Matt Blaze

@mpjgregoire I’m sorry, but why are you asking? This is an incredibly broad, open-ended question that would require quite a bit of effort to answer properly. There are multiple variables at play that make this a non-trivial question.

Thanks for the information about the evils of proprietary software. I had never heard anything about this before. And this “free software” you speak of certainly sounds intriguing.

Perhaps you have some literature or a manifesto of some sort that I could read? Just leave it by the door as you’re running away from the guard dogs I’m about to release.

It was touch-and-go there for a while, but it looks like we somehow made it through another Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

@MLE_online “razor blade-free apples”.

Bonus spooky photo of the day.

With a few exceptions (mostly towers atop downtown switching offices in populated areas), no one was trying to make any of this utilitarian communications infrastructure beautiful. It was form strictly following function, built to be reliable and rugged.

But there was, I think, quite a bit of beauty to find in it. Perhaps we'll look at our current neighborhood cellular towers, now often regarded as visual blight, the same way decades after they're (inevitably) gone.

Infrastructure is heroic.

The San Jose Oak Hill Tower is unique in a number of ways. This particular concrete brutalist design appears not to have been exactly replicated elsewhere; it was site-specific. It sits atop an underground switching center (that was partly used for a military contract), which explains the relatively hardened design.

Today the underground switch is still there, owned by AT&T, but the tower space is leased to land mobile and cellular providers. The old horn antennas at top are disconnected.

For much of the 20th century, the backbone of the AT&T "Long Lines" long distance telephone network consisted primarily of terrestrial microwave links (rather than copper or fiber cables). Towers with distinctive KS-15676 "horn" antennas could be seen on hilltops and atop switching center buildings across the US; they were simply part of the American landscape.

Most of the relay towers were simple steel structures. This brutalist concrete platform in San Jose was, I believe, of a unique design.

Captured with the Rodenstock 50mm/4.0 HR Digaron-W lens (@ f/4.5) on a Cambo WRS-1600 camera (with about 15mm of vertical shift to preserve the geometry), the Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50) in dual exposure mode (which preserves a couple stops of additional dynamic range into the shadows).

The tower's shape is irregular; it tapers slightly.

The wide angle and panoramic orientation give a bit of context, alone on a hill (which is being rapidly encroached by adjacent residential development).

AT&T Long Lines "Oak Hill" Tower, San Jose, CA. 2021

All the pixels, but operator assistance is no longer available, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/51261791084

#photography

@hzulla Cron, of course, dates back to a world in which:

- computers were a significantly smaller part of the load on the power grid
- we didn't have tightly synchronized clocks everywhere (no NTP yet)
- we didn't have architectures in which power consumption was as tightly linked to computational load

Software often outlives all sorts of assumptions!

US midterm elections coming up this Tuesday.

There will be a fairly large number of tight contests, and in each one of them, someone who thought they might win will lose. And none of them, and none of their supporters, will be be happy about it.

Remember that this is not, in and of itself, evidence of fraud.

@frincon @pluralistic Well, I can only speak to my own experience. But I'm grateful for the work that reviewers do, as imperfect as it might be, even when they have the poor taste to criticize my own papers.

@frincon @pluralistic Well, I can only speak to my own experience. But I'm grateful for the work that reviewers do, as imperfect as it might be, even when they have the poor taste to criticize my own papers.

@frincon @pluralistic Of course, the system is far from perfect. I think it's particularly disfunctional that we conflate the paper publication process with awarding career points, and place so much emphasis on metrics like acceptance rate, etc. But I'm still glad we have some mechanism to review papers before they're published!

@frincon @pluralistic I'm not in your field, so my experience is from a different angle here, but my conclusion is very different. I've gotten my share of ill-informed reviews, but I'm absolutely sure my published work is better (if less prolific) for having been through the process. Also, I've benefited from peer review in the papers I *read*, which are relatively free of the kind of glaring, time-wasting errors and irrelevancies that peer review is reasonably good at catching.

@frincon @pluralistic I'm not in your field, so my experience is from a different angle here, but my conclusion is very different. I've gotten my share of ill-informed reviews, but I'm absolutely sure my published work is better (if less prolific) for having been through the process. Also, I've benefited from peer review in the papers I *read*, which are relatively free of the kind of glaring, time-wasting errors and irrelevancies that peer review is reasonably good at catching.

Meanwhile in Mexico City:

AT&T Long Lines "Oak Hill" Tower, San Jose, CA. 2021

All the pixels, but operator assistance is no longer available, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/51261791084

#photography

Arguably, given the health and environmental effects of things like power plants, perhaps they *should* be ugly. But ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

In any case, if you like this kind of stuff, let me strongly recommend the work of Hilla and Bernd Becher. https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/bernd-and-hilla-becher