Friday Hodgepodge

Four Things

I haven't geeked out on tech for awhile, so here goes...

1. Here's a big part of why I write with the Emacs text editor, buried in the comments on a list of "Best Apps for Writiers:"

[T]he real advantage vim and emacs have is, they're still going to be maintained in 20 years time, and you won't end up having to do all your work on a machine that's two decades old, or write on something new and uncomfortable every half-decade.

Call that future-proofing. The insane amount of customizability is another huge part. It's easy enough to dump whatever I did into Word or similar when I need to collaborate with someone who uses more common tools.

2. And speaking of Microsoft, however indirectly, some of their old software defaults are to blame for the fact that "corp.com" -- a domain that has recently come up for sale -- is so dangerous to so many people:

For a brief period during that testing, Schmidt's company, JAS Global Advisors, accepted connections at corp.com that mimicked the way local Windows networks handle logins and file-sharing attempts.

"It was terrifying," Schmidt said. "We discontinued the experiment after 15 minutes and destroyed the data. A well-known offensive tester that consulted with JAS on this remarked that during the experiment it was 'raining credentials' and that he'd never seen anything like it."

Likewise, JAS temporarily configured corp.com to accept incoming email.

"After about an hour we received in excess of 12 million emails and discontinued the experiment," Schmidt said. "While the vast majority of the emails were of an automated nature, we found some of the emails to be sensitive and thus destroyed the entire corpus without further analysis." [format edits]

As far as I can tell, the sale has not yet occurred.

3. Robin Sloan, a best-selling author and self-described enthusiast-level programmer writes about a tool he created in his spare time:

Image by Nikolay Tchaouchev, via Unsplash, license.

Building this felt like playing with Lego, except instead of plastic bricks, I was snapping together conveniently-packaged blocks of human intellect and effort.

One block: a recurrent neural network, fruit of the deep learning boom, able to model and generate sequences of characters with spooky verisimilitude. Snap!

Another block: a powerfully extensible text editor. Snap!

Together: responsive, inline "autocomplete" powered by an RNN trained on a corpus of old sci-fi stories.

If I had to offer an extravagant analogy (and I do) I'd say it's like writing with a deranged but very well-read parrot on your shoulder. Anytime you feel brave enough to ask for a suggestion, you press tab, and ...

His post shows a couple of amusing animations of the software in action, and offers a way to try it yourself.

4. Robin Sloan's comment about being an enthusiast-level programmer reminds me of how Dave Barry, one of my favorite humorists, describes his own guitar playing:

I play guitar. I did it in college, and I’m good enough that if you didn’t know anything, you might think I could play guitar. But if you know anything, you would know immediately that I can’t. That I just can fake it reasonably well.

I don't program even at Sloan's level, but I have impressed family and friends with the tools I have created to make my writing easier and less time-consuming. But if I know enough to be able to do this, I also have Dave Barry's level of self-awareness about it.

The comment, by the way, comes from an interview of Barry by economist Tyler Cowan.

-- CAV