Rolandt

People who work with me tend to realize that I have Opinions about databases, and SQL databases in particular. Last week, I wrote about a Postgres debugging story and tweeted about AWS’ policy ban on internal use of SQL databases, and had occasion to discuss and debate some of those feelings on Twitter; this article is an attempt to write up more of them into a single place I can refer to.

Their accusations are their confessions.

Remember that. It’s how we need to consider the many and varied arguments we hear daily from conservative critics. It’s a common tactic. It’s what Freud called “projection”, where you identify your own faults, and ‘project’ them on to others, accusing them of the things you yourself are guilty of.

It was used to devastating effect by the previous U.S. president. Any time he was suspected (usually justifiably) of some form of corruption or malpractice, he would wrap up the suspicion in some new terminology (which Scott Adams called a “linguistic killshot“) and fling it back against the opposition as a direct accusation.

And we need to be clear that this is exactly what the term ‘cancel culture’ is. It’s an attempt by the people most likely to censor and silent opponents to accuse their opponents of exactly that sort of behaviour. It’s effective because it’s targeted at the audience least likely to stifle opposition, and therefore most sensitive to the criticism.

But remember: their accusations are their confessions.

The people accusing us of ‘cancel culture’ because we have decided to call an end to hateful and abusive behaviour are themselves the most likely to belittle, censor and silence opponents. That’s how they keep their power.

Despite their constant cries of censorship, conservatives dominate social media. Despite their accusations of left-leaning bias in newsrooms and on college campuses, conservatives exert a disproportional influence on both. Their cries of censorship in social media are baseless. And lets not forget the preponderance of conservative thought in organizations as varied as religious institutions, the police, military, schools of business and corporate boardrooms.

They would like us to believe that “we’re just the same, you and I.” They would like us to believe that if we were in the same position, we would do the same thing, that we would preserve our privilege, that we would take advantage of the weak, that we despise the poor and the marginalized just as much as they do. And their ‘proof’, they say, is cancel culture.

Except – no. The very same action, taken in the defense of the marginalized, is not the same as that action taken with the intent to oppress one. And this can be seen in the nature and character of the defense, how it is directed toward the action, and not the person, how it leaves even the attacker no weaker than when he started.

Their acts of silencing and oppression have no beginning and, it seems, no end…

• like when the state of Mississippi banned Sesame Street, calling it “too controversial” because it had black actors
• like when @ForAmerica attacked the Macy’s Day Parade for “blindsiding parents” because it dared to show two girls kiss
• like when conservative ‘free speech’ website Parler starts banning accounts for posting left wing ideas
• like when a conservative government bans universities from teaching gender studies
• like when Republicans in Georgia pass laws promoting voter suppression

You know and I know I could make this list longer and longer without much effort (but with more effort than it might seem, because conservatives has also flooded Google search with these accusations, making their own transgressions harder to find).

Every time a conservative complains about censorship or ‘cancel culture’ we need to remind ourselves, and to say to them,

“You are the one complaining about cancel culture because you are the one who uses silencing and suppression as political tools to advance your own interests and maintain your own power.

“You are complaining about cancel culture because the people you have always silenced are beginning to have a voice, and they are beginning to say, we won’t be silent any more.

“And when you say the people working against racism and misogyny and oppression are silencing you, that tells us exactly who – and what – you are.”

“Your accusations are your confessions.”

An acquaintance recently expressed frustration at being rejected for a job interview at the final hurdle.

He had been through five rounds of interviews and still hadn’t got the job. I sympathise, but I admire the company.

We should be vetting leaders of our communities with a similar rigour as we do when selecting the technology platform.

When we select a platform, we might create personas, use cases, a key list of requirements, invite vendors to spend hours completing RFPs to be invited to interview and potentially host a demo of their community. From there the vendor might face a security test, usability test, further negotiation and have to go into depth about what their platform can and can’t do.

Yet, I’ve seen many situations where an organisation will spend 2 to 3 hours interviewing a handful of candidates for 30 minutes and make a decision. That’s nuts.

It’s good to vet your community leaders properly. Listen not just to what they say in interviews but look at their current communities. See how they engage with members. Is the tone of voice and guidance about right? Do they specifically match the skillsets your strategy has indicated you need to take your community to the next level? Can they demonstrate that?

The problem isn’t usually wasting time through an endless intensive interview process, it’s not investing enough time in the recruitment process to find the right person.

The post Vetting Community Leaders first appeared on FeverBee.

Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds
Of field and meadow, large as garden grounds,
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease …
These paths are stopped – the rude philistine’s thrall
Is laid upon and destroyed them all.

John Clare, “The Mores” (1812-31)

 

In England, the transition to capitalism was marked by a parallel process of enclosure — the transfer of common land to private hands, a practice that peaked by the 19th century. For landowners, enclosures boosted agricultural efficiency and increased their private wealth and power. But for the people who worked and walked these spaces, the seizure of land represented a “class robbery,” as the historian E.P. Thompson famously put it.

John Clare, the 19th century “peasant poet” of Northamptonshire, described this “robbery” in “The Mores,” perhaps the most well-known poem about the enclosures. In the poem, fences are the material symbols of the restriction of people’s movement and the barring of communities from land they had previously held in common. Yet for Clare, this restriction had a wider meaning beyond the economic appropriation. With the blocking of their movement, the political rights of rural communities — what Clare calls their “paths to freedom” — were diminished in favor of the landowners’ cultivation of sheep.

Today, fences are thrown up and “little parcels” of land obstructed once more, but for a different purpose. Land is emptied and human movement “stopped” not for the production of goods, as in Clare’s time, but for their frictionless circulation in an economy that revolves around consumer convenience. The more that profit depends on the acceleration of consumption, the faster the fences are erected.

Fifty miles north of London, John Clare country has now become part of the largest concentration of logistics and distribution operations in Europe. Between Northamptonshire in the south, Nottingham to the north, and Birmingham out west — a space traced by the noisy borders of the M1, the M6, and the M42, some of the UK’s busiest roads — sits the “Golden Triangle” of logistics. If you buy something online in the UK, it almost certainly passes through there.

The complexity and scale of the operations are impressive. Leicestershire’s Magna Park claims the title of Europe’s largest distribution center, a cluster of warehouses nearly twice the size of Manhattan’s Central Park. The three interchanges of the Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal cover nearly a thousand acres. East Midlands Gateway, further north at Derby, is meanwhile the UK’s largest site for pure freight. Across these sites, and in the tens of smaller nodes that accumulate around villages and motorway junctions in between, the world’s biggest real estate companies —Prologis, Segro, GLP, Panattoni — do battle to provide the most convenient and efficient sites for the likes of Amazon and other global retail brands and delivery companies, as well as the UK’s supermarkets and department stores.

All this has made the Golden Triangle home to twice as much warehousing space as Greater London, Wales, and Scotland combined. It may be great for the logistics industry, but it makes for a strange place to live. Villages are overshadowed by the characterless walls of warehousing, and nature sites are bordered by the steely coldness of distribution parks and the roar of passing traffic. Residential roads change scale and warp into the thoroughfares of international commercial flows — and, as in Clare’s time, paths are stopped or redirected, channeled through fenced-off alleys between commodity storage, between sites that are intimidating and alienating by design. These are not new enclosures of public lands, but they serve as stark reminders for residents that the places where they live and walk, their “paths to freedom,” may soon become inaccessible.

The experiential inhumanity of the spaces of logistics, of course, won’t stop their proliferation. According to the real estate firm Knight Frank, every £1 billion spent online demands 1.3 million square feet of further warehousing. At current projections, that means 92 million square feet of warehousing by 2024 — almost as much as the Golden Triangle currently contains. Segro has recently started work on the controversial Northampton Gateway, a project that replaces fields with over a million square feet of warehousing and five times more in service space. Panattoni and Prologis have similar sites in development too. Investors, meanwhile, are bullish: “Twenty years ago, [logistics] was the ugly duckling,” one property fund manager told Bloomberg. But thanks to the surge in online retail, “massive amounts of capital [are] being put to work.”

Sites like these are where online shopping leaves its physical footprint — where capital, battling over space, inscribes itself in the landscape. Yet logistics sites in their vastness are paradoxically also the crystallization of speed. They manifest how the relation between consumption and its externalities has changed. It’s no longer just a matter of the more we buy, the more land is turned into warehouses. It’s a matter of how fast we do it too. To ensure the shortest time between desire and its fulfilment, spaces are enclosed, emptied, fenced off for commodities. This is the cost of frictionless shopping. The Golden Triangle is what convenience actually looks like.

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Legal scholar and tech critic Tim Wu has called convenience “perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and economies.” Born out of the language of industrial capitalism, the ideology of convenience transfers capital’s sought-after efficiencies of industrial production to the personal level. As one self-help book tells us, “run your body like a business.” But if convenience once derived from the imperatives of industrial production, it is now taken as a natural, autonomous demand that consumers place on businesses. Accordingly, the internet’s capacity to circulate information is understood as no more than an expression of consumers’ demand to get what they want, instantly. “Convenience decides everything,” Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder, now claims. “From here on out,” says Mark Zuckerberg, “it’s a frictionless experience.”

From this perspective, convenient consumption is what the internet has always been for. Back in 1995, Bill Gates was one of the first tech titans to promise a future of absolute frictionlessness. In The Road Ahead, his first book, he laid out a vision for “friction-free capitalism,” a pure state of convenience that would be, he said, “a shopper’s heaven”: “all the goods for sale in the world will be available for you to examine, compare, and, often, customize,” he explained. “When you want to buy something, you’ll be able to tell your computer to find it for you at the best price offered by any acceptable source or ask your computer to ‘haggle’ with the computers of various sellers.” All you need to do is click. As Wu claims, “the ideal is personal preference with no effort.”

In reality, “no effort” translates into the abolition of nuisance, the destruction of any barrier to transactions. Jeff Bezos, famously, is the world leader at this game, and Amazon is the “shopper’s heaven” that Gates envisioned made real, a place where all the goods in the world seem to be for sale. Here, things we didn’t even know were hassles — entering debit card details or delivery addresses, or even confirming your CVC — are now presented as “friction,” while anything more than a day’s wait for delivery is conceived as intolerable. Amazon endlessly “gives us back our time,” something marketers claim that consumers expect from online commerce, though it might be more accurate to say that it reminds us to feel as though that time was something we had been losing.

Eventually, no doubt, “1-click” itself will become one click too many. A dystopian vision of the future sees Big Tech demanding direct access to our thoughts in order to better “fulfill” our desires. But the recent history of the internet suggests that they won’t need to demand, exactly. As Mark O’Connell has recently written, “customer ecstasy” has been the guiding vision of Bezos’s enterprise. And tech companies have been successful at ideologically conflating an “ecstasy” with an experience of efficiency or ease — as if ecstasy only ever meant instant gratification.

In their pursuit of speed, then, tech companies have tried to keep us demanding convenience — regardless of how it otherwise adversely shapes lives, economies, and spaces. Part of frictionlessness, after all, is being able to disregard the bigger picture beyond one’s immediate demands. Architect Hamed Khosravi argues that logistics responds to the “choppy flows of consumer demand in markets regulated by an economy of desire rather than need.” But that opposition between a purportedly genuine need and a frivolous consumer desire is precisely what contemporary consumerism sets out to blur. Often enough, desire is felt as need — whatever the cost may be.

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“A good logistician operates out of sight,” an article on the news site DC Velocity, claims. “A great one is like the Wizard of Oz, orchestrating an amazing choreography somewhere behind the curtain.” Products move as if of their own accord; packages are delivered as if out of the void.

In pursuit of pure frictionlessness, logistics aspires to operate unnoticed. Behind the scenes, behind the curtain, the industry is fragmented, brutally competitive, with companies fighting among themselves over the trillions of dollars to be handled worldwide. Yet in its own self-image, the work of logistics is altruistic, self-effacing, heroic. As one freight company puts it, logistics is the “invisible industry,” the “silent, immense construct that ensures that all the things we take for granted work.”

In the supply chain’s central terrain — the sea — invisibility is relatively easy. As reporters like Ian Urbina and Rose George have pointed out, what stays at sea stays out of mind. Yet on land, inventive solutions are needed to draw attention away from the industry’s ubiquitous traces. For instance, at SubTropolis, outside Kansas City, thousands of acres of storage have been taken underground and out of the consumer’s eye. Industry leaders, meanwhile, have dreamed of placing distribution centers at the bottom of the ocean. In rural England, the invisibility of warehousing depends on the crudeness of “architectural camouflage”: paneled strips of lightening shades of blue or random patches of green, with which giant warehouses hope to disappear dazzle-ship-style into the fields or melt into the weightlessness of the sky. A warehouse with “good design” and “good aesthetics” that is “sensitive to place” (to use the language of Northampton Gateway) is meant to help us forget the loss of green spaces. And if that doesn’t work, invisibility is achieved by redirecting pathways and byways, ensuring no one gets close enough to see.

The desire for invisibility is not just a matter of sparing the public the ugliness of mass-scale warehousing, of course, or of appearing “less intrusive,” as one industrial architecture firm told the Guardian. It has little to do with aesthetics. Rather its function is obfuscation, a wager that the less consumers see, the less they care — about labor practices, environmental damage, the commodification of land. Like the inhabitants of the twin cities in China Miéville’s novel The City and the City, in which two different cities occupy the same physical space, we are brought to “unsee” the world that co-exists with us. We might register the presence of logistics — its hubs and distribution centers, fences and traffic, its delivery vans and people — but we look on ahead or back to the screen.

Only in this way can Gates’s dream be achieved: The bliss of the shopper’s heaven is premised on our “unseeing” the world behind the curtain. In Gates’s paradise, the internet would be the “ultimate go-between, the universal middleman,” he writes, and the “the only humans involved in a transaction” would be “the actual buyer and seller.” This would indeed be a paradise — of consumerism without externalities, consumption without cost, delivery without labor. It would be an amazing, automated choreography: completely, miraculously frictionless.

In the end, the purpose of “invisible” warehousing is to convince us that there is no middleman, as if convenience has overcome mediation once and for all. But this will always be a fantasy. As anthropologists Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri have pointed out, the tech industry prefers that we imagine a sci-fi world dominated by algorithms and AI, automated and robotic, than see the reality of human labor powering it. Behind the curtain of high-tech workplaces is what Gray and Suri call “ghost work”: poorly paid, low-skilled, precarious and invisibilized jobs in such areas as data entry and content moderation.

Logistics work is treated similarly. The space between click and delivery can simply move out of focus. In the Golden Triangle, hidden behind fences, the resources of whole counties are mobilized for the mediation of buyer and seller. You’re just not supposed to see.

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The demand for frictionlessness is changing the landscape – and our access to it. Rural areas are slowly becoming less rural, that’s for sure. Yet, increasingly dominated by the logics of exclusion and efficiency – identified by John Clare already two centuries ago – these areas are becoming ever more anonymous too. As Deborah Cowen, author of The Deadly Life of Logistics, points out, massive swathes of the countryside now “closely resemble computer motherboards. These sterile, engineered environments are without chaos, disorder, or detritus, let alone signs of life.” Supreme efficiency demands a new kind of posthuman enclosure, a forced evacuation of the serendipities and frictions and rhythms of everyday life. Everything instead is planned, down to the warehouses’ mimicry of the sky, their vast concrete forecourts, the frail planted saplings like the sad ghosts of nature.

The visions of frictionlessness demand empty space on an unprecedented scale. The more we buy, the more space we need to be emptied of life. Convenience — the learned demand for instant gratification — voids the world of its features, turning fields into town-size circuit boards. Yet at the same time, convenience demands that we forget the material costs of our desires.

J.B. Harley, a historian of cartography, once described the places shown on maps as “socially empty space.” In “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” he highlighted the ability of maps in colonial contexts especially to “‘desocialize’ the territory they represent” and so lessen “the burden of conscience about people in the landscape.” In the plans and marketing brochures that real estate companies draw up of their distribution centers, social emptiness is the dominant impression. Yet it is not just a representation: get closer to the sites of logistics, peer through the fence, and they remain socially empty. That’s deliberate: consumers need to stay firmly on the other side of the curtain (or the fence). Geographer Dara Orenstein quotes a corporate executive who explains that supply chains must be “self-enclosed, where the outside world doesn’t touch you.” When people are not consumers, they become friction.

If John Clare emphasized the political reality of the 19th century enclosures, what poet could do justice to the vast contemporary enclaves of logistics companies? As thousands more acres of land in the Golden Triangle pass into the hands of logistics companies and their tenants, more of our landscapes will be turned into hermetic spaces for business “where the outside world doesn’t touch you.” For all its complexity, contemporary logistics aspires to purge commerce of the kinds of connection that reveal our interdependencies, that make a political understanding of our situation in the world possible. Where goods move freely, the spaces in which we can move without friction shrink. But if we believe in a shopper’s heaven, we might not even notice.

Datasette 0.56 has bug fixes and documentation improvements, plus some new documented internal APIs for plugin authors and SpatiaLite 5 bundled with the official Datasette Docker container.

This weekend I played around with Gemini. I became aware of Gemini in the last six months or so, via various techie people talking about it on Mastodon. Even though the tech stack for Mastodon could barely be further from what Gemini is trying to do, there is a lot of overlap in the interests of people using each technology. I'm very attracted to the forced simplicity of Gemini: it has a lot in common with concepts I've written about before, like Brutalist web design, decentralisation, the Hundred Rabbits philosophy and even to an extent some of the things that drive the Rust community - it's not surprising that a lot of the Gemini server software is written in Rust (or that Hundred Rabbits have a gemini site.

I found Gemini a little confusing at first, since it's more a "souped up gopher" than a slimmed-down HTTPS, and gopher is something my mother once used to access files over the university network, rather than something I ever remember using myself. But with a few hours reading and tinkering I got a site up and running, where I'll post notes about what I'm reading and thinking, in the spirit of the Classic Era of blogging. The gemtext syntax is disarmingly simple — significantly simpler and cleaner than HTML, essentially it's a very tight and rigid subset of Markdown with one exception, being the way URLs are formatted. This means that the gemini file format is extremely close to plain text.

Even so, I don't really want to futz around manually adding a new listing to an index page every time I write a note in a new file. So while there's no need to transpile formatting like I do for this blog (writing in markdown and publishing in HTML), the whole point of Gemini for me is to focus exclusively on writing prose rather than code or markup.

Fortuitously, just as I was thinking about this, Ed Summers published a nice little note about a shell script he uses for journaling. Ed's post inspired me to create my own tiny "static site generator" for Gemini:

#!/bin/sh

DATE=`date +"%Y-%m-%d"`
YEAR=`date +"%Y"`
DIR="/Users/hugh/gemini/"
FILE="$DIR/$YEAR/$DATE.gmi"
REMOTE="projects:/srv/gemini/public"
LISTING="\n=> $DATE.gmi $DATE ($@)"

# push to server if run with argument `up`
if [ $1 = "up" ];
then
  rsync -aqz $DIR $REMOTE
  echo "🚀 capsule launched!"
else
  if [ ! -f $FILE ];
  then
    # Create new file with title as header
    echo "# $@\n" > $FILE
    if [ ! -f "$DIR/$YEAR/index.gmi" ];
    then
      # make new directory and index page for current year if there isn't one
      mkdir $DIR/$YEAR
      echo "# $YEAR Notes\n" > $DIR/$YEAR/index.gmi
    fi
    # add new file to the top of the index listing for current year
    sed -i "" "2 s/^/$LISTING/" $DIR/$YEAR/index.gmi
  fi
  code $FILE
fi

I saved this as an executable called "notes", so now I can run:

notes Title of today's post

And that will open a new file named with today's date, with a heading, "Title of today's post". It will also add a link to that page with that title, on the index page for the year's posts. If it's the first post for the year, it will create a new directory and index page for that year before saving the new file. If I already wrote a note today, instead of writing over the top of it, the script simply opens the file in VSCode.

Once I've written my note, I just notes up and the site is updated 🚀. Thanks for the inspiration, Ed!

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Brand communities often fall into two categories; first resort or last resort.

1) First resort. They’re the first place members go to ask questions and get help. When members have an issue they are taught (or learn) to visit the community first. If the community can’t help, then they call support/file a ticket etc….In this scenario, support handles the difficult cases which might involve private data or are so rare no-one else has a solution.

2) Last resort. They’re the place of last resort for members to go and get help. If customer support didn’t resolve the issue and they can’t find the answer through any other channel, the community is the final destination where customers can try to seek help from others. This often crops up if a customer is ‘out of warranty’.

Both options are fine, but it’s good to be clear about which role your community is fulfilling.

If your community is the place of first resort, then your goal is to reduce the effort and speed to first response. Your community is usually tackling easier questions asked multiple times in different ways. You need superusers who are enthusiastic who you can train and nudge in just the right way. A great search experience is also important and you need the community to appear in places where people might usually contact support.

If your community is the place of last resort, you often need the involvement of customer support agents and to offer stronger rewards for the handful of experts who might have the ability to answer the more difficult questions. You have to focus on the satisfaction and resolution rate more than the speed and effort of asking questions. You can also expect members to be a lot grouchier.

Which type of community is yours?

The post First Resort vs. Last Resort first appeared on FeverBee.

Greynoise helps security teams focus on potential threats by reducing the noise from logs, alerts, and SIEMs. They constantly watch for badly behaving internet hosts, keep track of the benign ones, and use this research to classify IP addresses. Teams can use these classifications to only focus on things that (potentially) matter.

They also have a generous (10K calls/day), free community API which does not require credentialed access and returns a subset of information that the full API does. This is handy for folks who can’t afford the service or who only need to occasionally poke at IP addresses.

Andrew, GN’s CEO, tweeted out a super-hacky shell one-liner, the other day, that grabs the external IPs of all the ESTABLISHED IPv4 TCP connections and runs them through the community API via curl. Even though I made it a bit less-hacky:

sudo netstat -anp TCP \
  | rg ESTAB \
  | rg "(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)" -o \
  | rg -v "(^127\.)|(^10\.)|(^172\.1[6-9]\.)|(^172\.2[0-9]\.)|(^172\.3[0-1]\.)|(^192\.168\.)" \
  | rg -v "$(dig +short viz.greynoise.io @9.9.9.9 | rg '^\d' | tr '\n' '|' | sed -e 's/.$//g')" \
  | sort -u \
  | while read IP; do echo $(curl --silent https://api.greynoise.io/v3/community/$IP); done |
  Rscript -e 'tibble::as_tibble(jsonlite::stream_in(file("stdin"), verbose=FALSE))'

its still a “run-on-demand” process that you could put in a script and launchd, but then you’d still have to keep a terminal up or remember to watch some file. Plus, it relies on full executables.

I decided to make things a bit easier for folks on macOS Big Sur by cranking out a small SwiftUI app I’ve dubbed GreyWatch:

Each list entry show an IP address your Mac previously connected to (since app launch) or currently has established TCP connections to. The three indicator dots show (in order) whether Greynoise has detected scanning behavior from the IP address within the last 30 days, whether it has a “Rule It OuT” (RIOT) classification, and what — if any — classification the IP address has. The app only shows an IP address once even it you continue to connect to it and it puts new connections on top.

If an IP address has a classification, double-clicking it will open your default browser to the Greynoise visualizer, otherwise said double-click will take you to the IPInfo entry for the IP address.

Needless to say, if your Mac is talking to a host Greynoise has classified as horribad, your other 99 problems no longer take precedence. I’ll likely add a notification action if that condition occurrs.

There’s an “Export…” item in the file menu that lets you save a copy of the current IP list (with metadata) to an ndlines formatted JSON file.

The app does not shell out to dig or netstat and has a light memory and energy footprint.

There are pre-built, notarized binaries in the releases section, and I’ll gradually be adding features (submit yours via new issues!). You can also submit bug reports or other questions via GH issues as well.

Many thanks to Andrew and team for their generous free tier, which enables semi-useful community hacks like this one!

For the first few months when our little one arrived, I didn’t get much time to read, or watch television and movies. Now that she’s sleeping a bit better, I’m finding a bit more time to enjoy some reading and watching and just escape for a little while.

Below, inspired by Kottke, a quick look at some of the books, television shows, and movies that I’ve been enjoying over the past three months:

How We Fight For Our Lives: I’m not usually one for memoirs, but this one is a must-read. Saeed Jones tells a story of growing up Black and gay that is gut-wrenching and powerful, and that will stay with me for a long time. An incredible memoir from one of my favorite poets writing today.

Bridgerton: Fluffy yet surprisingly fun and entertaining. The whole look is stunning; the sets, costumes, and actors are all strikingly beautiful. A good way to pass the time if you’re not looking for something too deep or meaningful.

Palm Springs: Hilariously enjoyable. Made me laugh out loud several times, and the two leads have incredible comedic chemistry. Watch if you’re looking for a guaranteed good time.

Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips: A tense thriller with a wide array of characters whose diverse paths all lead into each other. This one kept me on the edge of my seat, and the prose describing the setting all throughout the novel is gorgeous.

Tully: I think this movie would be better appreciated by someone who doesn’t currently have a young infant and that doesn’t feel panicked and overwhelmed all the time. That someone is not me, so this missed the mark.

RuPaul’s Drag Race, Season 13: Sure, the show has been on for thirteen seasons and some of the parts of it feel rote—you’ve seen the challenges and storylines many times before—but this show is buoyed by the magnificent cast of characters they get every season, and this season is no different. A riotous romp so far (the season isn’t quite done yet).

Elevating Child Care, Janet Lansbury: A collection of blog posts that were perhaps best served as blog posts. A book with a pamphlet-worth of a few good ideas, repeated over and over in too many pages.

Derry Girls: A brilliantly hilarious show set during a not-hilarious-at-all time—The Troubles—featuring excellent performances, laugh-out-loud jokes, and hours of joyful entertainment. Sister Michael is a particularly great character among a whole cast of funny characters.

Lupin: Full of thrills and twists and turns. Sure you have to suspend disbelief and just trust in the plot despite its holes, but this is a lot of fun and will leave you wanting more. Omar Sy is a tour de force in this, and the cliffhanger at the end will make you crave season two’s arrival, whenever its coming.

RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, Series 2: There are moments when I think the UK version of Drag Race might be better than the original US version. This season started off strong, and while it had a few missteps, it follows in the great Drag Race tradition of relying on some extremely charismatic and wonderful queens to make it one of the most enjoyable franchises on television.

The Mandalorian, Season 2: Maybe even better than the first season? The “caper of the week” format suits it well. Always a fun adventure to look forward to, and a memorable cast of characters to enjoy every episode.

The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai: A gut-wrenchingly beautiful novel about friendship and loss and family—blood and chosen— and love. The time shifting from the AIDS-stricken 1980s to the fast-paced mid-2010s is a brilliant narrative device that makes the feelings of loss and devastation all the more powerful.

Birds of Prey: At times confusing, at times odd and strange, but overall quite entertaining. Some really good action sequences, and more than a few laughs. Enjoyed this one more than I thought I would.

It’s A Sin: Heartbreakingly devastating, this series moves at a breakneck speed, taking you through the lives of a group of friends as they navigate the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. I laughed, but mostly I cried; this is an important, must-watch show and perhaps the best series I’ve seen in 2021 so far.

The Forty Year-Old Version: A gorgeously and poignantly written and directed feature film that resonated deeply as I’ve been thinking about what it means to soon be turning forty years old. Funny and emotional and beautifully shot, this is a film definitely worth watching as you think about what it means to get older.

The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett: A gorgeous story about the lives we tell ourselves, the lies we tell others, and the bonds that hold us together. The prose is exquisite and the story is captivating; a book that must go on any must-read list.

WandaVision: Took a few episodes to really get into it, but once it got going it ended up being a beautiful rumination on grief, all while being a fun superhero story as well.

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi: Not quite as powerful and captivating as her previous novel Homegoing, but still a good read about family and loss and grief and religion and motivation.

The Good Place, Season 4: A show that is packed full of laughs, and continues to be hilarious in its final season. The story may be convoluted, but that’s not what matters: the jokes are funny, the characters are endearing, and the show is just a pure delight.

It’s been less than a year since we launched Mozilla VPN, our fast and easy-to-use Virtual Private Network service brought to you by a trusted name in online consumer security and privacy services. Since then we added our Mozilla VPN service to Mac and Linux platforms, joining our VPN service offerings on Windows, Android and iOS platforms. As restrictions are slowly easing up and people are becoming more comfortable leaving their homes, one of the ways to keep your information safe when you go online is our Mozilla VPN service. Our Mozilla VPN provides encryption and device-level protection of your connection and information when you are on the Web.

Today, we’re launching two new features to give you an added layer of protection with our trusted Mozilla VPN service. Mozilla has a reputation for building products that help you keep your information safe. These new features will help users do the following:

For those who watch out for unsecure networks

If you’re someone who keeps our Mozilla VPN service off and prefers to manually turn it on yourself, this feature will help you out. We’ll notify you when you’ve joined a network that is not password protected or has weak encryptions. By just clicking on the notification you can turn the Mozilla VPN service on, giving you an added layer of protection ensuring every conversation you have is encrypted over the network.  This feature is available on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS platforms.

For those at home, who want to keep all your devices connected

Occasionally, you might need to print out forms for an upcoming doctor visit or your kid’s worksheets to keep them busy. Now, we’ve added Local Area Network Access, so your devices can talk with each other without having to turn off your VPN. Just make sure that the box is checked in Network Settings when you are on your home network.  This feature is available on Windows, Linux, Mac and Android platforms.

Why use our trusted Mozilla VPN service?

Since our launch last year, we’ve had thousands of people sign up to use our trusted Mozilla VPN service. Mozilla has built a reputation for building products that respect your privacy and keeps your information safe. With Mozilla VPN service you can be sure your activity is encrypted across all applications and websites, whatever device you are on.

With no long-term contracts required, the Mozilla VPN is available for just $4.99 USD per month in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Malaysia, and New Zealand. We have plans to expand to other countries this Spring.

We know that it’s more important than ever for you to feel safe, and for you to know that what you do online is your own business. Check out the Mozilla VPN and subscribe today from our website.

 

The post Latest Mozilla VPN features keep your data safe appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Apple Worldwide Developer Conference will be online and free, for the second time.

More >

ifconfig.co

I really like this: "curl ifconfig.co" gives you your IP address as plain text, "curl ifconfig.co/city" tells you your city according to MaxMind GeoLite2, "curl ifconfig.co/json" gives you all sorts of useful extra data. Suggested rate limit is one per minute, but the code is open source Go that you can run yourself.

Via Hacker News

Celebrating Women’s History Month

This March, we are featuring colleagues from across The New York Times in a special Women’s History Month series of ‘Meeting’.

What are your pronouns?
She/Her

What is your job title and what does it mean?
I am a program manager who works primarily on engineering projects. I love bringing structure and order to messy and hard problems or situations. I will hustle as I need to in order to enable my teammates to perform to the best of their abilities. I hate the term “servant leadership,” but the definition suits this role.

How long have you been at The Times?
I’ve worked at The Times for two and a half years.

Most Times employees are working remotely right now. What does working from home these days look like for you?
I moved to Rockaway Beach, NY during the pandemic and I hope to stay here. In my opinion, this is one of the most beautiful places in New York City and the quality of my daily pandemic walks has greatly improved since moving here.

There are more animals than people in my household. My colleagues regularly see my cats and dog popping into my meetings. This has been one of the better parts of work-from-home life.

Tell us about a project you’ve worked on at The Times that you’re especially proud of.
Though I loved my work on election readiness, the rollout of Oak, our custom article editor, to the newsroom was especially rewarding. When I arrived at The Times, a small subset of the newsroom was using Oak in limited capacity. In what now seems like a very short period of time, the Oak team fully built out the application and successfully released it to the greater newsroom. The technical challenges that were undertaken (such as track changes, collaborative editing, version history) were some of the most complex of my career. I will always be proud to have worked on this special team.

What is the biggest challenge you faced in your career and how did you overcome it? Knowing what you know now, would you do things differently.
For some time, I battled with regular bouts of imposter syndrome. Finding my voice and gaining confidence in that voice has not been easy. I have faced gatekeeping, which is not uncommon for women working in technology. Earlier in my career, I was told repeatedly, “you aren’t able to do this work” or “you can’t take on this project,” despite my track record of sound performance. I later learned that the gatekeeping stemmed from office politics happening above me.

If I could go back in time, I would have immediately removed myself from that situation. It took some time for me to prove to myself that I was capable of that project and much more. I’m grateful for those who have helped me build my confidence and I’m trying my best to pay it forward.

The Times has six core values (Independence, Integrity, Curiosity, Respect, Collaboration and Excellence) by which the company operates. Is there one that you find best describes your work?
Collaboration. Program managers infuse collaboration in all that we do. Our job is to reinforce the value of collaboration and ensure our teams work well together.

What is a goal you hope to accomplish this year?
I would like to learn to surf! I was too busy in the fall to take lessons and don’t have what it takes to embark on this hobby in the current temperatures. I’m looking forward to spring!

As a program manager working on a digital product, how do you approach your work with inclusivity in mind?
I believe you should approach everything, including your work, with your own reflexive statement in mind: I see the world in a certain way because paradigms, people and places have structured this viewpoint. This shapes my biases, the questions I ask and how I operate. I strive to remember that everyone around me comes from a unique place that I only see a small part of while we work together each day.

It’s non-negotiable that our work environment needs to be empathetic and supportive of all people. I (along with my teammates) strive to bring psychological safety, transparency and respect to all that we do. If we’re in a situation where any of this is challenged, we need to talk about it.

What change do you hope to see in your community?
Since I moved to the Rockaways during the pandemic, I haven’t been able to get involved in my new community as much as I would like. While many service activities have been shelved for now, I’m looking for ways I can safely contribute and meet my new neighbors!

Do you have any favorite life hacks or work shortcuts?
The basics truly keep me going. I take my own set of notes in every meeting, because writing things down helps me better process information.

I also live by and for to-do lists. I have a main to-do list that is maintained digitally. At the start of each day, I look at the list and prioritize what I want to get done. This manageable checklist goes on a Post-it. It feels great to cross things off with a pen.

What or who are you inspired by?
This has been a tough year for all of us. However, I remain in awe of our New York Times journalists. The combination of an ongoing pandemic and the 2020 election have presented a grueling and relentless news cycle. I have immense respect for their ability to keep going and provide the public with incredible journalism. Helping to serve as stage crew for these efforts has been a great honor.

Fill in the blank: What is the best part of being a New Yorker? If you had it your way, what could make it better?
The food and dining in New York! We are privileged to have endless options and standards of excellence embedded in our culture. Like many others, I’ve watched restaurants I’ve loved for years close during the pandemic. In reality, it’s been hard to operate a restaurant in NYC for way too long. If I had my way, we would look at the circumstances that have made it so difficult for these small businesses.

Complete this sentence: Over time, I have realized __________.
It is wise to pick your battles. Some goals are best tackled slowly over time. A wise friend put the phrase “Pack your patience” into my brain and I often repeat it to myself.

What is your best advice for someone starting to work in your field?
Take the time to listen. Challenge yourself to see problems from different perspectives. Always remind yourself that you have much to learn and are privileged to operate in an environment where continuous learning is possible and celebrated.

More in ‘Meeting’

Meeting… Véronique Brossier, Lead Software Engineer at The New York Times
Meeting… Vicki Crosson, Software Engineer at The New York Times
Meeting… Tracy Z. Maleeff, Information Security Analyst at The New York Times

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Meeting… Alexandra Shaheen, Program Manager at The New York Times was originally published in NYT Open on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This teaches us that—when it’s a big enough deal—Amazon will lie to us. And coming from the company that runs the production infrastructure for our companies, stores our data, and has been granted an outsized position of trust based upon having earned it over 15 years, this is a nightmare.

— Corey Quinn

Tldr: We started a company called Streamline Data Science https://streamlinedatascience.io/ that offers tidy data as a service. We are looking for customers, partnerships and employees as we scale up after closing our funding round!

Most of my career, I have worked in the muck of data cleaning. In the world of genomics, a lot of my research has focused on batch effects, synthesizing big genomic data into usable formats, and generally making data easier to use. A couple of years ago, we also started a company called Problem Forward Data Science. Problem Forward offered fractional data science services to a variety of businesses around the country, from the very big corporations to startups just getting started. We were asked to do a lot of different types of data work, everything from turning spreadsheets into dashboards to building complicated forecasting models. But no matter the project, whether in government, academia, or industry, we always ended up with the same problem.

We needed to clean the data before we could do the data science.

This will be no surprise to anyone who has worked in data science or analytics, but the data almost always led to setbacks and frustration when we were working with our clients. Customers wanted complex AI, insightful dashboards, or easy reports, but the data just weren’t ready for that yet. And we wasted a huge amount of time cleaning the data over and over again.

We realized that the most common challenge companies have is that their data processing and management pipelines aren’t ready for analytics. Or as Google so eloquently puts it:

“Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work”

We realized that this was a service that many businesses needed. They needed someone who could come in and set up a data processing pipeline for them, manage it, and make sure the data were up to date. Some people call this Extract Load Transform (ELT), but we found it goes a bit beyond that. It is figuring out what format is most useful for the people who rely on data and working backward to create a customized and unique data pipeline that gets the data ready to use.

The ELT pipeline we set up is designed to consistently output “tidy data” that makes it easy for our customers to use BI tools like Tableau or Looker and to ingest their data without having to do all the ugly data work that is painful and time-consuming.

We piloted this for one of our startup customers - we built their data pipeline and provided ongoing management, maintenance, and upkeep. When they hired their first data scientist, they were able to quickly create dashboards for their whole business because they already had easy-to-use, tidy data.

We got so excited about this data dry cleaning idea that we started a new company called Streamline Data Science that solely focuses on tidy data as a service. We just closed our seed round and are now working with our first set of customers to set up their data pipelines. The cool thing is we found that our most excited customers were the ones that already had a data scientist on the team. This seems a little counter-intuitive until you realize that we handle the painful/boring bits of data management so they can focus on the fun part.

The interesting thing about Streamline is that it isn’t a product. There are a ton of complicated tools out there that you can use to set up your own data pipeline. Streamline is a service that handles all your data issues for you so the data “just works”. It can often be a lot cheaper than building out a full stack data engineering team in house.

If you are a company that is worried about the state of your data - they are difficult to share, to manage, and to quality control - we’d love to hear from you! We would also love to hear from you if you are a data scientist or analyst at a company that is frustrated about how much time you are spending on data management and cleaning.

I’ll write more in the future about how we figured out setting up a data pipeline efficiently and the problems Streamline solves. We will also be releasing our first public data Streamlines that you can play with. In the meantime, I wanted to share how excited I am to finally be working on solving the first mile of data science and building a company that can help Baltimore grow its data science community.

Specialized has just unveiled the new Specialized Como SL (Super Light), an electric pedal assist Class 3 ebike designed for anyone and everyone. Building on Specialized’s decades of industry knowledge, the everyday commuter can now benefit from the same Super Light technologies that go into Specialized performance models like the Vado SL, the Creo SL and the Levo SL. SL e-bikes are approximately 40% lighter than traditional e-bikes, and yet will still assist you up to 28mph.

The post Specialized Announces Brand New E-Bike – the Como Super Light appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.

The latest news from Wikileaks, that GCHQ, the UK’s signal intelligence agency, has a sleeper agent working as a trusted member on the Linux kernel core development team should not come as a surprise to anybody.

The Linux kernel is embedded as a core component inside many critical systems; the kind of systems that intelligence agencies and other organizations would like full access.

The open nature of Linux kernel development makes it very difficult to surreptitiously introduce a hidden vulnerability. A friendly gatekeeper on the core developer team is needed.

In the Open source world, trust is built up through years of dedicated work. Funding the right developer to spend many years doing solid work on the Linux kernel is a worthwhile investment. Such a person eventually reaches a position where the updates they claim to have scrutinized are accepted into the codebase without a second look.

The need for the agent to maintain plausible deniability requires an arm’s length approach, and the GCHQ team made a wise choice in targeting device drivers as cost-effective propagators of hidden weaknesses.

Writing a device driver requires the kinds of specific know-how that is not widely available. A device driver written by somebody new to the kernel world is not suspicious. The sleeper agent has deniability in that they did not write the code, they simply ‘failed’ to spot a well hidden vulnerability.

Lack of know-how means that the software for a new device is often created by cutting-and-pasting code from an existing driver for a similar chip set, i.e., once a vulnerability has been inserted it is likely to propagate.

Perhaps it’s my lack of knowledge of clandestine control of third-party computers, but the leak reveals the GCHQ team having an obsession with state machines controlled by pseudo random inputs.

With their background in code breaking I appreciate that GCHQ have lots of expertise to throw at doing clever things with pseudo random numbers (other than introducing subtle flaws in public key encryption).

What about the possibility of introducing non-random patterns in randomised storage layout algorithms (he says waving his clueless arms around)?

Which of the core developers is most likely to be the sleeper agent? His codename, Basil Brush, suggests somebody from the boomer generation, or perhaps reflects some personal characteristic; it might also be intended to distract.

What steps need to be taken to prevent more sleeper agents joining the Linux kernel development team?

Requiring developers to provide a record of their financial history (say, 10-years worth), before being accepted as a core developer, will rule out many capable people. Also, this approach does not filter out ideologically motivated developers.

The world may have to accept that intelligence agencies are the future of major funding for widely used Open source projects.

After an extremely long special edition review process, the first paper from my collaboration with the phenomenal Nikki Stevens is now out! It’s an absolute doozy, looking at the history and present form of facial recognition, and how the idea of race (and the politics of racialisation) are folded into the technology:

Facial recognition technology (FRT) has been widely studied and criticized for its racialising impacts and its role in the overpolicing of minoritised communities. However, a key aspect of facial recognition technologies is the dataset of faces used for training and testing. In this article, we situate FRT as an infrastructural assemblage and focus on the history of four facial recognition datasets: the original dataset created by W.W. Bledsoe and his team at the Panoramic Research Institute in 1963; the FERET dataset collected by the Army Research Laboratory in 1995; MEDS-I (2009) and MEDS-II (2011), the datasets containing dead arrestees, curated by the MITRE Corporation; and the Diversity in Faces dataset, created in 2019 by IBM. Through these four exemplary datasets, we suggest that the politics of race in facial recognition are about far more than simply representation, raising questions about the potential side-effects and limitations of efforts to simply ‘de-bias’ data.

You can get it here if you like boosting publisher stats or here to avoid the paywall.

There is no shortage of iPad stands. Search for one on Amazon, for instance, and you’ll be met with page after page of results. Most stands are unremarkable, with little that distinguishes one from another.

Twelve South’s HoverBar Duo is different, though. The black aluminum and plastic stand has two articulating hinges with a clamp for your iPad that connects to the stand’s arm with a ball joint. The stand also rotates side-to-side at its base. The design, which is reminiscent of an attractive, modern desk lamp, provides a broader range of motion than most stands, making it useful in more scenarios. As a result, I’ve found myself using the HoverBar Duo far more than any stand I’ve tried before.

For the past few years, I’ve used a stand from Viozon that I first heard about from Jason Snell at Six Colors. It’s a good stand for writing with an external keyboard and pointing device connected to your iPad. The iPad isn’t positioned precisely at eye level. Still, it’s a step up from a laptop, making it more comfortable to use at a desk or table for extended stretches than if you used a laptop or the iPad Magic Keyboard. That’s exactly how I use an iPad most of the time, so it was a good fit with how I worked. However, with the introduction of Apple’s Magic Keyboard with Trackpad, the integrated trackpad was so compelling that I found myself using the stand less and less.

The HoverBar Duo has changed that equation because it’s fundamentally more versatile. The arm is connected to a solid base by a hinge that also rotates back and forth. There’s another hinge a little more than halfway along the arm, which terminates in the clamp that holds your iPad in place and is attached to the arm by a ball joint. That’s four separate points of movement compared to the Viozon stand’s one.

In practice, the additional ways you can position the HoverBar Duo make it a compelling option for a wider range of tasks. The swivel base and ball joint make fine horizontal and tilt adjustments possible. The two hinges allow the stand’s arm to be positioned higher and further forward from the base than other stands. However, the range of motion also means you have to be mindful as you adjust the stand because it’s possible to extend the arm too far forward, causing it to tip over with the iPad’s weight.

The HoverBar Duo’s base is stable and heavy enough to support Apple’s biggest 12.9” iPad Pro. The base is metal with a hard plastic shell enclosure that includes a divot where you can rest the Apple Pencil, which can’t be attached to your iPad when it’s in the HoverBar Duo’s clamp. The base would feel more premium if it were all metal, but it looks nice enough as is. It’s worth noting, too, that the HoverBar Duo comes with a desk clamp that works well, but I don’t use it because I prefer the flexibility of setting up the stand anywhere I’m working.

At the other end of the HoverBar Duo, the spring-loaded, grippy rubber-lined clamp has enough range to hold everything from an iPhone to an iPad Pro securely. I tried the HoverBar Duo with an iPhone, and it works well, but I haven’t found a good use case for the setup. Instead, I’ve been alternating between my iPad Air and iPad Pro. The clamp can accommodate a case, so with the Air, I’ve been using it on the stand with the Smart Keyboard Folio attached.

As you tap at your iPad’s screen, it will wobble a little, but the HoverBar Duo is remarkably steady. I’ve tried an inexpensive bendable gooseneck iPad stand before, and they bounce and wobble a lot at the slightest touch. The HoverBar Duo is much steadier.

In practice, the HoverBar Duo’s flexibility has made it work much better alongside my Mac in a couple of scenarios. My Mac mini’s display is on a VESA arm that allows me to move it around quite a bit. In the past, if I set up an iPad in a stand next to the Mac, it always felt too far off to the side. It was useable but didn’t feel integrated.

That’s changed with the HoverBar Duo, which provides enough flexibility to place the iPad at a height that’s just as comfortable as my Mac’s display. The result is that I’ve begun using macOS’s Sidecar feature more often. I’ve also started using the iPad alongside my Mac to run shortcuts and complete other tasks for which it’s better, transferring the results to the Mac through a combination of AirDrop, the Universal Clipboard, and apps that sync quickly over iCloud. The change has been pronounced enough that I’m beginning to experiment with splitting tasks across the Mac and iPad in new ways. Thanks to my hub setup, which I’ve covered in MacStories Weekly, I can also plug in one cable to charge my iPad, access a fast Ethernet connection, and connect external storage as needed.

The other use case I’ve found for the HoverBar Duo is when I record podcasts. The iPad’s screen is terrific for scrolling through show notes as I record or reading a sponsor script. The HoverBar Duo’s footprint is small enough that I’ve got plenty of room for it alongside my other recording gear allowing me to start recording on the Mac and then swing its display to the side while focusing on the notes on my iPad.

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Stands tend to be a pretty mundane accessory, which is why I don’t write about them often. However, Twelve South’s thoughtful design sets the HoverBar Duo apart from the pack. The black aluminum frame is attractive but discrete, allowing it to blend into a variety of environments. However, the greatest strength of the stand is how it adjusts to the task at hand. That versatility is critical because it makes the iPad useful in more situations, which is the hallmark of an exceptional accessory.

The HoverBar Duo is available for $79.99 directly from Twelve South and Amazon.

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WDR Doku: Rassismus in Deutschland. (YouTube, 29min)

“In der Diskussion um Rassismus kommen Betroffene häufig nur am Rande vor. Hier kommen sie zur Wort und schildern, wie sehr sie jeden Tag mit Rassismus konfrontiert werden und welche persönlichen und gesellschaftlichen Schlüsse sie daraus ziehen.

Das WDR Fernsehen widmete sich am 18. März 2021 einen Abend lang dem Thema Rassismus in Deutschland. Nach der berechtigten Kritik an der Sendung “Die letzte Instanz” ging es unter dem Titel “Warum hat Rassismus mit uns allen zu tun?” in einer Diskussionsrunde und einer Reportage um Fragen wie: Bilden Medien die Gesellschaft in ihrer ganzen Vielfalt ab oder verharren sie zu oft in der Abbildung von Klischees? Wo verursacht rassistische Diskriminierung Chancenungleichheit, und wie kann das verhindert werden? Wie lassen sich die Ursachen von strukturellem und verdecktem Rassismus erkennen und bekämpfen? Die Reportage “Rassismus in Deutschland” wurde im Rahmen dieses Themenabends gezeigt. “

Weitere Links zum Rest des Themenabends und weiteren Dokumentationen in der Videobeschreibung.

By Michael Gordon

The City of Vancouver’s housing stock stands out as having the lowest proportion of single-detached dwellings (one house/one household) of its housing stock of major cities in Canada*.  In the City of Vancouver, according to the 2016 Census, single-detached dwellings with only one household living in it make up 19 percent of the dwelling units in the City’s housing stock.(For Metro Vancouver CMA: 29 percent.)

The trend in Vancouver has been downward, with single-detached dwellings emerging as a more modest part of the housing stock since 1981.  Most dwelling starts now in the City and Region are in multiple dwellings or townhouse developments.

Many of the houses in the City have two dwellings and are counted as duplexes by Statistics Canada.  Houses with more than two dwellings could be counted as an apartment or a flat in a duplex.

I’ve seen the data from BC Assessment which would appear to indicate most floor space built in the City of Vancouver is for ‘single-family’ houses. My choice in looking at this is from the perspective of choices in homes, noticing that increasingly apartments in multiple dwellings are the largest part of our housing stock.

In any case, in our housing stock we have lots of houses but there has been an increase in the number of separate households with their own kitchen in them.

Referring to our RS zones as single-family zones is a misnomer, given the prevalence of so many houses with two or more dwellings (two or more households living within them) and now with infill houses on the lane. From a built form perspective, they really are ‘house’ districts.

Our so-called ‘single-family’ districts have been less so since 1987 when secondary suites were permitted in almost all RS districts if occupied by a family member.  Rental suites started to be permitted in some RS districts and then finally in most RS districts in 2004. With the introduction of laneway houses, the zoning permits three dwellings on each RS zoned lot. Maybe we should call them ‘Three-Family Districts.’

Wealth and class is an important subtext in discussions of housing policy. When you stroll or ride your bike through Vancouver’s west-side neighbourhoods (for example, Kerrisdale) dominated by houses, one finds a lot of wealth.  For many living there now, it’s reasonable to assume that many will prefer to live in a single-detached one-household house. We can contemplate building the ‘missing middle’ there – but given very high land values, home ownership will likely only be affordable by wealthy or two-income professional households. For those with moderate incomes or extended family members, a laneway infill dwelling, a rental secondary suite or a rental in a 6- or 8-plex will hopefully be more accessible.

The housing markets are driven by money, income, class, race, personal preferences and opportunities or lack thereof, as well as zoning and public policy.  One can anticipate that wealthier people looking for a house will consider Vancouver’s west side over other areas in the region, and this will put continued upward pressure on house prices.

Modest West Side House – Assessed Value: $5.5 million – Lot is 12,500 sq.ft.

 

West Side House – $3.6 million – Lot is 6,600 sq. ft.

 

For comparison, I recommend having a stroll around the residential side streets of Norquay to observe the addition of ‘missing middle’ housing.

Norquay Village Centre

The mid-90’s CityPlan championed by Ann McAfee envisioned Neighbourhood Centres offering a broader choice in homes – and that is what is being developed there.

Norquay ‘Missing Middle’ Homes for Sale – Multiple – Six Dwellings – Assessed Value – $5.35 million – Lot is 4,450 sq. ft.

The homes in Norquay were priced between $700 to $800 a square foot, competitive with some new apartments being built in Port Moody and near Lower Lonsdale.

It looks like you could build anywhere from 10 or more ‘missing middle’ homes on each of the ‘West-Side’ single-detached house sites in the above photo depending on lot size. (I wonder what the price per square foot of a condo in a four-storey ‘missing middle’ home would be on one of the single-family detached sites given current home values? Regrettably, many households in Vancouver could not afford to buy these condos.) Noticing that some houses are gems for their times of design and detailing, retaining them should be considered and in some cases, required.

The City of Vancouver as a place to live has its competitors. With more people being offered future flexibility in working at home, places like Port Moody and Lower Lonsdale become even more attractive. They offer livability and access to transit, shopping, restaurants, public spaces, waterfront and parks. Thirtysomething couples will also be looking for two bedrooms where they can both work at home, not be on top of each other and have a bedroom for a child.  (More about this in a future post.)

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Michael Gordon RPP has worked as a planner for 44 years, including as a Senior Planner for downtown Vancouver (1992 – 2018), has taught a course in Community Planning and Housing Policy for the past two decades at UBC, is Vice-Chair of the Vancouver Heritage Commission and several years ago was President of the Canadian Institute of Planners.

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*Percent of single-detached dwellings in other CMAs: Calgary (63%), Edmonton (60%), Toronto (43%) and Ottawa (48%).

 

PT: Some new research from the University of Oxford that won’t surprise you – “people who walk or cycle have lower carbon footprints from daily travel” – but the degree of difference might, particularly between bikes and electric cars.  From The Conversation:

We observed around 4,000 people living in London, Antwerp, Barcelona, Vienna, Orebro, Rome and Zurich. Over a two-year period, our participants completed 10,000 travel diary entries which served as records of all the trips they made each day, whether going to work by train, taking the kids to school by car or riding the bus into town. For each trip, we calculated the carbon footprint.

Strikingly, people who cycled on a daily basis had 84% lower carbon emissions from all their daily travel than those who didn’t.

When we compared the life cycle of each travel mode, taking into account the carbon generated by making the vehicle, fuelling it and disposing of it, we found that emissions from cycling can be more than 30 times lower for each trip than driving a fossil fuel car, and about ten times lower than driving an electric one.

PT: Let’s repeat that: Taking into account the full lifecycle costs, each trip on a bike creates 30 times less emissions than driving. 

And here’s some useful data on the difference the pandemic has made:

The pandemic forced countries around the world to adapt to reduce the spread of the virus. In the UK, walking and cycling have been the big winners, with a 20% rise in people walking regularly, and cycling levels increasing by 9% on weekdays and 58% on weekends compared to pre-pandemic levels. This is despite cycle commuters being very likely to work from home.

Joanne Jacobs, Linking and Thinking on Education, Mar 29, 2021

Joanne Jacobs comments on the EdSurge article Free college isn’t free by Rebecca Koenig. It makes the all-too-reasonable point that even if tuition and fees are covered, a student taking advantage of such a plan will still have large additional costs, such as books and materials, transportation, and living costs or lost wages. This obviously has an impact on the success of 'free college' initiatives. But it shouldn't be an argument for discontinuing them. Rather, governments and industry should be looking at other ways to lower all these other costs. A broad-based social support system covering everything from daycare to health insurance is needed to support educational outcomes, which is why countries that have these social systems perform more strongly on international education indices like PISA.

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Tracii Ryan, Educational Technology Research and Development, Mar 31, 2021

This short article (4 page PDF), noting that "anecdotal evidence suggests that many students who made the rapid mandated shift to online learning experienced feelings of displacement, social isolation, and demotivation," cites a study that "found that online students felt more supported, valued and encouraged when instructors provided assessment feedback in the form of asynchronous video recordings rather than text," though admittedly text feedback was more efficient and better organized. Via Neil Mosley.Image: Art of Education on ways to address social-emotional needs when teaching online.

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When you want to compare between three parts of your data, ternary plots might be a good option. Here is how to make them. Read More

Though this isn’t even remotely surprising, a new report from often-reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo states that the iPhone 13 Pro Max will feature the best camera in the tech giant’s 2021 smartphone lineup.

As first reported by 9to5Mac, Kuo’s supply chain report states that the iPhone 13 Pro Max’s wide-angle camera will feature a slightly wider f/1.5 aperture than the iPhone 13 mini, iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro. The rest of the iPhone 13 lineup will feature an f/1.6 aperture, the same aperture as the iPhone 12 series.

In theory, the bigger aperture should make the wide-angle camera perform better under low-light conditions and will allow the lens to feature shallower depth-of-field. That said, the difference between f/1.5 and f/1.6 isn’t significant, so the improvements will likely be negligible.

In the past, Kuo has said that the main wide-angle will likely be very similar to the iPhone 12 series’. That said, he’s also mentioned other improvements are coming to the ultra-wide shooter in both the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max, including the addition of auto-focus, which should help with closer wide-angle shots, and a jump from a five-element lens to six.

Kuo says that similar to the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro, this should reduce the distortion visible in ultra wide-angle shots.

Apple is expected to reveal its iPhone 13 series in October. It’s likely that as the smartphone lineup’s release draws closer, more information about the iPhone 13 series will be revealed.

The post iPhone 13 Pro Max reportedly features better camera than other 2021 iPhones appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Apple aims to fix battery drain issues that have affected some iPhone 11 devices by recalibrating their batteries through its upcoming iOS 14.5 update.

According to an Apple support document first reported by MacRumors, this process happens when you update the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro or iPhone 11 Pro Max to iOS 14.5.

Apple says that it might take a few weeks for the iPhone’s battery health system to accurately figure out how much power your battery has left and how much performance it can output. A message in the Battery Health section of the iPhone settings app will offer more detail, according to the support document.

If battery recalibration fails, Apple says it will replace the battery for free. The feature is currently only part of the latest version of Apple’s developer beta, but it will likely make its way to the final version of iOS 14.5 soon.

Following the controversy from a few years ago surrounding Apple throttling the performance of iPhones, it’s not surprising that the company is trying to be more transparent about its smartphones’ battery issues. Hopefully, if you’re iPhone 11 device is experiencing battery and performance issues, this update will solve the problem.

Along with this battery recalibration feature, the latest iOS 14.5 beta also includes two new Siri voices and changes the voice-activated assistant to no longer default to a female-sounding voice.

Source: Apple Via: MacRumors

The post iOS 14.5 will recalibrate iPhone 11 batteries to fix performance issues appeared first on MobileSyrup.

It looks like Mobile World Congress (MWC), might not happen again this year as Google has announced it’s pulling out from the show.

Last year as the Pandemic ramped up, the GSMA (which runs MWC) insisted the event would still occur, and this year the same thing seems to be happening again. So far, Google, Nokia and Sony have all pulled out from the event over COVID-19-related concerns.

Google’s full statement is available below:

“Following our current COVID-19 travel restrictions and protocols, Google has made the decision to not exhibit at Mobile World Congress this year. We will continue to collaborate closely with GSMA and support our partners through virtual opportunities. We look forward to this year’s activities and seeing you in Barcelona in 2022.”

What will be more interesting is if the company has plans to hold an in-person Google I/O developer conference this year or shift the event to be online-only like Apple did with WWDC.

There’s also a possibility Google could cancel its developer conference entirely like it did last year.

Source: The Verge

The post Google isn’t going to Mobile World Congress appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Dyson has launched a new purification fan that can detect and destroy potentially dangerous formaldehyde, the ‘Purifier Hot+Cool Formaldehyde.’

The company says the new device is capable of “solid-state formaldehyde sensing technology designed to capture ultra-fine dust and allergens and destroy potentially dangerous formaldehyde.”

Potential sources of formaldehyde include particleboard, fibreboard, hardwood plywood panelling, wallpaper, cardboard, paper products and even certain types of fabrics. Dyson says its new purifying fan is capable of removing 99.97 percent of particles as small as 0.3 microns in a room.

The Purifier Hot+Cool Formaldehyde looks very similar to the Pure Cryptomic air purifiers Dyson released in the United States roughly a year and a half ago. What’s different is that these new air purifiers can detect formaldehyde separately from other potential toxins in the air thanks to its Selective Catalytic Oxidization (SCO) filter.

Along with the new formaldehyde purifying fan, Dyson has also launched new “reengineered” versions of the Dyson Purifier Cool and the Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool. For example, Dyson says that the new Purifier Cool is now 20 percent quieter than its predecessor.

The Dyson Purifier Cool in ‘White/Silver’ starts at $699, the Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool in ‘White/Silver’ costs $799 and the Dyson Purifier Hot+Cool Formaldehyde in ‘White/Gold’ costs $899. All three devices launch on March 29th and are available exclusively at Dyson’s Canadian demo stores and its website until April 23rd.

The post Dyson’s new formaldehyde detecting air purifier is now available in Canada appeared first on MobileSyrup.

In this episode of JS Party, I talked about my new book Grokking Simplicity: Taming complex software with functional thinking. https://cdn.changelog.com/uploads/jsparty/163/js-party-163.mp3

The post JS is an occasionally functional language – JS Party [PODCAST] appeared first on LispCast.