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So when passkeys were invented, everyone said yay. But they don't solve all the problems and create many new ones. The difficulty of having them across multiple devices, the difficulty of creating them in the first place, and the difficulty of implementing them. And the reliance on central authorities.
The best solution to passwords is not to have them at all. Just send the user a limited time link in text or email. This is simple to explain, simple to use, simple to implement. And no less secure than passwords; most of the time you can change or recover a password with a link in text or email anyway. Oh, and it supports multiple devices easily.
Tonight I watched stage 16 of La Vuelta (the Tour of Spain cycling race), which finished atop the legendary Lagos da Covadonga climb in Asturias, the Northernmost province of Spain. It was a fantastic race on an amazing track.
I rode this very climb myself, way back in 2007; I was in Spain for business and detoured up to Asturias to ride the stage and then watch the pros do it too. After an improbable series of barriers surmounted I made it, probably the hardest climb I've ever done then or since. Watching the race today was doubly enjoyable remembering being there which seems like yesterday, 17 years ago...
Rereading my report on the day, I remember feeling a weird sense of inevitability; with each obstacle it felt like something good was going to happen, and then it did. "How did I get here (!)" indeed ... Quite a day.
Watching pro cycling in Europe is the best - in addition to another Vuelta stage I've been privileged to watch two stages of the Tour de France, and to ride and then watch the Ronde van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders). I still have to see a Giro d'Italia stage (Tour of Italy), and would love to see the Strade Bianca (which tours Tuscany and finishes in La Plaza in Siena). It's nice to have goals :) Onward !
a Labor Day spent sailing w your granddaughter is pretty perfect
Yesterday I drove my bike up to Arroyo Grande and took a nice out-and-back ride to Avila Beach. Here's a composite video from the ride: This is a test, there are several things going on here. First the video itself is a GoPro time-lapse combined with a Strava GPS flyby, with embedded iPhone pics. Experimental, and I like it. Composed with Adobe Premier. LMK what you think.
And LBNL, this is my first time posting a video with my new spiffy (shaved-yak) email-to-blog mechanism. I love it by the way; this is being composed on my iPad, sitting in my den, miles away from my laptop and office.
{Another Update: modified the API to support embedding videos, as opposed to merely linking them. This takes advantage of modern browsers' support for video; in the bad old days I used to embed various video plugins, and in the worse older days used Flash. But now even mobile browsers can play video directly ...}
Well enough of the navel gazing; it was a fun ride watching the masses at the beach, and traversing through Shell Beach which is a beautiful little residential neighborhood tucked in between Pismo and Avila.
Pismo Beach is a real slice of Americana; except for the size of the people and their tattoos, could have been any time in the 1980s; the kids and dogs playing in the surf were just the same.
Speaking of dogs, this has to be the best way to tour around with them, and is my favorite pic from the trip. Woof. And onward...
I recently reread this post about AI and emergent properties, from May 2003, and was blown away by its prescience and relevance. (In posting about old posts I seem to be following the New Yorker's example and reusing content in lieu of new thinking, but in this case it's delightfully "meta", as new observations have "emerged" over time).
Way back in the dawn of time, 2009, now (checks sundial) 15 years ago, I posted about remembering 1984, about the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. At the time I posted it was 25 years ago, so now (gasp) it's been 40 years. All of those observations are still valid, more poignant for being so much older now; rowing on Lake Casitas, Peter Ueberroth, Ronald Reagan. Time Magazine. The first televised Olympics! The Torch OJ Simpson, Rafer Johnson. And LBNL the first Olympics (and still the only one) to be run as a business, at a profit for the host city. (Just typing LA84 gives me chills how weird is that? I was 25 at the time, must have made quite an impression on me :) And so with memories of Paris fading, we're getting ready to do it all again in 2028. Hope we can show everyone how it should be done, again. Should be amazing!...
Seems currently LA28 will feature 35 sports!
Speaking of The New Yorker, (we were) I've made it to the bottom of my stack, the Aug 26 issue (with a "haha" cover featuring A roller coaster with Harris and Walz going up while Trump and Vance go down ... typical), and I encountered this thoughtful review by Louis Menand of two books about bookstores, subtitled "why do bookstores still exist?" There's some good background and interesting thinking, but no clear answer. I think it has to do with the same reason I prefer paper magazines to their digital counterparts:skimmability. When you're seeking a specific book you go to Amazon and poof you buy it. But when you're browsing for a book, how do you find one? For that, nothing is better than a bookstore where you can easily scan the shelves, view covers, and if so minded, pick up and (gasp) sample the wares. They’re “fun”. Yeah, to some extent this contradicts The Long Tail (curiously, not mentioned in the review), but not really; the tail is there forfinding and ordering, at Amazon and elsewhere online, but browsing is still mostly done at the head, and the physical experience trumps virtual inventory. In fact the curation - concentrating and filtering the vast space of all books to a much more manageable inventory - is part of the attraction. Interestingly and as noted in the article, most independent bookstores call themselvesshops, and shopping is why they still exist.
In my office I have a pile of magazines. Real paper pick em up and read em magazines. The stack is in FIFO order, and depending on how busy or bored I am, it gets deeper or shallower. Regulars include the Economist still enjoy it, although the increasingly left bent is tiresome Fortune, Caltech, Traveler (always fun and getting better), Wired (kind of a legacy, rapidly fading into irrelevance), and of course The New Yorker I parted from them politically long ago, but enjoy the feature writing and above all the cartoons.
Anyway.
To the top of the stack recently rose the Aug 12 issue of New Yorker, with the title Comedy, an archival issue. They have been doing this a bit; cutting back on staff, they can run an issue with almost entirely recycled content, and readers like me find it interesting. In fact, honestly, it was way more interesting than the "regular" issue from Aug 12. Okay the focus was comedy, but also, there was a characteristic spirit of inquiry has been sadly lacking of late. The New Yorker's general stance is that it is a giant world out there (including, albeit begrudgingly, the world outside of New York city) filled with people and stories, and it wants to tell you about them. Lately it seems to have morphed into telling you how to think about them, and that doesn't go over as well nor foster that positive spirit. And so in this issue there is a lot of awesomeness: Notes about Robin Williams and Joan Rivers, rabbi jokes, Girl Scouts, and Buster Keaton, and articles about laughter, Richard Pryor, and the birth of Saturday Night Live, among others. The reviews were cherry picked as well, including Chelsea Handler on late night TV and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. I almost did read it cover to cover, and might yet go back. I guess it's inevitable that an old guy would look back and think "that was a better time", but ... it was :)
As usual Randall hit a nail on the head, and he comes at it in a way which makes a point... yes, this is a useful periodic table, but no, a little too dumb and not that useful. This is how I feel about the current trend toward "simple" user interfaces. They're dumbed down past the point of usefulness. The other day I tried Microsoft's "new Outlook", and it's a joke; you can't find anything because all the controls are hidden. Can we go back to good UI design now? Anyway...
Looking at history I see that this date Aug 13 has been a quiet one. I guess on this day I’ve mostly been busy, sailing, traveling, working, or otherwise not blogging. Sorry not sorry. But maybe (?) this will unplug the pipe. Hope y’all are having a nice summer and will check in again sooon…
NY 240527:
Posted by my friend Keith on his Facebook: I have no idea where I-94 is (Chicago maybe?) but we can all relate to this, those seemingly endless road construction projects where someone is making a career out of adding a lane. For me it is PCH into Santa Barbara, which has been ongoing since the time of Jesus and will continue long after he's back.
This is why I am opposed to government -anything, whether it be healthcare, education, science, etc. And/or roadwork. Anyone who thinks the government is better than private industry at anything, please feel free to list counter examples. It will be a short list.
So what can be done? Well fortunately the amazing Wayback Machine exists, and quite a lot of that old linked-to content has been captured there. The challenge is to figure out which links are now dead, and how to redirect them. So, is a link dead? Used to be, you could follow the link, and if you got a "404" the link was dead. (And if the site was gine, well, then it was even deader.) But anymore many sites now redirect any 404 to a special "not found" page, or a search engine, or their home page. Harder to tell. Jamie Zawkinsky solved this problem by waybackifying every link over five years old, on the assumption that it was dead or about to be. I'd like a smaller hammer. I'm thinking of a logic like this:
Anyway stay tuned. This will be internal plumbing. Perhaps one day we can visit old archived pages and follow their links!
The advice is to practice on a piece of line you don't care about before attempting to do this "for real", and that's good advice which I did not take. There is a line on my C-15 half unspliced waiting for me to go back and fix. But now I think I can. Onward!
My first attempt was an implementation of the then-brand-new “MetaWeblogAPI”, which was conceived as the successor to... the API of Blogger! Which was the biggest baddest most prevalent blogging system. This was back in 2004, mind you, right after Google bought Blogger, and way before Six Apart and Wordpress and so on. Anyway it didn’t work. Not only did the API not work, but even if it had done, there wouldn’t have been external tools with which to post. The blogging ecosystem never went that way. My second attempt was an implementation of my own email-based way to post. At that time, in 2011, I had just begun using my then-brand-new iPad, and began wanting to use it for blogging. There I was sitting in my family room, reading content on my iPad, and in order to post about it I had to go over to the PC in my office. Anyway it didn’t work. I built it, lots of goodness in the design, but abandoned it after a few months of not posting. My third attempt was more recent. At that time, in 2022, I switched from SharpReader to Feedly for daily reading of RSS feeds.. This corresponded with a nice new habit of having coffee with Shirley in the morning. We’d sit there, fire roaring (or windows open, depending on the time of year), and I’d be scanning my feeds for the news. Which now also included Twitter/X feeds. I’d read about something, and in order to post about it I had to go over to the PC in my office. And that was truly crummy.
This very post was composed and sent as an email. This likely spells the end for the oldest tool in my kit, a venerable desktop app named Citydesk. It predated my blog by about a year (2001!) and was built by Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software. (They were known for FogBugz, an early and most-useful bug tracking tool, and Joel went on to co-create Stack Overflow...) Citydesk hasn’t been supported for years but it keeps working, and has been the only way for me to post to my blog in all this time. Does this mean more posting from me? Better posting? Or the end of times? Who knows.... Stay tuned!
Fairly recent posts (well last handful, anyway):
For older posts please visit the archive.
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Passwords are a problem, for sure, for me as a user as well as for me as an applications developer. Good passwords are hard to remember, every site has different rules, sometimes you have to change them, sometimes you can't reuse them, and everybody writes them down insecurely. (Yep, you do too, admit it.)
So long passkeys, we hardly knew ya...
Little did I know or could have known that 21 years later AI would be at the forefront of all tech, and that it would be a "brain dead" form of AI, without heuristics, happily using applied statistics to synthesize emergent properties. We can now hypothesize that not only does this lead to "intelligence", but it might be all that ever does; there are no underlying heuristics at all. In this, I find an analogy to Alpha Zero, 
In the post linked above AI pioneer Marvin Minsky was quoted as saying "AI can't deal with concepts like water is wet'". That was true in the 1970s. And it was thought that to deal with this, "wet" would have to be defined, and an association between "water" and "wet" would have to be made. Now we can see that a concept like "wet" emerges from the presence of things like water, and so the association is causative, water "causes" wetness. Such properties are a function of observation, they are not inherent nor are they explicit, and they are to some extent influenced by the observer as well as the thing itself.
Consider a more abstract property like "beauty". Not only is it famously "in the eye of the beholder", but it is only such, it does not exist in and of itself. (This point is made in another old post made only a week later, 
Here’s a great shot of some unusual action at last weekend’s C-15 North Americans. Wow. That’s my crew Carly and I; we won that race but finished fourth overall in a great regatta at the Santa Barbara Yacht Club. (Perhaps, more to follow.). And yes, we made the front page of Sailing Anarchy, not quite the Rolling Stone but for sailors, close.
Now that I've finally 
Probably you will not be as impressed as I am, but I have successfully mastered (or at least, accomplished) end-to-end splicing of braided line. Without a fid, just a wire coat hanger, some e-tape, and a lot of patience. Yay.
Way back in the dawn of time, way way back, I messed around with an API for my blog. The idea was that I could use (gasp!) external tools to post. It would make things easy. And in particular, Maybe I could post on any device from anywhere.
And so ... and so ... yes, I finally finished the email-based API to my blog. I could tell you how it works, and you could admire it, but you couldn’t use it because it is custom for me and my little blogging world (sorry). It is however pretty nice, I must tell you. I can post images (including auto-resizing-them), I can edit posts, I can embed links, do all the things, from *any* device which supports sending email, so any device at all. And of course I can do it from anywhere at all too.
