There is an excellent folk horror documentary called Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. In the documentary, several folk historians, writers, critics, and even occultists talk about the folk horror genre, it's influence, and it's importance in modern culture.
We all build our own mythologies, and those mythologies are based on past experiences that shape not just what we want the future to be, but also what we want the past to be.
In late 2017, I came up with a domain name off the top of my head - botsandbeer.com. I was heavily into chatbot development... and more than a little into the craft beer scene.
The aforementioned Tango Song was something I purchased on a whim. My physical Crowley collection is light, and I normally don't indulge in the ultra-obscure items. I have been a little intrigued of Crowley from a literary perspective—or at least his literary ambitions.
Aleister Crowley was never as influential on me as he was on some people. Although I had Magick Book IV, I think I was 5 years younger than when most—obsessed by British punk/post-punk—poured over his volumes of work.
Although I won't say that I collect vinyl records, I can certainly tell you that my vinyl record collection has grown over the course of the last 12-18 months. I never had a record player in my youth, but my father and uncle both did—with an enormous collection of records.
How many New Year's resolutions have been broken over the course of several decades? I'm guilty of this all the time. Although I've made steady improvements year over year in my life, the hard defined New Year's resolution is always something that we approach as a binary in terms of success or failure.
When Apple TV+ released the first season of Foundation, I realized that I hadn't read Isaac Asimov's Foundation series at all—only being familiar with his robot tales.
I never really paid much attention to who Mitch Horowitz was until Douglas Rushkoff had him on a live special on Team Human. He seemed reasonably intelligent and had a good grasp on the occult.
Yesterday I took my black gi from Kajukenbo and all my Kaj and Aikido belts and put them in the trash can. I studied Aikido in my 20's and did quite well at it until my progress was derailed by a relationship.
When I first dove into the Internet I had started an ecommerce site during a time when you had to type "online bookstore" into Altavista in order to find Amazon on the web. People often laugh when I recollect being 16-17 years old and mailing cash to Amazon for books. For the first few years I even received free Christmas gifts from them for being a frequent shopper.
I mentioned previously that I pulled over a number of Codepunk and Apotheosis articles under hckr fyi to mostly represent a best of, and a consolidation of various writing projects over the decades. I was in the process of doing the same thing for Key 23 when I realized... there really wasn't much to bring over.
I promised myself that this new blog would not tetter off into the past with immersive odes to nostalgia. That is still the case; however, I do feel the need to close the book on a number of projects, and in doing so, consolidate some of those projects under the current domain name.
Coil's earlier work is harsh, masculine, and profound—a band interested in only making music for themselves, but there was always a hint of something more esoteric. This became more pronounced with the release of Love's Secret Domain and by the time the band entered their Moon Musick phase, that hint was a much fuller halucinatory experience.
As I start writing this, it's January 2nd, 2024. It will likely be published a few days later. The year has just turned over to a new number and tomorrow (January 3rd) will represent my 45th revolution around the sun.
One area that is a large focus for me in my work life has been DevOps automations—specifically integrating DevOps with older, legacy and potentially monolithic solutions.
Two articles that I came across a week ago (that I'm not going to link to)... one referenced going inside a Microsoft sprint to add ChatGPT to all Microsoft 365 products and another talked about how the Meta (Facebook) CTO said that he and Mark Zuckerberg were primarily working on artificial intelligence (AI) products.
The TLDR Newsletter linked to a podcast transcript today about XML versus JSON. The podcast episode was an interview with Douglas Crockford, so you can imagine what side he fell on.
There is nothing on the Internet anymore... which sounds weird because there is more stuff on the Internet than ever before.
There are people that hate J.K. Rowling. I'm not going to get into the debate. She wrote _Harry Potter_, made a lot of money, and became famous. Famous people are scrutinized for every word and action. But Rowling is also not a civil rights activist nor a doctor.
I used to blog consistently. At peak, I was probably producing one high quality blog post a week on technology. I also co-produced one podcast and completely handled another.
Updated the review page to include book reviews for William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy.
At the end of Neuromancer, the Wintermute artificial intelligence (with the help of Henry Case and Molly Millions) broke down the firewall preventing Wintermute from reaching the other artificial intelligence—the namesake of the book... Neuromancer.
Some of you might be wondering where the original Codepunk podcast is. There was a lot of talk about building a Codepunk space in virtual reality (using Facebook Horizon... or Meta Horizon... or whatever it's called now)...
I told you this blog was mostly for me. No, it's not dead.
Joe Rogan is a comedian. My partner and I saw him in Washington, D.C. probably about a decade back. Hilarious. Rogan's comedic style is absurdist. He attempts to use absurd language and scenarios to draw out the idiocy in the mundane and to poke fun at observed structures in society.
The story of the Russian Internet is a story that reaches as far back as early dissendent papers and the birth of telecoms in the region. It's an interwoven story of the control of information from paper to sound waves to Internet packets aimed at philosophy, conspiracy, and journalism.
I'm happy to see this entry for Apotheosis—not just because it's the 10th entry, but because it wraps up the Mondo 2000 3-parter, which followed on the heels of the Boing Boing 3-parter. Revisiting both publications/communities just reminds me too much about how the edgier (experimental would be a more appropriate term) aspects of cyberculture quickly fell to commercialism, leaving those in the community stranded.
I've been wanting to launch a zine for a while now, so here we go. I'll talk more about it in a longer post later. Right now, I just felt like dumping it into cyberspace for the bots to pick up.
This podcast episode does a good job of reflecting on Julian Assange. With Assange back in the headlines now that extradition is coming, it's important to understand that you often have the separate the person from the act, much the same way you might separate the author from the work.
The meme that I'm seeing circulating the most is that 2022 is more like 2020 Two with the raging of COVID and the spread of the Omicron variant. The rule for 2022 should be fuck your politics.
Yesterday I was going through my GitHub starred projects on my phone using the beta lists feature to organize them. In that process, I culled the stars, reducing them from ~530 to 237 (as of this writing). I posted the accomplishment to Phil Eaton's excellent Discord.
Horror for the holidays isn't so strange. I might be delayed in posting this, but at least I can take solace in the fact that Creepshow did come out of with a holiday special.
I had heard bits and pieces about Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, but it was mostly sitting on my wish list as something I'd get to in the future until the Exponential View reading group picked it for their book club. I decided to put some of my other reading on hold and dove in since I felt it would provide some good debate and discussion with other thinkers from across various industries.
If you're first exposure to Mondo 2000's narrative of the Internet was with The Cyberpunk Handbook you might have looked no further—sending it to the trash heap—not even fit for recycling. But those who grew up and explored the Internet during Mondo's days didn't live in reverse like we're doing with this look back at cyber history. The handbook was the final push of California cyberpunk satire, but Mondo did lived on the edge for a few years, much like the earlier zine version of Boing Boing.
I want to take a trip down memory lane to a whitepaper I wrote over a decade ago. It was originally titled Ruby on Rails Death to All Hobbyists. I wrote it near the peak of Ruby on Rails popularity, and it was an analysis of hobbyist languages and hype versus proven scalability and development processes.
In the last post, we had some fun reliving a little early 2000's Internet culture, but what we're doing here is digging deeper into the roots of cyberspace. That brief interlude was me reminiscing of a time when I was highly involved in an underground culture, while also checking in on an old friend and his work...
I'm behind a bit on the October/Horror Movies/Craft Beer posts—mostly because there was a run on pumpkin beer, but also because I exhausted myself with a few side projects and kept falling asleep halfway through the movies.
Bear with me, I'm going to take a trip down memory lane before getting to the point. It gets a little ranty too. Grab yourself a cup of coffee. Earlier in my career—after I left the first consulting company I worked for—I did a little freelance work in web site design and web site building at a time just far enough past the Dot-Com bubble bursting to have a market flooded with freelancers. If you thought web application development was a hard sell, try selling web sites. This was pre-SquareSpace, etc.
I've been on both the giving and the receiving end of interviews in my career as a software engineer and engineering manager, and I've been privy to a great many styles of interviews.
I picked up a very, very local craft beer from a farm brewery (which I'll leave unnamed) and it was stuffed to the rim with clove as a spice and not much pumpkin at all. Terrible.
When discussing virtual reality (VR), there is a specific aspect of design involved—whether world design, production design, or application design. These environments are not exempt from the same design principles available in 2D design environments.
Have the supply chain issues ruined beer distribution as well?
There's a pretty good horror series on Shudder called Slasher. It started out on Chiller before moving to Netflix and eventually ended up on Shudder.
Dropping a quick note on Powershell, which is a powerful language with a terrible syntax.
While I await and finish season 2 and 3 of Creepshow, I'll be able to drop in on a few other horror favorites this month between viewings... or am I viewing Creepshow in between horror favorites? One of those.
Moving from movies to television (or whatever streaming television is considered), we're going to take a look at the new season of Creepshow.
On the second day of my 31 days of horror movies and craft beer, I revisited a favorite of mine Ginger Snaps.
Rob Zombie has carved himself out a nice niche and a cult following, and as someone who was wealthy way before he started directing, he really doesn't need to please anyone. He just needs to break even of funding.
It's October 1st; You know what that means?
I'm writing this mostly because I need another blog post to check the margin between posts on the listing.
The answer is yes. That's the TL;DR.The long answer (promise it won't be too long) is that I needed to be able to write whatever I wanted unattached from my personal/professional profile.
When a company's network gets compromised by a virus, it can set off the panic alarms throughout the workplace. Of course Internet access being a must for all companies (every company is an IT company), means that exposure and risk are both high with the single biggest thread being the human element.
Many my age still remember the years of personal bulletin board systems (BBS) when the Internet was young (and more explicitly tied to the telecoms). Eventually, cyberspace emerged as a collective of protocols with BBS, IRC chat channels, and UseNet newsgroups filling out additional communication channels. I remember following newly created UseNet newsgroups dedicated to the very first SciFi Channel original programming (long before it became whatever SyFy is supposed to stand for).
I'm sure you're tired of hearing my opinion on Boing Boing at this point, so you'll be happy to know that this is the last Codepunk post and Apotheosis episode on the subject.
With advances in technology being so profound over the last few decades, security has become—and continues to be—an ever important issue for every business, project, or hobby (and even home automation) taking the steps to bring their offering to the next level.
With the launch of season 6 of the Codepunk podcast, we'll be coalescing around a single theme since we'll be producing less episodes at a higher quality with accompanying video inside of virtual reality.
Although the history of Boing Boing paints a picture of geek chic with a thriving community and an almost playful cyber-indulgence, the blog (and those running the blog) is not without the occasional head-turning controversy...
Boing Boing was a zine before it became a web site, and although zines were not exclusive to the counterculture and cyberculture eras, the proliferation of zines reached its apex in the late 80's/early 90's.
In most of my current projects (both for work and for pleasure), I use very similar tools, frameworks, configurations, etc. With Node.JS applications...
One billion seconds is a phrase that has accumulated usage over the course of our most recent evolution of memes. Representing a little over 31.5 years (which isn't nearly as fancy as saying one billion seconds)...
You can blame Ben Brown for this one. I mentioned Ben in the previous Apotheosis post. He's a current Microsoft engineer that works on the Bot Framework Composer, but made a name for himself...
For a significant time now being a software engineer—being a technology worker—has given us the impression that we are not labor. That we are not the working class.
I miss the Gopher protocol. That's an odd statement to make because the Gopher protocol wasn't successful long-term and it had quite a few drawbacks, but the Gopher protocol was an Internet protocol...
Every generation—once they reach around 40 years of age—starts to think about how things were when they grew up, and we all come to the same conclusion about how our childhood was better.
Modern culture siphons value from past generations in order to pre-package large quantities of the next big trend for quick financial extraction. The result of this is the raiding of authenticity from past generations into a pale meme of itself. Much of the modern generation seems to live off of memes, YouTube video clips, and recycled collage advertisements that fake and feed nostalgia.
I often forget a lot of tech pundits come from the finance sector and it's not so much an expertise in technology as it is an expertise...
I mentioned recently that I took the time to remove applications like Twitter and LinkedIn from my phone in order...
Typically when we talk about economic sectors, the focus is generally on the public and private sectors, and most don't consider if there is anything else...
I hit the wrong key again. Staring at the screen with the twins making noise in the background, I'm wondering if I can edit out that part and make it a seamless cut, or if I'm going to have to overlay a transition.
Email. We used email. I slowly came to the realization that I hadn't done this much recently, feeling like email was a burden of communication instead...
This is the third article this year dealing with Facebook. I don't work for Facebook. Promise. In fact, for the most part, I don't even...
Cal Newport, unfortunately, slots right in with the rest of them. I was recommended Deep Work by several people that I highly...
This isn't going to be a hard science piece, so turn off your computer if you had high expectations. This is more a philosophical debate...
A few weeks ago I divested myself of all my Bitcoin and used a fraction of the proceeds to buy a computer. You can watch me unbox the new computer on YouTube...
I read a lot of book about a variety of subjects, but as someone who studied clinical psychology and philosophy in college, I also like to read about the metaphysical layer on top of some of these subjects...
We record videos. Surprised? I know. It's not like we talk about them constantly. Seriously, though it's been a fun ride building out the Codepunk YouTube channel to its current state.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, most on my team (and indeed my entire organization) have been working from home like the rest of the world.
Funny story. During one of the last technical interviews I had, I was asked what SOLID was. After I answered that it was a philosophy in object-oriented programming for single use objects...
The origin of this newsletter was that it was going to be about chatbots and craft beer. We ran out of chatbot content by about the fourth or fifth issue, but the newsletter evolved into a narrative, thematic newsletter about the future of computing...
All the way back in the first issue of this year, I wrote about GitHub's Arctic Code Vault in what would truly be a turning point for this newsletter. That issue marked a future period of consistency focused on a singular thematic approach that we've continued to this day.
Never check your passwords and secrets into source control. We've all been told this plenty of times; Yet for some reason, people keep doing it.
With the pandemic still in full effect, it's clear to see that the virus propagates more quickly in areas of high density. New York City did not fair well, while areas like Wuhan, London, and Singapore required strict controls. Even as the curve flattened in some areas, and the economies opened up, travel and density saw the slow creep of COVID-19 cases rise.
Lightning talks are often misunderstood and handled poorly by conference organizers. They are seen as a consolation prize.
It wasn't that long ago that people believed Virtual Reality and VR headsets were dead in the water. The popularity of the Oculus—and the emergence of the Oculus Quest as a wireless—option seems to have quelled that talking point, but now we've reached another moment of knee-jerk reaction by pundits and analysts...
The long-term resolution to this remote work stressor lies in appropriate documentation. We've talked about this before, and even went into details with...
I used to review a decent amount of books on Amazon a few decades back. For a while there, my ranking was pretty high. As a result, I would often get researched and emailed by authors looking to give away a free book for a review. This died down after a while, but every so often I get a random request or a random book in the mail.
Why do people read Codepunk? What makes it different? More importantly How can it make a difference on its own? I'm hoping to answer these questions...
During our last conversational software post, we talked about the different types of conversations - Pairs, stories, therapy, etc. This is because conversation develops different patterns depending on the context, reason, and the expected outcome.
The biggest problem with a monorepository is that it's good for development but bad for deployment. Why do I say this? In a traditional CI/CD setup...
Remember the Facebook phone? Me neither. In fact, I was just about to sit down to start writing this email when the thought of it popped into my head. Here I was about to write an email about Facebook's foray into hardware, and I almost forget their first disaster.
With this monorepository set-up we're able to run each of the applications, while utilizing the common package, and we can make updates to the common...
There's been a lot of talk about working remotely and the future of remote work lately, and I don't want to feel like I'm piling on the trendy bandwagon by repeating a lot of the same information, so this email will focus on both the approach-ability of remote work, and dive deeper into what makes remote work possible—both from a technological and a philosophical standpoint—and what the future might truly hold.
I'm old enough to remember when monorepositories were "in" the first time around. As code became more complicated, best practices dictated the uncoupling...
It usually takes me a week or two to fully flesh out one of these issues. As I've started writing this the Microsoft MVP Summit (a conference for people who received the Microsoft MVP award during the year) has just been canceled.
How is everyone doing with the work-from-home mandate? In a conversation with executive leadership at my organization, when asked how I was handling the new work arrangement...
Before we get to truly defining conversational software we need to look at the different types of conversation.
Re-reading the title of this issue, I realize that Max Headroom and the Culture Killers sounds like a band name. That's actually fitting since the focus of this issue in part centers on how financial extraction has killed innovative, quality art, especially in the music (and entertainment) industry.
We're going to be talking a lot about "talking" in these next few posts, so it's important that we're all on the same page about what we mean by 'talking' and "conversation"—especially when we discuss how it relates to software.
Almost two years, I brought up the lack of a killer application when it came to chatbots. That killer app still doesn't exist.