Eric S. Raymond's Blog, page 51

Indestructible cat is indestructible

Those of you not in our cat’s fan base can ignore this.

Sugar, at twenty years and five months of age, had her annual checkup today and was pronounced almost indecently healthy. The usual chorus of “Wow, she doesn’t look old!” occurred.

Yes, we do have to hydrate her about once a week. And we can tell she needs it when the night yowling starts – but, in general, indestructible cat continues to be indestructible. Nobody expected her to live this long, much less as an active cat who looks about half her actual age.

Cathy and I are pleased and proud. Of course this is is probably mostly good genes, but we like to think all the affection Sugar has collected from us and our geeky ailurophilic friends has contributed to her longevity.

Looks like she’ll be entertaining visiting hackers in our basement for some time to come.

Announcing: Keyboards with crunch

I’ve founded a G+ community for fans of the Model M and other buckling-spring keyboards. Here it is:

Keyboards with crunch

Buckling-spring keyboards are wonderful devices for the discriminating hacker, vastly superior to the mushy dome-switch devices more common these days. But for various reasons (including the mere fact that they contain a lot of mechanical switches) they can be tempermental beasts requiring a bit of troubleshooting and care.

This community is for people who want to know how to find, care for, and troubleshoot their clicky keyboards.

Hugh Daniel is dead – in frighteningly familiar circumstances

Hugh Daniel, a very well known hacker and cypherpunk, was found dead in his apartment a few days ago. Hugh was a terrific guy and a friend of all the world, the kind of cheerfully-larger-than-life personality that makes things a little merrier and more interesting wherever it goes. He’s going to leave a big Hugh-shaped hole in a lot of lives, including mine.

But I had a presentiment when I heard the first report of Hugh’s death, which was borne out when the first information came out about probable cause. Friends report that the coroner is fingering stroke or heart disease – but I’ve seen this movie before.

Because I’ve seen this movie before, I make a prediction. If they autopsy Hugh, they will find evidence of undiagnosed type II diabetes, non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver, serious coronary plaque, and probably marginal function in the kidneys and other organs. He will present similarly to a victim of long-term, low-grade poisoning.

About three years ago, another friend of mine, a gamer named Richard Butler, was found dead with these symptoms. The two were about the same age when they died; both physically large men with big booming voices, happily extroverted geeks with a knack for making friends wherever they went, and the kind of zest for life that can make someone seem unkillable.

And both looked prematurely aged in photographs I saw shortly before their deaths. The energy was still there, but in retrospect the body was beginning to fail.

I think I know what actually killed Hugh and Richard. I don’t think it was old age in the normal sense; neither of them was even 60, if I’m any judge. I’m sounding an alarm because I think a significant number of my peers could die the same, preventable death.

The medical establishment calls it “metabolic syndrome”. Or, sometimes, “cardiometabolic syndrome”, “insulin-resistance syndrome”. It’s associated with hypertension, cardiac disease, obesity, and diabetes.

A significant thing about Richard and Hugh is that they were both large-framed men who carried, rather gracefully, an amount of overweight that would have looked morbid on a smaller physique.

Most doctors would observe this, shrug and say that the overweight is what killed them. And, as far as that goes, it’s probably not wrong. But I have come to believe that the actual underlying cause of such overweight and metabolic syndrome is fructose poisoning.

When I first heard that Richard has fatty cirrhotic deposits in his liver when he died, I didn’t know what that meant. A few months later I learned that this is what happens when the liver becomes overloaded with hepatotoxic compounds and secretes encapsulating fat to defend itself. Alcohol stimulates this response; so does the fructose component in sugar. If an autopsy opens Hugh’s liver, that’s what I’d bet they’ll find signs of.

The hepatic poisoning deranges half a dozen critical metabolic pathways. The secondary effects of the derangement are the whole range of metabolic-syndrome symptoms, including cardiac disease and diabetes and probably stroke as well.

People look at this and think “It’s just old age.” It isn’t. It’s almost certainly fructose poisoning. I think I’ve just lost my second friend to it. I don’t want to lose a third.

If you’re reading this, and you’re overweight, please cut the goddamn fructose out of your diet before it kills you. No more HFCS-laden sodas. No more white-sugar-from-hell desserts. You even need to back off the fruit juices; I used to drink a lot of apple juice, but don’t any more.

Watch the ingredients lists on what you eat. The liver’s ability to process fructose non-toxically is limited; nobody’s sure what the limit is and it probably varies, but most people who have looked into this think about 50g of fructose per day is the most you should risk. Sucrose (cane sugar) is 50% fructose; convert accordingly.

Becoming a no-sugar fanatic isn’t required. Whole fruit is reasonably safe because the fiber slows the fructose uptake, making it unlikely that you’ll hit your liver’s conversion limit. I have a cup of cocoa most nights, about 16g of fructose. Occasionally I treat myself to cheesecake or even baklava. The point isn’t ritual self-denial, it’s to not go over 50g a day.

Please do these things to live. And to not be fat as a whale. It’s not complicated or difficult, it just takes a little attention. And I’m tired of watching friends die needlessly.

Adobe in cloud-cuckoo land

Congratulations, Adobe, on your impending move from selling Photoshop and other boring old standalone applications that people only had to pay for once to a ‘Creative Cloud’ subscription service that will charge users by the month and hold their critical data hostage against those bills. This bold move to extract more revenue from customers in exchange for new ‘services’ that they neither want nor need puts you at the forefront of strategic thinking by proprietary software companies in the 21st century!

It’s genius, I say, genius. Well, except for the part where your customers are in open revolt, 5000 of them signing a petition and many others threatening to bail out to open-source competitors such as GIMP.

Fifteen years ago I pointed out in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and it sequels that buying proprietary software puts you at the wrong end of a power relationship with its vendor. And that this relationship will almost always evolve in the direction of more control by the vendor, more rent extraction from your wallet, and harder lock-in. Adobe’s move illustrates this dynamic perfectly.

But the response from its customer base highlights something else that has happened in those 15 years; open-source applications like the GIMP, and the open-source operating systems they run on, actually offer users a practical way out of these increasingly abusive relationships. Adobe’s customers aren’t being shy about pointing this out, and the company is going to feel heat that it wouldn’t have before 1998.

It’s not clear which side will back down in this particular confrontation. But the underlying trend curves are obvious; even if Adobe wins this time, sooner or later the continuing increases in the rent Adobe needs to claw out of its customers are going to exceed the customers’ transition costs to get out of Adobe’s jail.

The problem is fundamental; one-time purchase payments can’t cover unbounded downstream support and development costs. They can only even appear sufficient when your market is expanding rapidly and you can always use today’s new revenue to cover support costs from last year’s sales. This stops working when your markets near saturation; you have to somehow move customers to a subscription model to survive.

But doing that doesn’t solve an even more fundamental problem, which is that the stock market doesn’t actually reward constant returns any more; it wants an expectation of rising ones in order to beat the net-present-value discount curve. Thus, in a near-saturated market, the amount of rent you extract per customer has to perpetually increase.

But what can’t go on forever won’t. Eventually you’ll have to squeeze your customers so hard that they bolt. This may be happening to Adobe now, or it could take a few more turns of the screw. But it will happen. And as with Adobe, so with all other proprietary software.

On the road, blogging limited

Blogging will be limited for the next week.

I’ve received several requests for posts on a bunch of meaty topic, including (a) Adobe’s Creative Cloud move, (b) The Defence Distributed takedown notice, (b) the utility of power-projection navies, (d) current state of the terror war, and others. I won’t get to all of these anytime soon, because I’m swamped with work and will be travelling today to an undisclosed city for a meeting I can’t talk about yet.

Sorry to go all international-man-of-nystery on everybody but all will be revealed later this year. It will have beenb worth the wait.

Destroying the middle ground, redux

A few weeks ago I blogged an alternate-history story in which the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was abused and distorted in the same ways the Second Amendment has been in our history. The actual point of the essay, though, was not about either amendment; it was about how strategic deception by one side of a foundational political dispute can radicalize the other and effectively destroy the credibility of moderates as well.

Now comes the news that the head of the Department of Homeland Security officially thanked the Governor of Missuri for violating state law by illegally passing to the DHS Missouri’s list of concealed-carry permit holders. The Governor then lied about his actions.

The Feds, meanwhile, continue to illegally retain transfer records from federally licensed firearms dealers past the statutory time limit, among several other continuing violations of a 1986 law forbidding the establishment of a national gun registry.

The BATF also criminally violated its authorizing laws by transferring over 2000 firearms to Mexican drug gangs through illegal straw purchases (google “ATF gunwalking scandal”). Over 150 Mexican citizens and United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry were killed with these guns.

Meanwhile, following scandals about “drop guns” at the sites of police shootings, some big-city police forces (notably in LA and NYC) are strongly suspected of routinely using planted guns to frame suspects they can’t otherwise nail on firearms-possession charges.

Any trust that “gun control” will be administered with even minimal respect for civil rights is long gone, destroyed by the behavior of the enforcers themselves.

This is yet another way to destroy the middle. Anti-firearms activists speak of “common-sense regulation”, knowing that the agencies enforcing these have engaged in a series of criminal conspiracies to evade and ignore safeguards against abuse of such regulations. By doing so, they annihilate any trust firearms owners might have once felt that “common-sense regulation” is anything other than a prequel to those abuses.

In the absence of trust there can be no compromise. This is how you radicalize gun owners into the Second-Amendment absolutists most of us are today. After four decades of bad faith the only position left to us is “No more ‘gun-control’ laws. Ever.”

The true meaning of moral panics

In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In retrospect it’s easy to understand as a reaction against the gradual breakdown of both legally enforced and de-facto racial segregation in the U.S.

But moral panics are by no means a monopoly of cultural conservatives. These days the most virulent and bogus examples are as likely to arrive from the self-described “left” as the “right”. When they do, they’re just as likely to be about something other than the ostensible subject.

In Lies, Damn Lies, and Rape Statistics a college newspaper does a little digging through U.S. crime statistics and finds that the trendy “anti-rape” movement is exaggerating the rape risk of college women by two full orders of magnitude – as it concludes, “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400.”

What can explain such gross distortion? I’ve looked into this issue myself and discovered a lot of flim-flam. Still, even the the best-case figures I arrived at apparently overestimated the actual risk on campuses by a factor of 50. (Barbarian zones – like, say, inner-city Detroit – might be a different story.)

If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.

Recently, Meg Lanker-Simmons, a left-wing activist at the University of Wyoming, faked a rape threat. The agenda seemed obvious: smear Republicans, confirm feminist narratives about male hostility to ‘uppity’ women, confirm women as morally superior creatures who rightfully dictate the content and style of male behavior.

This, together with the crazy inflation of rape statistics, suggests that the campus “anti-rape” movement has little or nothing to do with preventing rape. It has become an instrument of the sort of political warfare in which truth is most likely to be the first casualty.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before, of course. Playing the “racism” card has become such a cliche of left politics that even the reliably lefty Jon Stewart now spoofs it as overdone and busted. In that case the threatening Other is working-class white men, especially rural and most especially Southern, and the aim is clearly to prevent them from pushing back against the culture and politics of elite bicoastal left-liberals.

But there’s actually something a bit more puzzling about the campus-rape panic. College campuses are far from a threatening environment for feminists. Nowadays women outnumber men in every department outside STEM fields. At many colleges mandatory ‘sensitivity training’ heavily privileges female and feminist perspectives. By federal encouragement, female students can now accuse men of rape and expect the claim to be evaluated under circumstances that deny the man any right to due process and the presumption of innocence.

On campus, the Other seems so thoroughly controlled that some academics now attribute declining male enrollments to an unwillingness to enter a hostile work environment. What are women like Meg Lanker-Simmons really pushing against? What in their environment do they not already own?

I think the answer is…themselves. The increasing intensity level of the campus-rape panic seems well correlated with the erosion of college womens’ position in sexual bargaining.

The key concept here is hypergamy: womens’ wired-in desire to mate with men who are taller, smarter, richer, a little older, and higher-status than they are. Hypergamy is at the core of the human female mating strategy in exactly the way that seeking physical attractiveness (signs of fitness to bear) is at the center of male strategy.

An increasing number of hypergamically-aspiring college women are competing for a decreasing pool of higher-status male peers. The consequences are well documented; in the “hookup” culture that now pervades many campuses, sex has become a woman’s opening bid rather than a prize men must compete strenuously to attain. This was a more or less inevitable result once premarital sex stopped being strongly tabooed and the campus sex-ratio flipped over to majority female.

It is not surprising that women like Lanker-Simmons should resent this situation, because it’s almost exactly the reverse of the instinctively K-type mating strategy common to females in humans and most other mammalian species. It’s sex on male r-type terms, and women have DNA going clear back to the Cretaceous that pushes against it.

(This logic also implies that today’s campuses should be among the last places to expect rapes rather than the first. I’ll leave that demonstration as a very simple exercise for the reader.)

This Other, alas, will not be so easily banished. To reverse the dynamic, one of the following things would have to happen:

(1) Premarital sex again becoming strongly enough tabooed that effectively all women cannot offer it as an opening bid. (It has to be effectively all; otherwise the defectors get a large enough advantage in competing for men to make the withholding strategy unstable for the rest. We’ve seen this movie before.)

(2) Sex ratios on campus flip back to a large enough majority of males so that each woman has multiple hypergamic targets who must compete for her. Under these circumstances “not till we’re married” becomes viable again.

(3) Women as a group revert to having much less economic autonomy and social power than men – enough less, anyway, that almost any nominal SES peer or near-peer is a hypergamic target. There’s a tradeoff between this and move 2; the fewer males there are in the nearly-peer population, the more status and autonomy women must implicitly sacrifice to have a constant number of eligible hypergamic targets.

I leave the reader to imagine the screams of rage that would issue from feminists if any of these were even seriously proposed, let alone attempted. And I am not actually advocating any of them, just pointing out that women like Meg Lanker-Simmons are caught in a trap that has nothing to do with (mythically) rape-minded men and everything to do with the world easy contraception and feminist ideology have given us.

I think that underneath the obvious political maneuvering, screaming about a nonexistent rape pandemic is a displacement activity. Campus feminists do it because confronting their actual powerlessness and the jaws of the dilemma that created it would be too painful for them to face.

At bottom, the problem is that female hypergamic instinct and the ideology of sexual equality are inevitably in collision. (Men don’t have the symmetrical problem because their instinctive mating strategy is to just bang women who turn them on physically without regard for differential status.) Short of genetically re-engineering humans to change their mating instincts, there is probably no fix for this.

Of course the implications of this logic go way beyond college campuses. It’s a fundamentally tragic situation and I don’t know what we as a culture or a species are going to do about it.

One thing I am sure of is that displaced moral panic and silly, counterfactual yabbering about “rape culture” will not solve the problem.

Penguicon party 2013!

My blogging will be light or nonexistent over the next week. I’m on the road in Michigan, at Penguicon; the Friends of Armed and Dangerous party will be here at 9:00 tonight.

It really is the 21st century. Yesterday I merged a bunch of patches, ran acceptance tests, and then polished and shipped a reposurgeon release – while in the passenger seat of a car tooling down I-80. The remarkable thing is that this no longer seems remarkable.

I discovered in the process that while i3 is the best thing since sliced bread on a 2560×1440 display, a tiling window manager is pretty uncomfortable on a laptop-sized 1366×768 display. The problem is that even dividing the laptop screen only in half produces shell and Emacs windows that are narrower than their natural 80-column size rather than wider as on the larger display; one gets the text in email and source code wrapping unpleasantly. I’ve fallen back to XFCE for laptop use.

In two hours, Geeks With Guns. Going to be a full day.

Iranian connection in the Boston bombing

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the terrorist who died in a firefight with the Boston police with a kettle bomb strapped to him, had a YouTube page. Examining an image of it, I found an approving link to a movie titled “The Black Flags of Khorasan”.

Because, unlike the politically-correct idiots who infest our nation’s newsrooms, I’ve actually studied the history of Islam in some detail, that title had immediate resonance for me. I thought I knew what it meant, and I googled.

What I found confirmed my hunch. Not just that Black Flags from Khorasan is a jihadist propaganda movie, but that it’s a jihadi movie of a particularly interesting kind – Mahdist, and almost certainly radical Shi’a. Mahdism is present in Sunni but much less central, and in any case the region of Khorasan has been the heart country of Shi’a for nearly a thousand years.

Domestic terrorism, my ass. As usual, the mainstream media was slavering to pin this on some Richard-Jewell-like native-born conservative (bonus points if they get to say “Tea Party”). As usual, it’s a jihadi atrocity in which fundamentalist Islam was causal.

But that film is a more specific clue. If the investigators have even a microgram of brains, they’re looking for an Iranian connection now.

Building a better IRC client

I’ve been thinking about how to build a better IRC client recently.

The proximate cause is that I switched to irssi from chatzilla recently. In most ways it’s better, but it has some annoying UI quirks. Thinking they’d be easy to fix, I dug into the codebase and discovered that it’s a nasty hairball. We’ve seen projects where a great deal of enthusiasm and overengineering resulted in code that is full of locally-clever bits but excessively difficult to modify or maintain as a whole; irssi is one of those. Even its maintainers have mostly abandoned it; there hasn’t neen an actual release since 2010.

This is a shame, because despite its quirks it’s probably the best client going for serious IRC users. I say this because I’ve tried the other major contenders (chatzilla, BitchX, XChat, ircii) in the past. None of them really match irsii’s feature set, which makes it particularly unfortunate that the codebase resembles a rubble pile.

I’m nor capable of stumbling over a situation like this without thinking about how to fix it. And yesterday…I had an insight.

Probably the single most annoying thing about today’s IRC clients is that if you don’t leave them on all the time you miss some of the channel traffic. There’s no way to join a favorite channel and look at the traffic for the last half hour to get context that happened while you were gone, other than leaving your client actively watching it. And sometimes you don’t want a client distracting you with chat and urgent notifications.

So, I thought, OK, what if I built a client that logs all your IRC traffic for you? You’d still have the dropout problem, but at least it could always use the log to show you the last part of the conversation you were actually present for. Hm…but what about when you weren’t there?

That’s when I got it. I realized that because people think of IRC clients as ways to watch network traffic, they build them all wrong. Here’s how to do it right…

First, build a little client daemon whose job it is to watch channels for you and log their traffic, aggregating it into a message timeline that’s stored as a logfile on disk. The daemon gets started if it’s not already running, whenever you fire up your client. But exiting the client doesn’t kill the daemon. If you really don’t want to miss anything, you launch the daemon from your login profile well before you start your client.

Your client is just a browser for the message timeline. It doesn’t actually talk to IRC servers because it no longer has to. When it wants to send traffic, or join a channel, or leave a channel, it ships a request to the daemon, which is managing all the actual server connections. The response gets appended to the message timeline just like every other traffic and is then visible by the client.

Then I realized…I’ve already written this daemon! Almost all of it, anyway. It’s irker, my replacement for the defunct CIA service. Add an option to log traffic. Add options to set your nick and its nickserv password. Done!

Those features are in the irker repo now. Not released yet because the code for nickserv authentication is untested, but that’s a detail. The point is that adding about 20 lines of trivial code has amped up irker so that it’s now a generic chat-logging back end that could be used by a whole family of IRC clients – every one of which could be functionally superior to what’s now out there.

To paraphrase XKCD: Code reuse. It works, bitches!