No Food for Thought

I played several violent video games during my childhood and early adulthood, and wasted several more person-weeks playing them. Despite playing America's Army, I was never recruited by any army, and besides sometimes wishing violent tyrans would taste their own medicine, I do not consider myself particularly violent.

If violent video games were a costly distraction for me, it seems they may have been a very different kind of distraction at a political level. For an even longer time, and at a much higher cost: human lives, as politicians blame games instead of focusing on efficient ways to reduce gun violence.

Thankfully, it seems that ignoring NRA-funded groups, this side of the distraction may be coming to an end.

Some may track their limit manually, but after a while, this usually gets quite complicated. Thankfully, WOWA's page on the topic helps in 2 ways. It first provides a calculator, which will unfortunately be inconvenient for many. But as the page then explains, you can also get (somewhat) that information directly from the CRA!

That is, of course, if you've already used the CRA's My Account... or if you're willing to go through an Insane (and half-broken) process involving some 15 minutes of wondering how a national G7 government can make such a simple thing so complicated, in 2022. I for one have been lucky enough to survive the resulting head-banging and get access to the precious amount.

I suppose simplifying a complicated complication will always be somewhat complicated.

Update: Once you receive - of course by paper mail - you CRA security code, you can go back to the website. Once you will manage to remember how you connected, and once that authentification method starts to work again, you will be able to enter your security code. But not before entering again all of the same strange information CRA asked you hoping to authenticate you before you signed up. For the last time, hopefully... until your security code's expiry, not even 1½ year after you signed up!

8 years ago, Heartbleed was estimated to have cost at least 500 million USD. Since then, many more vulnerabilities were granted infamous names, including a few whose damages are estimated at the same magnitude. And yet, despite everything which was written about EU-FOSSA and the Core Infrastructure "Initiative", only roughly 10 million € were spent on all these projects.

For some time, hope in OpenSSF has started appearing, thanks to its approach and reasonable orientations. When Log4Shell erupted, OpenSSF's future was quite questionable. But this year, while some big challenges remain, it is acquiring an unprecedented credibility, with involvement from the White House, and a plan whose ambition would have been unthinkable prior to Heartbleed.

The main question now is whether it can find enough funding for these ambitions. Tens of millions of USDs would have been miraculous before the advent of crhypetocurrencies, but we remain far from the short-term target.

148 M USD may be little in comparison to the costs of the ongoing software chaos, yet the tragedy of the commons will most likely prevent even reaching that, once again. Unless - perhaps - the EU and the USA can join and demonstrate what collaboration can make possible?

2024-04-02 Update: funding security

How far have we come to that, almost 2 years later? OpenSSF's website doesn't even prominently list its contributors. Wikipedia's article only mentions the initial 30 million USD in pledges. OpenSSF's 2023 annual report merely mentions that Alpha-Omega was "awarded over $4.9M in grants toward securing open source in 2023".

As OpenSSF's efforts remain mostly a plan, reality has started hitting, with professionals scaling back on FLOSS.

2024-10-09 Update: funding criminals

As ransom payments are exploding, estimates of ransomware damages keep varying widely, but with an independent estimating that payments alone exceeded a billion USD/year, the scale of our underinvestment in security has become clearer than ever. Our collective commitment to security is orders of magnitude smaller than our commitment to criminals, who keep investing in becoming more and more efficient, and more and more profitable.

I grew up strongly rooted in the economy. My father was a merchant, I worked in his store, and I knew his employees earned 6 CAD per hour. For me, this minimum wage was generous.
A few years later, I got a first job. Thanks to some good fortune, I always found my wages generous, and even more when I started working in IT.

It turns out my story may not be the norm. A recent survey confirms an old phenomenon: highly distorted economical expectations by some of the people which we could think of as most educated, i.e. students of colleges in the USA. Even students in psychology − yes, psychology − overestimate their starting salary by more than 100%!

I find the amplitude of this distortion puzzling, and am curious about its causes. Is this a case of exceptionalism? Would students better estimate the starting salary of their peers? Is the USA's private education system to blame for this perception? Or are we encouraging education so much that we overvalue it?
Hopefully, research on this can help mitigating student debt.

2024 Update

A 2024 study found that half of college graduates remain underemployed! Real Estate Witch's methodology is not documented well enough to exclude that the main cause could be trivial: a large share of graduates just not getting a qualified job. It does seem likely that young people may fail to factor in that risk in their expectations.

Le monde évolue. Enfin... certes, il change, mais depuis quelques temps, on se demande si c'est pour le mieux. Déjà, la crise environnementale a débuté il y a bien des décennies. Depuis quelques années, c'est la démocratie elle-même qui est menacée. Et ne parlons même pas de la pandémie...

Tout cela est-il une simple crise? Une crise dont on pourra apprendre pour en sortir renforcés? Ou sera-t-il trop difficile de se relever?

Si nul ne le sait, admettons que notre confiance est au plus bas. Selon le baromètre de confiance Edelman, en ce moment, nous nous fions beaucoup plus aux compagnies qu'au gouvernement et aux médias (page 5). En plus, la fracture s'agrandit entre la population favorisée et les moins informés (p. 16). Peut-être le plus inquiétant : la confiance est plus basse dans les États démocratiques que dans les autocraties (p. 21), et le premier monde a beaucoup moins confiance en l'avenir que les second et tiers mondes (page 22).

Ironiquement, Edelman étant une société privée, je ne me fie pas aveuglément à ces résultats. Mais même s'ils étaient inexacts, l'ampleur du phénomène reste inquiétante. D'un autre côté, l'optimisme n'est pas interdit. Une baisse de la confiance en l'avenir pourrait être considérée comme un indicateur rassurant d'une prise de conscience. Les pays développés se rendent peut-être enfin compte que nous sommes en crise. Et peut-être cette réalisation nous permettra-t-elle de réagir, et d'ainsi éviter que cette crise ne se transforme en pic démocratique... voir en pic civilisationnel. Encore faut-il éviter une réaction pressée.

Méfions-nous de nos manières actuelles, et optons pour une remise en question posée... mais ne perdons pas confiance en notre capacité d'évoluer en une humanité consciente, unie et prête à se réguler elle-même, avant que la nature n'ait à faire tout le travail. Il est encore temps de faire de cette situation un simple creux, que nos descendants regarderont comme une phase de l'histoire à laquelle nous aurons su réagir brillamment. Tous ensemble, relevons ce test de volonté.

3 weeks ago, shortly after Russia expanded its invasion of Ukraine, I wondered how Russians would react. And I wondered if they could react, given how bad repression is getting. I wondered what would happen if a citizen was to go out with a sign reading "I am not protesting against anything."

It turns out I was quite naive, as others have now proven. While Vladimir Putin never declared war on free speech, his war against it has reached such a terrifying point that Russians can no longer hold a blank, letter-sized sheet of paper in public. No need for the sheet to be blue and yellow to be arrested.

In 2014, Vladimir Putin did not declare war on Ukraine when he "secretly" invaded it. Nor did he declare war in 2022, when he launched his "special military operation".

It turns out Putin has been skilfully exploiting democracy's worst flaws to weaken his opponents for a long time, with grave effects in the last decade. While our media focus on covering refugees and dead children, Putin has managed to legalize theft without even getting democracy's attention, discretely adding yet another colossal weapon to his arsenal for future wars. Putin knows better than to trigger a conventional war against NATO. Putin prefers to target democracy's weakest, corrupting or manipulating them with just enough discretion to avoid full-scale war.

Unfortunately, if Putin will not declare war on democracy, democracy still has to stop pretending there is no conflict. Putin's undeclared war against Ukraine may be our last occasion to acknowledge his war against democracy. And finally react accordingly.

One of Microsoft Windows's weaknesses has always been drive space usage analysis tools. My reference on that front is KDE, which often comes with an appropriate tool. In the old days, KDirStat, and more recently, a Dolphin plugin.

But on Windows, I always resorted to WinDirStat, which - unsurprisingly - is based on KDE's KDirStat. Last week, when I went to download again WinDirStat, for my new business PC, it felt a bit strange to download a package which is almost 15 years old. So I checked if I was missing some fresher fork of WinDirStat.

Doing so, I was pleased to discover that the newer KDE utility, Filelight, was available for Windows. So I considered installing its latest version, which is from 2021, rather than 2007.

I found that Filelight from Windows is obtained from the Microsoft Store, which offers Filelight 20.12.2. I was about to download it when I realized the package was... 299 MB!! A supposedly "light" utility which helps clearing space takes 299 MB?!!?

I hope it's just poor packaging, but in light of the current status, I decided to stick with the good old WinDirStat, which - despite weighing less than 1 MB - still works just as well on Windows 10.
Thank you, WinDirStat

Russian Foreign Intelligence Service director Sergey Naryshkin would, at first look, seem like an evil fraud. And yet, right before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Naryshkin dared, in a way, to disagree with his orders, despite the huge pressure. Another proof that evilness—just like everything—is relative; all humans - no matter their camp, their ideology and past - have some rationality and honor. Dissent, too, is most relative. Naryshkin, and many more of yesterday's villains, could quickly become tomorrow's heroes.

Whether we want it or not, conflict is a formidable source of change. War can bring destruction, but it can also teach us a lot about our weaknesses. Vladimir Putin will have choices to make after his invasion: slow down his already dangerous brain drain, or turn into an extreme dictator, keep preventing any media against him, and get rid of those who did not fully support him.

Democracy also has an occasion to learn from this conflict. We can learn that Russians are evil. Or, we can realize how dangerous autocracy is, how disunited we are despite the "United Nations" and how dangerous our disagreements have become. And we can realize how relative and surmountable our differences are, and finally make a real effort to actually unite. As Kyiv's mayor came to realize when his city was besieged:

Here's hoping the democratic world can use this as a learning opportunity, before autocracy unites us all in mediocrity and oppression.

2022-11-19 Update: It appears this won't cause a real problem.

It has already been more than 2 years since No Food for Thought rejoiced about the arrival of JPEG XL. Needless to say, the last 2 years were quite disappointing.

And unfortunately, it turns out our legal systems may keep photographic standards from catching up with this "new" century for even more years. Now, if only I could patent "software patent deliverance", perhaps we would manage to bring patent grants close enough to a halt for software to evolve!

If the 20th century was generally favorable to democracy, many see the 21st century as a different storyThis article from The Atlantic now requires subscription.. And many populations agree.

For sure, autocrats still face difficulties. At times, integrity may prevail, as their victims may have more ways to access quality information and more tools to organize dissent.

Unfortunately, autocrats also have much more information, more repressive tools, and ever-evolving ways to spread propaganda and misinformation. As autocracies fuelled by nationalism and xenophobia prosper, their collaboration and opportunities to share population control techniques and technologies reach new highs.

IEEE recently explored how artificial intelligence could go wrong. Personally, my immediate concern is rather how technological evolution in general favors autocracy:

Technology, whether it is "artificial" or not, largely helps detecting and quashing dissent. Modern technology allows combining ultra-powerful and highly automated arsenals with sophisticated surveillance, which could make dissent a souvenir from the past. And recent times have demonstrated it can help exploiting flaws in competing regimes to destabilize them.
Is there a name for the fear that technology will favor autocracy?

Autocracy expands thanks to many factors:

• Disregard for integrity and how citizens (from their country or others) fare, propaganda and cult of personality
• Efficient enforcement
• Uniformization and unity
• A greater compatibility with historical beliefs

For its part, democracy currently struggles due to several factors:

1. Hyper-individualism, sacralization of property, liberty, equality and cultural differences, and hyper-fragmentation
2. Huge barriers preventing citizens from exerting their theoretical power, cynicism and polarization
3. Substance abuse and other addictions (computers / video games, overconsumption)
4. State-granted collective bargaining monopolies
5. Hyper-complex legal systems, normalization of disregard for rules and poor prevention of external negativities
6. Separation of powers, the "principle of checks and balances" and a general tendency towards "consensus" governance

Whether or not autocracy better exploits evolution than democracy, and whether or not that fear is named, we do not have to accept that situation. While we cannot do much about the first list, we have control over much of the latter. Many self-proclaimed democracies, such as Canada, the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries, still contribute to the cult of personality, proudly keeping their autocratic past alive.

A naturally fragile crown

Technological advances have allowed democracies to make great progress. And recent advances allow us to make huge leaps forward. Our slow pace is not the result of having reached the objective, but rather a sign democracies are resting on their laurels.

But what does it mean to rest on our laurels? The first meaning is to get tired/lazy. But there is a much more dangerous sense; it may be that we have also associated our current state with the reasons why we took the lead, and chosen to remain in that state, as if it was a ultimate goal. In fact, the United Kingdom's direction is worst than resting on its laurels - it might be an attempt to go back to where it was when it won the most races, as if that was still a valid winning formula.

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, and playtime is over. If democracies want to keep impressing autocracies and to stay their envy, they need to get serious and do a real self-examination, distinguishing their true advantages from their less desirable properties which are merely obsolete ways, or even historical accidents.

Let's not give up on centuries of fighting. There is no need for everyone to get a gun and enroll. Our first defence should be to strengthen our democracies. The weapon democracies need the most is greater performance. Even superior economies, environments, education, health, and everything else. We can replace many guns by educating ourselves, reforming governance, building new tools, or just keeping ourselves healthy. Proper decision-making alone would represent a weapon of mass destruction against autocracy.

The path to good governance is a long road. If we have enough will to keep innovating, we can still keep our lead, one step at a time, until we hear a distant competition peacefully concede. Current dangers, however worrying, may just be the challenge we need to stand up again and refresh our laurels.

2023 Update: Russia has since pushed its information control even further, notably by blocking numerous more VPNs.