on all sides prattle on about experience as though it’s highly indicative of something the whole time.
Bruce Schneier flags a post about the ineffectiveness of red light cameras. Unfortunately, because cities find the cameras to be a useful source of revenue, I doubt we’ll be seeing them disappear anytime soon. I’ve seriously considered running for city council or county commissioner on the sole issue of getting rid of them.
Not only do I hate the general level of anxiety they cause for drivers at the intersections where they’re posted, but I also hate that they condition people to accept being constantly, passively observed for potential violations of the law.
Big companies and the government both suck, particularly when they work together. The insurance companies are evil:
The IIHS, funded by automobile insurance companies, is the leading advocate for red-light cameras since insurance companies can profit from red-light cameras by way of higher premiums due to increased crashes and citations.
And so are city governments:
In fact, six U.S. cities have been found guilty of shortening the yellow light cycles below what is allowed by law on intersections equipped with cameras meant to catch red-light runners. Those local governments have completely ignored the safety benefit of increasing the yellow light time and decided to install red-light cameras, shorten the yellow light duration, and collect the profits instead.
More people will die thanks to red light cameras, but surely that’s justified by increasing government revenue without “raising taxes” and more profit for the auto insurance industry.
Here are more details on the six cities that have been caught shortening yellow lights to raise red light camera revenue.
A couple of years ago, I posted a link to an article which said that the essence of wisdom is strong opinions, weakly held.
Tyler Cowen points to an article from the New York Times which says essentially the same thing in a different way. It explains that most people who claim to be undecided really aren’t and that more importantly, not recognizing your own subconscious leanings makes you more captive to your own biases.
Here’s the money quote:
Scientists have long known that subtle biases can skew evaluations of an issue or candidate in ways people are not aware of. But the new study, appearing Thursday in the journal Science, suggests that professed neutrality leaves people more vulnerable to their inherent biases than choosing sides early.
So take a position, even if you’re not completely convinced, and then carefully evaluate that position. You’re more likely to arrive at a better answer than if you ride the fence.
More evidence that email is dead: automatic replies sent to the forged from address on incoming spam like the one below.
I have been watching the Presidential campaign far too closely for months now, and I just wanted to call for a bit of a time out (not that anyone involved will heed it). People are obsessing over the daily polls, the content of ads, and which candidate seems to have the upper hand on a day to day basis.
This is fueled mainly by the maddening commentary from people whose paychecks depend on an audience obsessively checking their blogs, reading their columns, or watching their shows on a day to day basis. They depend on getting people’s emotions ratcheted up about the Presidential election, and they’re good at playing on those emotions.
At this point, either you have faith that your preferred candidate has a plan for victory that will work and that they’re smart enough to adapt that plan to changing circumstances, or you don’t. If you don’t, you may as well tune out for the next couple of months and then go vote when you get your turn.
What I don’t care for is the avalanche of recommended political messaging, proposed lines of attack, and the insistence that the campaigns somehow need to change their tenor. The thing is, the campaigns don’t care what I think, they don’t care what you think, and if I had to guess, I’d say they don’t care what Josh Marshall thinks, either.
I can’t help but think that all of the armchair quarterbacking is really just a way for pundits to give themselves the chance to say “I told you so” later on, and I’ve pretty much lost patience with it.
As an interested citizen, it’s not my job to guess at winning campaign strategies. If I care enough, I can give money, I can try to convince people to vote for my preferred candidate, or I can volunteer and make calls, knock on doors, and register voters. Or I can stand around and argue with people who are already going to vote for the same guy I’m going to vote for about why he’s going to lose if he doesn’t agree with me on the best way to get elected President.
The ultimate test for any candidate is whether or not they can devise a strategy that will lead them to victory. In November, we’ll see which of the two passes that test.
Is China blocking access to the iTunes Music Store because an album called Songs for Tibet was added? What’s interesting to me is that regardless of why China started blocking access to the store, everything that happens from this point will serve to confirm some people’s assumptions on the matter, and we’ll probably never really know for sure what happened or how it wound up playing out.
Tim O’Reilly’s warning against a Web where sites link mostly to their own content is worth paying attention to. He makes two suggestions to sites that link to their own content, but his second rule says it all for me:
Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide.
To shorten that even more, your links should point to the best resource in that context, whether it’s on your site or somebody else’s. As long as you’re following that rule, I think you’re on solid ground.
© 2024 rc3.org
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Ruby Gems as an attack vector
Tim Bray warns of the dangers of Ruby Gems as an attack vector. The risk is that basically anyone can create a Gem and make it available using the gem installer.
I’ll say that this is why real systems administrators detest the various packaging schemes that scripting languages offer. It’s generally a much better practice to manage libraries through the operating system’s centralized packaging system — Red Hat’s RPM, FreeBSD Ports, Debian/Ubuntu’s APT, and so forth. Administrators who want to go beyond the vendor-approved repositories for packages are free to do so, but packages from the vendor list can be installed with relative confidence.
Who knows what to expect from packages from CPAN, PEAR, RubyForge, and the like? (This also ties into my longer argument about why developers are the natural enemy of the systems administrator, but I’ll get into that some other time.)