Who Needs a Smart Phone?

Posted on 2021-08-31 by jcs

As long as I’m obsessing about smart phones and the choice between Android and iPhone, we might as well consider the New Luddite option: no cell phones. Over at diaspora*, Doc Edward Morbius has a post that argues that smart phones are foolish and not nearly as useful as the old way. The “old way” is a land line, a Rolodex, a paper journal/appointment book, a calculator, and, of course, scratch paper.

The old way was better, Morbius says, because those devices weren’t integrated and you could use more than one of them at the same time. If you wanted to look up an address in your Rolodex while on the phone, it was no trouble because they were separate devices. Even putting aside for a moment that I can still do that with my iPhone, the argument is beyond silly. Yes, a smart phone implies a slightly different workflow but it’s generally a better workflow and anyone who denies that is just being willfully obtuse.

People who make these arguments always do the same thing: they ignore that you have all the world’s information and all your personal data instantly available—not to mention a phone that’s associated uniquely with you—and concentrate instead on some minor detail like “yes, but I can’t use my calculator as easily while I’m on the phone.” It is, really, an 8-year-old’s argument.

Going off the grid by ditching your phone is more than an inconvenience. It’s simply not feasible for anyone who wants to remain a part of society. It’s true you probably don’t need one down on the commune, though.

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Gain-Of-Function Research

Posted on 2021-08-30 by jcs

It’s been over a year and we still don’t know the origins of COVID-19. Barring the leaking or release of Chinese records, we likely never will. Consensus has converged on one thing, though. Just about everybody now admits—despite earlier, strenuous, and probably disingenuous denials of the possibility—that it’s at least as likely that the pandemic resulted from a lab leak as it is that it resulted from the virus jumping between species naturally. Many believe that Occam’s Razor points strongly at the lab leak as being more likely but it’s hard for those of us who aren’t virologists to make a scientifically informed judgment.

I do think it’s reasonable, though, for the man-on-the-street to have an opinion on a related question: Should we doing gain-of-function research in the first place? It’s a matter of considerable controvery even in the scientific community. There are three salient facts:

  1. The cost of a lab accident in human lives could be huge or even existential.
  2. Lab accidents are frighteningly common.
  3. As far as I can see, no one can point at any concrete advantages that have accrued from the research.

To the extent that those three statements reasonably reflect reality, it’s hard to reach any conclusion other than that such research should be ended immediately. To be sure, that would be asking those who do such research to give up their research programs and maybe even their life’s work but if the choice is between that and another pandemic like COVID-19, it’s an easy choice.

Sadly, far from suspending or even slowing down such research while we examine the risks and benefits, the US federal government under the leadership of Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins has removed some of the safeguards previously put in place and are proceeding apace. When Collins was asked why he removed safeguards he replied that he was “not able to fully reconstruct” the details. That sounds like political speak to me.

On a question like this, I’m not willing to accept “trust the experts.” If you can’t spell out why this research isn’t an existential threat then you should stop doing it. Full stop.

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The Index

Posted on 2021-08-29 by jcs

What do you think about book indices? Do you think about book indices? If you’re like most people, the first question doesn’t make much sense and the answer to the second is something like “Hardly ever.” The book index is so ubiquitous that we hardly notice it even if we occasionally use one.

It wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, the notion of a book index was so controversial that people wrote diatribes against them, and like the New Luddites of today, predicted that people would stop reading books altogether preferring to just scan the index to see what the book was about.

Having prepared the index for two books, I can tell you that making it is one of the hardest parts of getting a book ready for publication. No one likes doing it but if you’re writing a non-fiction book, you pretty much have to. You would think that you could just mark a word as an index item as you write the manuscript and you can but no one does, probably because it forces your mind away from the content.

Over at Prospect Magazine, Michael Delgado has an interesting article on the history of the index and the controversies surrounding it. The article is sort of a review of Dennis Duncan’s new book, Index, A History of the. I haven’t read the book but the title alone makes it enticing.

Most of us probably don’t have sufficient interest in things like book indices to read a whole book about them but Delgado’s article is interesting and short enough to make it a worthwhile read.

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Why Are People Apple Users?

Posted on 2021-08-28 by jcs

This whole contretemps with Apple has me pondering my computing future. I’m not ready to man the lifeboats yet but it does seem prudent to check them for seaworthiness. My ruminations got me to wondering why Apple has such a loyal user base. What is it about it that makes the Apple product line so sticky? I’m one of those loyal customers and have been since 2008. This post is me thinking out loud—as it were—about why I am such a loyal customer.

One of the things I always say I like about the Apple ecosystem is the integration. My iPhone, iPad, and Macs all talk to each other and often something I’ve started on one device can be continued on another. All my emails and iMessages are always available on all the devices and I can even share the clipboards between them. If I take a photo with one device, it’s instantly available on the others.

That kind of integration is harder in the Linux world because the same vendor doesn’t control the whole stack. Even so, there is integration in the Linux ecosystem. I’m sure there’s integration comparable to Apple’s in the Microsoft world but that’s a nonstarter for me.

Then there’s the hardware. The iPhone and the Macs are top-of-the-line but devices from other venders are, cum devices, comparable. The situation with tablets is a bit different. No fair analysis, I think, can conclude anything other than that the iPad blows its competitors away. If you’re going to have a tablet, you probably want it to be an iPad. Of course, there’s no reason you can’t have an Android phone and Linux PC and still use an iPad. I use my iPad mostly for reading Amazon ebooks, reading email, and doing crossword puzzles so my use doesn’t depend on my using other Apple devices. And, of course, I could just as well read those books on a Kindle reader and find some other application for crosswords if I wanted to rid myself of all things Apple.

So far we have Apple’s superior integration and the iPad but is that enough to account for their stickiness? I don’t think so. The real discriminator, I believe, is privacy. I would hate to give up my iPhone for an Android but the reason for that is privacy. Android users are having their every action surveilled while, until now, iPhone users could be pretty sure that wasn’t happening to them.

Every time I think about moving back to Linux and an Android phone, it’s privacy that gives me pause. What if there are a lot of other folks out there with similar views? If Apple decides that, “You know what? We don’t really care about our users’ privacy after all” what reason would all those people have to stick with Apple? Apple, of course, insists that’s not the case but their demurrals seem weak and disingenuous. If fighting CSAM on the backs of their users ends up costing them their premier position they’ll have no one to blame but themselves. But at least they can tell all their fellow cocktail partiers that they were virtuous.

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Vim vs. Emacs (and a Little Bit of ED)

Posted on 2021-08-27 by jcs

If you’ve been around Irreal for a while, you know that I don’t usually partake in the Editor Wars except in a humorous way, mostly in Red Meat Friday posts such as this one. Over at Kindness City there’s a post that considers the author’s view and use of Emacs, Vim, and ED. The reason that I’m writing about it is that the author uses all three and his post is about when and why he uses each one.

The author usually fires up Vim when he’s on a foreign host because you can be sure it’s going to be installed. Similarly, he uses ED for scripting editing functions on a foreign host. He particularly likes using Vim and Tmux for remote pair programming. That’s something I can’t relate to because I consider “pair programming” something that happens to particularly evil programmers when they go to Hell but I’m aware that that may be a minority view so if you like such things, be sure to check out the post.

On his local machine, he’s strictly an Emacs user and, in fact, embraces the “everything in Emacs” worldview. As much as I hate mixing editors, this approach makes sense to me—other than the pair programming stuff, of course. I’d first try to use Tramp but if that didn’t work out I’d fire up Vim. My Vim-fu is extremely atrophied but I can still get around in an emergency. I’ve even fallen back to ED when really stuck. Still, I’ve found I’m no longer comfortable wrangling text unless I’m doing it in Emacs.

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Journaling with Org-roam

Posted on 2021-08-26 by jcs

David Wilson over at System Crafters has the third video up in his series on Org-roam. I’ve said before, I’ve found his series more useful than any other introduction to Org-roam that I’ve seen.

This episode focuses on the journaling functions built into Org-roam. Since Org-roam is an implementation of a Zettelkasten, it might seem weird tack on a journal but when you think about it, a journal fits nicely into the Zettelkasten paradigm and, of course, the journal entries can be linked to and from “normal” entries.

There’s a separate Org-roam note for each day’s journal entries. The workflow is that the first note of the day creates a new note and subsequent entries for the day add headings to that note. That makes it easy to navigate to journal entries by date. There are convenient functions to go to today’s, yesterday’s, and tomorrow’s entries as well as an particular date, of course.

Adding journal entries is handled via a capture template just as other notes are. There’s a default template that you can modify but you can also add templates if you have varied needs.

If you already have a journal, you may not want to retrofit it into the Org-roam journal but if you’re just starting one, this is an excellent way. You don’t, of course, have to link your journal entries to other Org-roam notes so you can keep them separate if you like but when it makes sense to link to a journal entry or to link to a regular entry from a journal entry, it’s easy to do.

Take a look at the video to get all the details. The video is 16 minutes, 49 seconds long so you’ll probably have to schedule it but it’s easy to fit in.

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Introduction to Dired

Posted on 2021-08-25 by jcs

Ashok Khanna has a quick introduction to the basics of Dired. It’s not even a précis of the Dired section of the Emacs manual and doesn’t mention the essential Wdired mode but it is a useful post to get you started.

One interesting thing that I learned from it is that Dired is the original visual file manager. I always supposed that the idea was taken from existing programs and ported into Emacs but Khanna says it was the first and dates from 1974.

Dired, of course, is famously featureful and has many ways of operating on files and directories. As I’ve said before, even though I’m an old-timely command line guy, I mostly use Dired for my file operations. It’s just easier and faster and, of course, I don’t have to fire up a terminal app or leave Emacs to get the job done. I can even use Ctrl+x Ctrl+j to open a Dired session with the point positioned at the current file. If you’re an “everything in Emacs” person—or want to be—you really need to get comfortable using Dired. You’ll be surprised how much easier it makes your life.

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Why The Government Should Not Be Trusted With A Backdoor

Posted on 2021-08-24 by jcs

As you all know, Apple is building spyware into iOS 15. This is ostensibly in service of fighting child pornography but will, you can be sure, be expanded to detect other illegal activities and finally wrong think™. Apple, of course, ensures us this won’t happen but, really, they won’t have any choice.

Governments have long been demanding a backdoor into Apple’s encryption, and the US even got a court order in 2016 demanding that Apple build one. Back then, Apple (successfully) argued that no such capability existed and that building one was a significant and costly undertaking with long term maintenance and support obligations. Now, of course, the machinery is already in place and it’s hard to see what arguments Apple could bring to bear against such a court order: certainly not that they’re committed to protecting their users’ privacy.

Apple aside, this brings up another, related issue: Can the government—any government—be trusted with such a backdoor? One needn’t descend into paranoid musings about rogue agents selling secret keys to malefactors. We can, instead, depend on Hanlon’s Razor. To wit: the government exposed its watchlist to an unprotected server on the internet. If this was the only example of such fecklessness we could shake our heads bemusedly and assure ourselves that those responsible would be put in charge of cleaning the bathrooms in the North Dakota FBI field office. But of course this sort of thing happens all the time and nothing at all will happen to those responsible for the disclosure.

What reason is there to suppose that these clowns would do any better in protecting a backdoor key? State and criminal actors would be working full time to get access and wouldn’t depend on someone leaving it exposed on an unprotected server. Sooner or later someone would be careless and the secret would be out. If the key were obtained by criminal elements, our smart phones would instantly become useless for banking or any other type of sensitive activities. If the FBI or any other government agency wants to hold a master key to our phones, they better have shown themselves capable of safeguarding that key. They better have shown themselves worthy of our trust. Sadly, they’ve shown just the opposite.

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Another Step for Open Access in the UK

Posted on 2021-08-23 by jcs

The UK is already a leader in achieving open access for journal articles but have recently taken a further step. The UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a major funder of UK research, has announced that starting in April 2022, researchers receiving support from their £8 billion annual fund will be required to make copies of their papers publicly available immediately upon publication and that they be published under a Creative Commons copyright.

The UKRI made the common sensible argument that “publicly funded research should be available for public use by the taxpayer.” Many of us here in the US have been making this argument for years. Why should the public be forced to pay for the research and then to pay again to see the results?

Academic publishers are, of course, up in arms about the changes. They say that the changes will confuse researchers, threaten academic freedom, and undermine open access. You needn’t be a cynic to suspect that what they really mean is that the changes will undermine their business model and cost them money.

The publishers feel they have a right to their rent because they’ve always had it but it’s harder and harder to make a case for their role in the process. Of course, as I’ve also said many times, universities and researchers also own part of the blame because their rewards systems require publishing in “top notch journals.” It’s not hard to imagine a more modern system based on a public repository for the papers funded and run by a consortium of universities and other research institutions. Doubtless, some arrangements would have to be made for peer review—which has its own problems—but, again, this is a solvable problem. The real difficulty is that universities are among the most conservative of organizations when it comes to changing the way they operate.

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The Most Useful Emacs Operations

Posted on 2021-08-22 by jcs

The other day it popped into my mind to wonder what the most useful Emacs editing functions are. Various people—like Xah Lee—have taken actual measurements of the most used functions. The most often used function is, of course, self-insert-command, which runs every time you type a displayable character into the buffer. You can read Lee’s excellent analysis at the link.

My question is slightly different and I’m not being nearly as scientific. Rather, this is a subjective opinion on what I think the most useful functions are. Emacs, of course, has many whizzbang functions that do amazing things and that’s before we start considering things like Magit and Org. Still, I think it’s the humble navigation commands that are most useful.

Whatever you’re using Emacs for, it’s going to involve entering and editing text. Unless you’re the mythical keyboard maestro who never makes a typo and, additionally, never revises your text, you’re going to need to move around the buffer to fix typos and revise your content.

Being able to move around quickly and easily is a vital feature of any editor. Emacs makes it easy and fast to move around without using the arrow keys or mouse. In addition to the standard movement functions, I use avy and jump-char to quickly place the cursor where I need it without depending on the standard cursor movement functions such as forward-char and its brethren. As a class, these are the functions I use the most. If your experience is different, leave a comment.

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