Thoughts from a Rustacean learning React

2023-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

At Source.ag</a> we have something called Personal Exploration Time (or PET days for short). The idea is that you get some time, usually one day, to explore a topic that you find interesting which may or may not be useful for Source.ag in the long run. The idea is to give new and innovative ideas a bit of room to breathe before they have to prove themselves. It's explicitly part of the concept that it's okay for them to fail, or conclude that it's not that useful. I love these days, because not only can (and have) they lead to new innovative technologies and ideas being used by the company, but they are also great for my motivation. They help break up slumps when I feel stuck, give me time to investigate technologies I'm really excited about, and just generally let me engage with the creative side of my job.</p>

Just to give you an idea, here are some projects I've done in the past:</p>

Checking out a new data frame library</li>

Checking out a new property-based testing framework</li>

Informally indexing the company's yearly CO2e emissions</li>

Making a Python & Rust MVP setup</li>

Optimising some decision rules in our pipeline with bayesian reasoning.</li> </ul>
Because so many people took time off over Christmas and we were still busy finalising the roadmap for Q1, rather than have us start on something and put it down immediately again for the holidays, management decided to give the entire cultivate team an extravagant 3-day long stretch of PET at the end of 2022. This did amazing things for the team's motivation (or at least for mine), but that's not what I'm here to talk about today. I wanna talk about what I did for those 3 days: Learning React.</p>
Why React?</h2>
Web and front-end work are subjects I've danced around for a long time. I've always gravitated towards backend and analysis work. On the front end side of things, I don't know much beyond the HTML and CSS I needed to make the website you're looking at right now. I've tried to learn javascript and its myriad of frameworks before but somehow they never really clicked for me. In addition, design is not something I feel comfortable with either. In code, I don't usually suffer from blank-page-paralysis, but in design and UI work it feels very overwhelming for me to even get started.</p>
However, I've felt held back by my inability to make simple UIs for the projects and prototypes that I've made. I can make a CLI with no problem, but those have two very major drawbacks.</p>
First of all, they are just not well suited to every program. I think that CLIs work well if you keep them somewhat contained, but some programs need to facilitate so many different interactions that it's not really feasible to do it all ergonomically.</p>
Secondly, when you're trying to demo a prototype I think it's hard to overstate the value of a good visual component (pun intended). Even from my own experience, it's very hard to get a sense of how nice a CLI is without actually using it. For GUIs, however, it's different. Even if it's not the same as direct experience, with a GUI you can at least get across a decent idea by video, and I've found that to be an incredible tool when I'm trying to show off an idea to someone.</p>
Not being able to make a UI makes iterating on the (technical) design a lot harder at times. I like to work iteratively, holistically if at all possible, and to do that you need something that will at least resemble what it will look like to the end user. This is why I think it's really important to dogfood</a> what you build. Backend systems should be in service of the UX, and all too often it's the other way around in my opinion. Even CLIs have a UX even though we don't usually think of it as being such (and that's a problem). This is often why I dislike the old UNIX tools</a> like cat</code>, awk</code>, find</code> and sed</code> even though they work fine and prefer to use modern CLI tools written in Rust whenever possible; their CLIs are just so much more ergonomic in my opinion.</p>
So those are some of the reasons I wanted to get some basic proficiency in building GUIs. But why React specifically? Two reasons. First of all, it's one of the more foundational architectures for UIs as far as I can tell. Almost every new UI library I see these days touts being "like react", as well as being the topic du jour on the internet when the front end is mentioned. So I figured that even if I didn't end up liking React itself enough to use, getting a basic understanding of how React works would help me get familiar with other UI frameworks. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, it's what Source.ag and by extension my colleagues use, so I knew I'd have people to go to for help if I needed it. And boy did I end up needing that.</p>
The project I did was a joint one with my wonderful colleague Neha Kalia</a>. We both wanted to learn a new technology so we decided to team up and build a joke app together. She would take care of the backend with Golang, and I'd get a front end working with React. The extra bonus for me was that Neha also works on our front end and thus is already familiar with React so I could come crying to her whenever things went pear-shaped. And let me just say she was an invaluable resource and an incredible mentor for an FE newbie like myself. Seriously Neha, thanks, you were a lifesaver.</p>
The project pitch</h2> What app did we make, you ask? Well, we built a revolutionary system called "What would my Project Manager say?". I think I'll let it speak for itself:</p> Is your project manager too busy to talk to you right now? Do you have a burning question about what you're supposed to be doing? Then look no further! What would my PM say? (WWMPS) is a state-of-the-art AI system that has learnt from 1000s of project managers throughout time and across the globe. It has distilled and refined all this knowledge and is ready to dispense these life-changing and invaluable insights to you, yes you, at a moment's notice.</p> </blockquote> At the risk of ruining it by over-explaining: this is a joke. WWMPS is basically a glorified magic 8 ball that will respond to any question you ask it with vaguely PM-sounding snippets like "Have you made a ticket for that?" or "How does this impact the customer?". And before you ask, yes, I did show it to my actual PM, and she was a real champ about it (Paula, if you're reading this, thanks for taking the joke so well, you're amazing <3).</p> If you want to check out the final product yourself you can find the code here</a>. At the time of writing it doesn't work because the backend doesn't come packaged with it, but I'll try and make a dummy version available that actually does something.</p> This was a really fun project, and as always, I have thoughts and opinions. Lots of them. So I thought it would be fun to talk about some thoughts I had while learning JS and React. The timeline of the project looked vaguely like this:</p> Day 1: Learn the basics of React by following a tutorial</li> Day 2: get some interactions working with dummy data</li> Day 3: integrate with Neha's backend</li> </ul> One final disclaimer before we get into it properly: as the title says, these are my thoughts and opinions. This post is not at all meant to be factual or objective. To quote the wonderful YouTuber:</p> throughout the course of this [blog] I'm going to say some mean things. I'm going to say some nice things! but most importantly I'm going to be saying some mean things. sorry I mean fair, I'm going to be fair.</p> - Tentacrul</a></p> </blockquote> So I will be saying mean things throughout this blog but I don't want you to come away thinking that I didn't like JS or that I think JS should become more like Rust. I actually liked it much more than I expected to but some things that just boggle my mind and I do think they are worth pointing out. I tend to be harshest on things I actually like because I want them to be the best they could be! If I didn't like the experience, I wouldn't be writing this post. With that out of the way, let's get started!</p> Initial overall thoughts</h2> I'll be honest, I enjoyed it way more than I had expected. Because I'd tried JS and React a couple of times before and just bounced straight off I was actually a little nervous before starting. Luckily, I started having a lot of fun with it quite quickly. After it all started to click for me after a few hours, I found the (for me) novel structure and idioms much more refreshing than confusing or frustrating, as I had expected. It also helped that Neha and I had a similar style of humour so I could put lots of stupid jokes in there, which was also super motivating for me.</p> Another advantage I had was that Neha was building a backend alongside me. Having a backend to integrate with made me get familiar with some problems that I otherwise would not have stumbled over like CORS issues and POST requests. (I'm a web newbie okay, cut me some slack.)</p> It also gave me a better understanding of what the FE collaboration workflow looks like, and how dependent FE folks are on backend stuff. If stuff doesn't work you sometimes have to sit there twiddling your thumbs for a while, and I think it's good to have been on the other end of that for once. There was also some nice back and forth between Neha and me, and I think this ultimately led to nicer designs for both the front end and the back end. Overall, if you ever do a project like this, and you don't necessarily need to learn about backend technologies, I'd still recommend adding a backend to it. It will make the learning experience much more complete and useful even if it's technically less focused.</p> So overall: both the project and React get a thumbs up from me 👍</p> The out-of-the-box experience</h2> One thing that I actually didn't like about React was npm</code>. Coming from Rust, there were definitely a few things that stood out to me.</p> The first thing is that npm</code>, or at least create-react-app</code> (CRA) actively teaches you not to read its output. Any time you run something like npx create-react-app</code> or npm install</code> it produces one line of text that it continually overwrites, making it impossible to read. This might seem inconsequential but it's quite frustrating if something goes wrong because now you have no record of what it was actually doing that led to the problem.</p> Secondly, when I ran CRA for the first time it immediately slapped me around the head with this warning:</p> npm WARN deprecated tar@2.2.2: This version of tar is no longer supported, and will not receive security updates. Please upgrade asap. </span></code></pre> .... Uhm..... am I supposed to do something with that? After a few minutes of running we also get:</p> added 1397 packages in 1m </span> </span>214 packages are looking for funding </span> run `npm fund` for details </span></code></pre> Ah, so I've not even done anything and you've already downloaded half the internet on my laptop and are also asking for money? Gotcha. This is a nitpick for sure since other package managers do mostly the same, they just don't tell you about it. I also don't mind when people ask for money so it's not that this is inherently bad, but it is a little weird to do on first contact. At least buy me a drink first, okay?</p> After some more waiting we get this:</p> 10 high severity vulnerabilities </span> </span>To address all issues (including breaking changes), run: </span> npm audit fix --force </span> </span>Run `npm audit` for details. </span></code></pre> That sounds serious. Did I do something wrong? I only followed the standard instructions so I guess not. I wanna be a good little developer though, so I better try to fix that. Okay, let's check what this audit thing has to say.</p> nth-check <2.0.1 </span>Severity: high </span>Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in nth-check - https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-rp65-9cf3-cjxr </span>fix available via `npm audit fix --force` </span>Will install react-scripts@4.0.3, which is a breaking change </span>node_modules/svgo/node_modules/nth-check </span> css-select <=3.1.0 </span> Depends on vulnerable versions of nth-check </span> node_modules/svgo/node_modules/css-select </span> svgo 1.0.0 - 1.3.2 </span> Depends on vulnerable versions of css-select </span> node_modules/svgo </span> @svgr/plugin-svgo <=5.5.0 </span> Depends on vulnerable versions of svgo </span> node_modules/@svgr/plugin-svgo </span> @svgr/webpack 4.0.0 - 5.5.0 </span> Depends on vulnerable versions of @svgr/plugin-svgo </span> node_modules/@svgr/webpack </span></code></pre> Uhmmm, what does that even mean? This gives me no useful information. Okay, let's try applying the fixes. npm audit fix</code> didn't seem to do anything though... Okay well, I guess I'll try the --force</code> option then? No idea what's gonna happen but we'll give it a shot and see where we land.</p> npx audit fix --force </span> npm WARN using --force Recommended protections disabled. </span></code></pre> Huh?! I thought you told me to do this?! What the heck is going on here?! And to top it all off we end with this message:</p> 39 vulnerabilities (2 moderate, 29 high, 8 critical) </span></code></pre> What?! So in addition to making me stressed and confused you also only made the issue worse?! This is something I'd expect from a personal project, not industry-standard software. Some googling later I found out the solution is "don't even worry about it, it's fine, trust me." Okay. sure. got it. Delete the now broken project and start from scratch. This time I'm just gonna skip over all the warnings. My conclusion: don't listen to npm</code>, it only makes things worse. I don't understand why this is considered an okay state of affairs. It's not a good look fam.</p> The dev experience</h2> After the tussle with npm and finally getting the project set up, it was time to get started. What I usually do is get the bare minimum information about how the language works and then just dive into a project, researching relevant topics as they come up. This is what I originally did way back when I tried to learn React for the first time and.... it did not work, but let me get back to that later.</p> Luckily this time around I had Neha to help me. She provided me with a really good tutorial. It took me through all the required steps and major mechanics that I initially just typed along with. It took me through all the major mechanics and idioms I'd need to get up and running. Neha also provided me with moral support and helped me get to grips with the counterintuitive stuff when I was stuck.</p> I must say, by the end of this, I actually feel somewhat competent with React. At least enough to understand basic React code and build basic interfaces for my prototypes, so in that regard, task accomplished! While the npm</code> bit was not great, I must say that React itself is actually fairly beginner friendly once you get over the initial hump of understanding things like useState</code> and useEffect</code>. Credit where credit is due.</p> Let's come back to how I learn languages for a minute. The bit that I now realise this process relies on is for the language and the tools to actually tell you where you did something wrong and what you need to research to fix it. Sadly... this does not work in JS. The reason for this is basically exemplified by one of my favourite ancient memes: </div> When you make a mistake JS is very happy to just keep going even if it makes no sense to do so. This means that I have to figure out on my own what I even need to research to figure out what I did wrong.</p> This also brings me to the next point: debugging. it's terrible. At least in my opinion. For example, just to see if I understood how things worked, I wanted to make a button that would only show questions with an even number of upvotes. So I started out with the following code (only the relevant bits):</p> 1</td> const </span>[</span>evenUpvotePostsOnly</span>, </span>setEvenUpvotePostsOnly</span>] = </span>useState</span>(</span>false</span>); </span></td></tr> 2</td> </span></td></tr> 3</td> const </span>toggleEvenUpvotePostsOnly </span>= () </span>=> </span></td></tr> 4</td> setEvenUpvotePostsOnly</span>(!</span>evenUpvotePostsOnly</span>); </span></td></tr> 5</td> </span></td></tr> 6</td> return </span>( </span></td></tr> 7</td> </span>historicalQuestions</span>.</span>filter</span>((</span>resp</span>) </span>=> </span>{ </span></td></tr> 8</td> </span>if </span>(</span>toggleEvenUpvotePostsOnly </span>=== </span>true</span>) { </span></td></tr> 9</td> </span>return </span>resp</span>.</span>votes </span>% </span>2 </span>=== </span>0</span>; </span></td></tr> 10</td> } </span>else </span>{ </span></td></tr> 11</td> </span>return </span>true</span>; </span></td></tr> 12</td> } </span></td></tr> 13</td> }) </span></td></tr> 14</td> ); </span></td></tr></tbody></table></code></pre> Can you spot the mistake? I tried to assert whether the function</em> was equal to true</code> not the variable</em>. My understanding was that this was exactly what the ===</code> as opposed to ==</code> was for because the former wouldn't do type conversion for you, but it was very happy to carry on with this code which then always returned true without any warning. This took me an hour and two trips to Neha to figure out. This was a bad experience for me.</p> I've been told that this is partially what TypeScript was invented to solve, but still. If TS is anything like MyPy it does help, but doesn't solve the issue in my opinion. I find issues like these are incredibly frustrating. The fact that nothing told me that anything could even be wrong made it so much harder for me to even figure out where I needed to search for a fault. This was about the moment that I started to understand that I really couldn't just rely on compilers or runtimes to help me figure these things out and I needed to rely much more on forums, blog posts and tutorials. In hindsight, this seems obvious but it still made me a little sad. The help you get from the compiler and other tools is actually what draws me to Rust in the first place, so losing that felt quite significant to me.</p> Another thing that didn't help was that the control flow in React is very non-obvious to me in the beginning. After having worked with it a bit more the useState</code> and useEffect</code> control flow is a bit more intuitive to me now but it took quite a while to figure out and didn't help when trying to debug. This meant that debugging a fairly straight-forward piece of code felt like print line debugging a huge mess of spaghetti code to me, which as you might imagine, is not a very nice experience.</p> It wasn't all bad though. One thing I liked a lot more than I expected in React is the hot reloading. While the installing etc from npm</code> feels much slower than it does in Rust, the edit-compile-test loop is much</em> faster, due in part to the hot reload. It even maintains state between hot reloads!</p> This does occasionally lead to your application getting into a state you've just made unreachable due to a code change, which it can't handle very well. This can be a bit of a brain bender, but on the whole, it made for a very fluid feeling workflow. While I don't think it's something I'll miss in Rust, I was surprised by how much I liked it here, especially for something so visual and interactive.</p> As a brief aside, I've been trying to decide on a front end to add to the tech stack for a personal project that I'm planning. Initially, my stance has always been "I don't want to learn <insert whatever is hot now> I want to write Rust, that's what works well for me and where I want to build my proficiency". I think that this was partially because I've never liked working with FFIs if at all possible. They have just never been a smooth experience for me, so I wanted to see if I could keep my potential project monolingual.</p> However, after this project, I no longer believe this is the correct way to go. I've followed the GUI development progression of Rust for a few years now and while I'm impressed with what they managed to get done, I think JS simply just does this better and probably will for the foreseeable future. Especially separating them by a CRUD web API makes the experience much smoother than I expected. Something I did not expect to come away with. Another point in React's favour.</p> Information availability & legacy software</h2> This is one of the biggest surprises to me. If you're like me, you probably had quite a visceral reaction to reading the words "legacy software". In the mind of most devs legacy software is something terrible. I think this meme sums it up pretty nicely: </div></p> However during this project literally the last thing I ever expected happened: I gained some understanding and empathy for the existence of legacy software (or at least backwards compatible software). Not all legacy software mind you, (looking at you, government) but some of it at least. Before this project my opinion on software sounded something like "come on, people should just stay up to date with stuff. Don't you want your stuff to work properly?" I always bemoaned the need for backwards compatibility and openly wondered why people just refused to upgrade and maintain their stack.</p> This project, however, has made me realise that the breakneck speed with which this JS is evolving and new frameworks are popping up makes the field incredibly confusing for newcomers. What's the difference between Vanilla JS, TS and JSX? What's the difference between React and Angular? Is Vanilla JS even useful to learn at this point? What's ES6? Is that a library or a linter? What's webpack, What's Babel? Why is the answer to every question "who cares, just use the default". This "every decision up front" mentality you get confronted with is one of the things that made me bounce off JS the first couple of times. It's incredibly paralysing if you're on your own and don't know that half the choices you're presented with aren't actual choices.</p> Secondly, it's incredibly frustrating to find help with things when things become obsolete this fast. Anything to do with React that's older than 2 years is basically worthless at this point, which let me tell you, is most of the stuff out there. React now looks very different syntactically to React a couple of years ago even if they largely do the same. This is incredibly confusing when you're trying to cross-reference things as a beginner. Did this not work because I did something wrong? or did the standard change in the meantime? This StackOverflow question is exactly what I needed, but it's from 2019, is it still valid? Even if the documentations are still correct, having those additional questions associated with everything makes it effectively worthless to a beginner. Thankfully I had Neha to bail me out when I needed it, but without her, I'm not sure I'd have made it to the end of this project.</p> Now I don't mean to imply that it's that binary. While writing this I am also reminded of the Python 2 debacle and the very "maybe kind of sometimes ever consider please thinking about upgrading some day maybe please?" approach that the python team took. Of course, it's easy to commentate from the sideline, but I can't help but think that if they had been willing to force a clean break a bit harder the segmentation might have been less egregious.</p> So it's definitely not as easy as "backwards compatible is always better". Sometimes earlier designs can really hamper you in what you can achieve, and I am incredibly impressed with how innovative and backwards-compatible Rust manages to be to this day. I guess there is no easy answer here as there never is. I've just gained a bit more of an understanding of the other side.</p> Being able to use existing knowledge and interface with existing infrastructure and tools is such a productivity life saver it's not even funny, because you're not just learning them in isolation but also in how they relate to the other bits you're using. Being able to take that more "one step at a time" like you can do if things are more backwards compatible is much more valuable than I first realised. An unexpected, but very useful lesson.</p> I am definitely going to try and keep my JS skills a bit up to date and also explore other frameworks again to see how the experience compares. Next port of call is probably Svelte</a> but we'll have to see when I have time and energy to dive into something new. Hopefully that will be before the 2023 PET extravaganza.</p> Wanted: Creative work. Originality not required, inquire within. 2022-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 Stop me if this sounds familiar to you. You're in a conversation with someone about a topic that you know quite a lot about. Perhaps you're a hobbyist, maybe it's part of your profession, or you just like watching a really specific type of youtube show about this topic because you find them soothing and vaguely interesting for some reason. In any case, this is your jam, you love talking about this stuff! However, after a while, your conversation partner says something along the lines of "wow, you know so much about this, you should write about it." This kinda takes you by surprise. Sure, you know a bit about this, but no way you could write something serious about it right? After thinking it over for a split second you respond with "Oh, that's really sweet of you but I don't think I have anything new</em> to say about it."</p> This happens to me all the time. I do like to try and involve people in projects I'm working on or have an interest in but whenever I ask someone to talk about something they know a lot about there's at least a 50/50 chance they will try to dismiss themselves like in the previous paragraph.</p> I have two things I want to say in response to that:</p> That's almost certainly not true</li> Who cares?!</li> </ol> Having something new to say is incredibly overrated, and in this blog post, I hope to convince you of this, so that next time you have this conversation I might be able to convince you to take a leap into a cool new project.</p> Before I get into this point properly, let me get a disclaimer out of the way. It's entirely possible that when people say this, it's more of a polite dismissal rather than something they actually believe. If that's the case, then that's fine. If you don't want to do the work for whatever reason, you don't have to, as long as you realise that's the decision you're making. However, I think there are a decent number of people that actually do believe they don't have enough to say about a topic they are passionate about. I am writing this for them and because of that, I'm going to take the statement "I don't have anything new to say about X" at face value. Let's get started!</p> You're wrong</h2> Let's start with the easy reasons. People don't ask just anyone their opinion on specific topics. Even in instances in which it seems like you're asking complete randos about things like on forums, you usually go to one specific to your topic, where there is a good chance people will know about the things you're asking. So if someone asks you specifically about something, that's already a good indication that you have more to say about something than you might realise.</p> It's a fallacy to say that you even need to know about something to be able to say something new about it. I very often run ideas and projects by people who know nothing about them. For example, my mother knows very little about the maths and programming I do, but she proofreads nearly anything I write (thanks mum <3). Sometimes the questions she asks have been incredibly illuminating and have led to me taking a very different angle of approach to something.</p> The curse of expertise (yes that's an actual thing) can create real blind spots that take an outside perspective to illuminate. For example, I think it's very appropriate to ask recent immigrants about Dutch immigration policy, specifically because they don't know all the ins and outs of it, but have to deal with it anyway. So even if it is true you don't know anything about the subject that still makes your perspective interesting!</p> What does new even mean?</h3> I think that the question of "is something new", is an incomplete one. A better version of the question is "is X new to Y?" The sentiment that you always need to be saying something novel, assumes a sort of all-knowing audience that is aware of everything being said at all times. This is clearly not true in every conceivable way. People (including me) sometimes talk about how certain children's shows like Pokemon (that's still what kids these days like right?) can be so repetitive, but this starts to make a lot more sense once you consider that the audience for such a kids show is continually renewing itself as people grow in and out of the relevant demographic.</p> A somewhat funny illustration of this happened to me when I was a teaching assistant (TA) for an introductory course for first-year maths students. Understandably a lot of them make very similar mistakes, meaning that as a TA you're writing the same feedback over and over again. I remember thinking after grading the first batch of homework, "gee, I've written this feedback so many times now, surely they'll remember now!" In retrospect, this seems hilariously wrong to think, because no matter how many times I write it down, they only read it once. I wouldn't have been a good TA if I told the second student to make the same mistake "oh I don't know if I have anything new to say about this."</p> Once you read the dictionary, everything is a remix</h3> The title of this subsection is a bit facetious, but I still think it illustrates my point rather well. There is tremendous value in aggregating, summarising, rehashing and reformulating. If there was no value in repeating content, there would only be one tutorial on youtube for any given topic, but still, new versions of the topic du jour pop up every day. You only have to look at the rise of "edutainment" on places like Youtube across the past decade or so to realise that even if you can say the same thing in new ways that's immensely valuable.</p> This is also (at least partially) why reviewers, influencers and recommendation systems have exploded in numbers over the past few decades. The amount of content people are exposed to has grown so large, that people need reputable sources to help them separate the wheat from the chaff. Perhaps it helps to have a new way of communicating to engage that audience, but for the most part, these people are not saying anything "new", they're reporting on things that are already out there.</p> Even if you were to change nothing about the information you're presenting, realising which information is relevant and fits together with which other bits of information, is hugely valuable. That is literally the job of journalists (and if you're one of those types that think journalists are just leeches or "sewage rats" then get the hell off my website).</p> There is also tremendous value in remixing and introducing audiences to parts of a genre they might not have been familiar with. Twilight was horror + YA Romance, and regardless of your opinion on it, I think it's hard to argue it didn't make a splash. Game of Thrones is Tolkien + dark gritty reboot (or Tolkien + porn if you're feeling less charitable). Newton was Euclid + limits. Bitcoin is cryptography + the Nigerian prince email scam. I'm being facetious here, but you get what I mean. Saying "What if X but Y" is a perfectly valid creative strategy.</p> Who cares?</h2> So far I've mostly talked about why you have a lot more "new" things to say than you realise, but there is another side to this. The idea that everything has to be novel in some way is just bullshit. I've already talked about ways in which presenting "old" information again can be valuable and in this section, I want to take that to its logical conclusion: the wholesale dismissal of the necessity of originality.</p> Sometimes you want consistency, not novelty</h3> If you've ever had an insecure friend or partner you know what I'm talking about. It takes a lot of constant encouragement to convince someone of their own value sometimes. If every time your friend needed some encouragement you'd respond with "eh, I'm just not sure what I have to say that others haven't already said," I doubt that would be good for your relationship. I also think we can all agree that "they've been saying that for years" is not a good reason to dismiss the idea that smoking is bad for you.</p> Advertisers know this. It's often the consistency and ubiquity of a message that determines its persuasiveness, not necessarily the contents or the quality. Sure it can help, but it's not required. That's why brand consistency is tyrant these days. If you ask me it would be naive to think that people would have gotten on board with climate change earlier if the climate activists had had a new talking point every week.</p> Sometimes messages are for the sender, not the receiver</h3> I've mentioned before that this blog is a good way for me to structure my thoughts. Communicating an idea or feeling can help you structure, conceptualise or process topics or events. That's why therapy is a thing.</p> There is also an artistic angle to this topic. Much art, (although I would argue much less than we colloquially think) is made simply to express something, regardless of audience. Saying that those pieces need something unique in them is both disingenuous and missing the point.</p> Not all copying is plagiarism</h3> It's a well-known advice to aspiring creatives to simply copy styles they like from veterans to get them started alongside practising the basics. To get started in painting you might practice basic shapes and try an early Van Gogh-style painting. If you're learning an instrument, you practice with tone progressions and popular pop songs you like. If you're looking to get into chess, you start out with well-known strategies rather than just flailing around on the board. These are just examples but my point is that there is real value in emulation.</p> Even though it is a bit long I think it is germane to share one of my favourite quotes here:</p> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.</em></p> But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.</em></p> Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.</em></p> And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you're going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions.</em></p> I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.</em></p> —Ira Glass</p> </blockquote> And this applies to much more than just creative work. I believe that maths, coding, academic writing, basically anything follows this trend. I think that a unique style is not something you should strive for, it's something that happens organically as you produce a body of work.</p> Take for example my work. This very blog is very heavily modelled on blogs like joelonsoftware.com</a> and codinghorror.com</a>. Even though I don't actually like them that much anymore and very heavily disagree with them on many topics these days, it would be disingenuous to say they haven't influenced my style. When I was a wee kid, I wrote fan fiction of my favourite games with me in it classic mary-sue-isekai style. My style of poetry has been very much influenced by Pablo Neruda. I very deliberately model the endings of all of my significant work after the way Ian Danskin ends his Alt-right playbook</a> videos. If I had been hell-bent on having my own style immediately after I started writing I'd never have gotten anywhere because I'd still be busy reinventing the wheel.</p> This of course does not mean that you should plagiarise, or not put effort into your work. There is a very important distinction between plagiarism and emulation. While simply copying someone's style can help you figure out whether it works for you or not and what makes it good, it will not help you to just churn out pure copies of other people's work. This might seem contradictory to what I've been saying for this entire post, but I don't think it is and I hope you'll get the difference.</p> I am also not trying to tell you have you have to do all this work. Any kind of creative work, whether you mean one specific project or whether you want to do the work of developing your own style, it can all be major time investments. You are not obligated to do any of this if you don't want to, but I hope you understand that that is the conversation you should be having with yourself, not one about originality.</p> You also don't have to publish everything you make, or that you have to finish everything you start. Motivation is a fickle thing, and you have to decide for yourself whether there is any value in starting or finishing something. But please, for the love of all that is creative, don't throw away your gems because "they have nothing new to say." What you have to say matters. Originality is nice if you can get it, but in the end, it will always be optional.</p> What devs and doctors wish you knew about writing bug reports 2022-10-16T00:00:00+00:00 Recently I gave a presentation at work about writing good bug reports and I've gotten quite positive responses from it so I figured I'd put it in writing here as well for anyone who would find it useful. Enjoy!</p> Why should I care about bug reports?</h2> I'll start off with the carrot: you should care about writing good bug reports because it will help your problems get solved much faster. And I'm not just talking about actual software bugs but problems in general. A bug report is simply something that will help someone diagnose a problem you're having. And let me tell you, dear reader, if you make it easier for someone to understand and thus solve your problem, it is much more likely to happen. People who solve problems are busy, and when they have to inevitably start prioritising, you want to make it as easy possible for them to pay attention your problem.</p> The broadness of my definition is intentional. In my opinion, describing your symptoms to a doctor is fundamentally the same process as opening an issue on GitHub is, they just use different lingo. I'll illustrate this with an example later.</p> It should be noted that writing good bug reports is hard, very hard. It takes practice, and this post is not giving you any hard and fast rules, just some rules of thumb to use and adapt as fits you.</p> Rule 1: Be to the point</h2> The two most common types of error messages are: "Oops, something went wrong!" or</p> javax.servlet.</span>ServletException</span>: </span>Something</span> bad happened </span> at com.example.myproject.</span>OpenSessionInViewFilter</span>.</span>doFilter</span>(</span>OpenSessionInViewFilter</span>.java:</span>60</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.</span>ServletHandler$CachedChain</span>.</span>doFilter</span>(</span>ServletHandler</span>.java:</span>1157</span>) </span> at com.example.myproject.</span>ExceptionHandlerFilter</span>.</span>doFilter</span>(</span>ExceptionHandlerFilter</span>.java:</span>28</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.</span>ServletHandler$CachedChain</span>.</span>doFilter</span>(</span>ServletHandler</span>.java:</span>1157</span>) </span> at com.example.myproject.</span>OutputBufferFilter</span>.</span>doFilter</span>(</span>OutputBufferFilter</span>.java:</span>33</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.</span>ServletHandler$CachedChain</span>.</span>doFilter</span>(</span>ServletHandler</span>.java:</span>1157</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.</span>ServletHandler</span>.</span>handle</span>(</span>ServletHandler</span>.java:</span>388</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.security.</span>SecurityHandler</span>.</span>handle</span>(</span>SecurityHandler</span>.java:</span>216</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.</span>SessionHandler</span>.</span>handle</span>(</span>SessionHandler</span>.java:</span>182</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.</span>ContextHandler</span>.</span>handle</span>(</span>ContextHandler</span>.java:</span>765</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.</span>WebAppContext</span>.</span>handle</span>(</span>WebAppContext</span>.java:</span>418</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.</span>HandlerWrapper</span>.</span>handle</span>(</span>HandlerWrapper</span>.java:</span>152</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.</span>Server</span>.</span>handle</span>(</span>Server</span>.java:</span>326</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.</span>HttpConnection</span>.</span>handleRequest</span>(</span>HttpConnection</span>.java:</span>542</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.</span>HttpConnection$RequestHandler</span>.</span>content</span>(</span>HttpConnection</span>.java:</span>943</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.</span>HttpParser</span>.</span>parseNext</span>(</span>HttpParser</span>.java:</span>756</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.</span>HttpParser</span>.</span>parseAvailable</span>(</span>HttpParser</span>.java:</span>218</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.</span>HttpConnection</span>.</span>handle</span>(</span>HttpConnection</span>.java:</span>404</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.bio.</span>SocketConnector$Connection</span>.</span>run</span>(</span>SocketConnector</span>.java:</span>228</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.thread.</span>QueuedThreadPool$PoolThread</span>.</span>run</span>(</span>QueuedThreadPool</span>.java:</span>582</span>) </span>Caused</span> by: com.example.myproject.</span>MyProjectServletException </span> at com.example.myproject.</span>MyServlet</span>.</span>doPost</span>(</span>MyServlet</span>.java:</span>169</span>) </span> at javax.servlet.http.</span>HttpServlet</span>.</span>service</span>(</span>HttpServlet</span>.java:</span>727</span>) </span> at javax.servlet.http.</span>HttpServlet</span>.</span>service</span>(</span>HttpServlet</span>.java:</span>820</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.</span>ServletHolder</span>.</span>handle</span>(</span>ServletHolder</span>.java:</span>511</span>) </span> at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.</span>ServletHandler$CachedChain</span>.</span>doFilter</span>(</span>ServletHandler</span>.java:</span>1166</span>) </span> at com.example.myproject.</span>OpenSessionInViewFilter</span>.</span>doFilter</span>(</span>OpenSessionInViewFilter</span>.java:</span>30</span>) </span> ... </span>27</span> more </span></code></pre> I cut out most of that java error message but you get the point. The problems with these is that they don't give you the right amount of information about exactly what went wrong. The first gives you no information at all, and the second one technically does, but it burries it in so much unhelpful bullshit that it's almost impossible to find. The amount of information to include has a sweet spot, and where that spot is, can vary wildely on a case by case basis</p> In case you still find that a little vague, let me illustrate a bit more concretely with a fictional example:</p> The case of Jan-Klaas Klompenmaker</h3> Imagine you're a tech support for a company that has a webapp and you get the following email:</p> Hello,</p> I hope this email finds you well. My name is Jan-Klaas Klompenmaker. I was recently using your website but it doesn’t work for me. I am 87 years old so perhaps I am simply not understanding how it is meant to work, sorry if this is the case. Normally I would ask my daughter to help with this but she is currently on holiday in Cyprus so I cannot ask her for help you see. I am on Apple, if you could help me I’d really appreciate it. Thank you and enjoy the rest of your day.</p> Best wishes, Jan-Klaas Klompenmaker</p> </blockquote> Setting aside the politeness, the email contains only three bits of "relevant" information:</p> I was recently using your website</li> It doesn't work for me</li> I am on Apple</li> </ol> This is why I dislike people trying to be overly polite when reporting issues. I appreciate the sentiment, but it distracts from the task at hand. I'll be less annoyed if I can do my job efficinetly and finish early than I am if someone doesn't ask me how my day is going.</p> Okay so that's on not including irrelevant information, but what about the info that is there? I think you'll agree that while my summary is more to the point, it's not that much more informative. With the power of fictional hindsight I can show you a better version:</p> Hello,</p> I was using your website on 2022-10-16 at 3:24 AM (when there was a scheduled maintenance outage). When I submitted my form I got sent to a 404 page, I was visiting your website on an iPhone with the oldest OS still supported.</p> Thank you</p> </blockquote> Much better isn't it? The fictional person of course wouldn't know about the outage so you would have to piece together yourself but the leap from my revised version to the answer is a lot more managible. In short: I'm here to help you, so let me.</p> Rule 2: Come to me with a problem, not a solution</h2> Sometimes people will try to be helpful and do some of the diagnosis and problem solving for me. Sometimes because the answer seems much more straightforward than it actually is, sometimes because they genuinely have made some useful inferences already. That's all fine, even if it's a little grating when they turn out to be wrong.</p> The actual mistake they almost always make in that situation is only telling you the solution but not the original problem statement or how they arrived at that answer. The problem with this is that it does not give me what I need to assess the solution the way I would with any other solution: Does it actually solve the problem? Is it compatible with other parts of the system? Does it follow the necessary standards? so on and so forth.</p> In my professional experience it is also the case that the solution people come to you with rarely actually solves the issue they have. Therefore whenever a user or client comes to me with a solution instead of a problem description it's a red flag to me. I almost never take something like that at face value. Not because I think they are stupid, but because this is how you end up with solutions without problems. More often than not, there is an underlying problem they have not discussed, knowingly or not. If this is perhaps still a little vague to you, consider the following example:</p> The case of the red button</h3> Hello,</p> The button on your contact form should be blue [instead of the red it is now].</p> Thank you</p> </blockquote> Again setting aside the possible rudeness of a message like this, it doesn't give me the information I need to assess whether this is a good idea. Do they prefer blue to red? Does the shade we have now make some kind of colour theoretic faux pas? How will other users of my system see that change?</p> Again, with the benefit of fictional insight I'll show you what they actually meant:</p> Hello,</p> I have Protanopia [red-green colourblindness] and so I can’t find the button on your contact form or read the text on it properly.</p> Thank you</p> </blockquote> Aaaahhhh, okay. Aside from being a more legitimate reason to ask for the change than simple preference, it opens up a lot of different options that won't require a potential overhaul of the entire colour palette of the website, such as having a higher contrast between text and background. In short: if you want me to solve your problem, give me what I need to do that.</p> Rule 3: Be clear in your expectations</h2> The final bit to consider in a good bug report is what you consider a solution to look like. Often, when someone has done a good job on the previous two points this one is fairly easy to infer, but not always. This step is especially critical if the solution you want is different from the first thing that people think of when you describe the problem, which could be the case for example when you communicate across cultures, or disciplines or with someone that doesn't have your disability or experience.</p> If you go back and read the previous examples carefully you'll notice that they don't actually state what the solution should be, but this can be quite easily inferred. In the first example, the website should have accepted the submission and possibly given confirmation that it was successful. In the second example it is the button being clearly legible to the user. However this is not always the case. Consider the following (admittedly somewhat contrived) example:</p> Hello,</p> When the users try to look at the flash animation on my website, they cannot do so anymore because Adobe deprecated flash. It is an important part of my portfolio, can you bring it back online somehow?</p> Thanks for your help.</p> </blockquote> This follows the previous two points but leaves out a crucial bit: what requirements do the solutions have to satisfy? Is its being flash a hard requirement? Is a recording of the animation an acceptable substitution? Do we have copyright or licensing requirements?</p> If the point is only that the animation be shown because it's part of a portfolio, an embedded YouTube player showing the animation could very well suffice. Otherwise more complex considerations should be made. The client can usually not assess these things accurately so in any bug report it is important that you specify what completion means to you. In short: be clear on when I can give my solution back to you.</p> Putting it all together</h2> Until now I've only described common mistakes that people make when writing bug reports, but in order for this to be actually useful, I ought to show you how to do it properly instead. In summary the best practices are:</p> Describe what has happened</li> Describe what should have happened</li> Describe what an acceptable solution looks like to you</li> Describe any relevant context and no more</li> </ol> That last bit is usually a tricky one, since, especially if you are a lay person, you cannot always accurately judge what constitutes as "relevant" context. This is where personal judgement and practice come in. Basically the rule of them here is that you want to describe anything necessary for another person to recreate the incident.</p> For a final demonstration I'll write a bug report in what I consider to be a very good manner. To also drive home the broadness of this subject I'm going to do it with a slightly unconventional subject.</p> Showcase: A medical diagnosis</h3> Consider the following email:</p> Dear dr. Whitecoat,</p> I’ve been running long distances (5km+) for over a few years now which has always gone well. However for the past few months my performance has gone down steadily seemingly out of nowhere. I also get shortness of breath when I work out which I didn’t have before, and I have moments where out of nowhere my heart starts racing like crazy and I feel very nauseous. On hot days I also have chest pain. Any idea what could be wrong and what I can do to get back to running?</p> Thanks!</p> </blockquote> Hopefully you can see that very few words in the letter above are not spent talking about one of the three cases I outlined in the section. For reference we have:</p> Problem statement: "However for the past few months my performance has gone down steadily seemingly out of nowhere. I also get shortness of breath when I work out which I didn’t have before, and I have moments where out of nowhere my heart starts racing like crazy and I feel very nauseous. On hot days I also have chest pain."</li> Expectation: "Any idea what could be wrong and what I can do to get back to running?"</li> Context: I’ve been running long distances (5km+) for over a few years now which has always gone well.</li> </ol> Of course this is not an exact taxonomy so there is a fair bit of overlap between the intent of these sentences, but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.</p> As a final remark I'd also like to note the following. The other person has responsibility here as well. As I already said, it's very likely that you don't have the full context needed to include all of the "relevant" information. These are just tools to help you do the best you can. After that it's on the other person to help you get them what they need, so they can help you, get what you need.</p> Why you cannot interact with me on this website 2022-06-06T00:00:00+00:00 In some ways, my blog is unique: it's a one-way street. No likes, no comments, no analytics; I don't even log traffic at the time of writing. That might seem weird to some in this day and age but it's a very intentional choice. Here are some of the main reasons I made that decision.</p> Privacy & complexity</h2> The fact of the matter is that most platforms that facilitate interactions in one way or another are bad for privacy. For example, one platform I might have considered using is Disqus</a>. It takes approximately .3 ms of googling to find out that Disqus has some problematic behaviour</a> when it comes to privacy. Another dead giveaway is the 4 main phrases they use to promote themselves: "Engage your audience", "Understand your success", "Retain your readers", and "Monetize engagement" (source</a>). This reflects a worldview that I do not ascribe to. Namely that privacy is a resource to be used, that violating privacy is simply "the cost of doing business". Not only that, but it is also just not how I want to run this blog.</p> I think this way of viewing privacy as a resource is convergent behaviour</a>. Doing interactive stuff is hard and in a lot of cases both expensive and potentially lucrative. We often don't think of it as being expensive because it is everywhere these days, but it really is. That's why there is a market for ready-made solutions that focus on converting privacy into currency. There are, of course, ways to do it privacy-friendly, but those are less effective or more meantenence heavy and thus do not attract investors or users in the same way that something that is promising to make you money does.</p> Another part of this is that once you start storing what you need to interact with people you have to be GDPR compliant</a>. This adds even more complexity. So far I've mostly talked about off-the-shelf solutions, but GDPR compliance on its own is complex enough to make homebrewing a solution not a good idea in my opinion.</p> Ambitions</h2> I think a part of this overall point I'm trying to make stems down to the ambition I have for this blog. Here I use the word ambition to mean "intention", rather than a hard to achieve goal. In fact, my intentions for this blog are deliberately low. They say that "if you do what you love for a living you'll never work a day in your life," but the past decade has taught me that if you make your hobby your job you'll never have a moment to rest for the rest of your existence. This a sentiment that has been echoed by youtubers</a> as well as FOSS contributors</a>, to name just a few groups that I'm familiar with.</p> This is why I'm okay with the upload frequency of this blog (if you can even call it that) being so inconsistent. This is a hobby, not a side hustle. That means that I work on it when I have the time and energy for it and I have no intention of turning this blog into a content farm. If anything, it's mostly a place for me to practice my writing, experiment with aesthetics, structure my thoughts, and occasionally serve as a resume with a more permissive format. I don't intend to make money on this blog, at least for the foreseeable future (but never say never I guess).</p> A huge inspiration for me in this regard is the writer Veo Corva</a>. Not only are they an absolutely wonderful writer (and you should definitely check out their books</a>), they stream quite regularly on twitch in a way that I admire immensely. They stream twice a week, for 1.5h with a fairly strict limit. They've refused Twitch partnership meaning they don't directly earn money on their streams, and both the chat and other community places they host are small and cosy. They are open to newcomers but not growth-oriented. This is not an anti-capitalist comment about them selling out or not, it is admiration about how they work to keep a hobby a hobby in a world where there are incredibly strong incentives to turn everything into a revenue stream. If I ever do something that requires community management I hope to be able to do it in the same way they do it now.</p> I strongly believe community management is an obligation that anyone who has an audience ought to take seriously, and so I'm not going to put myself in a position where I might have to take on that responsibility until I feel ready for it.</p> Sanity</h2> That last point about non-growth centred community leads nicely into my final and perhaps most important point. I want to protect myself in several ways. One thing I know about myself is that I'm quite an obsessive and neurotic person. That's not me being self-deprecating, that's just an observation. I tend to worry about numbers and whether they are high enough once they enter my life in one way or another. This is of course highly encouraged by all of the platforms out there since that is their business model. Platforms like Google and Twitch are the creative landlords of our era and I do not want to be beholden to them. That is why this website is self-hosted instead of on some platform like Medium.</p> However, you might argue that, so far, I've made a case against analytics, not interactions. I think this misses my point, but it does have a grain of truth to it. For me, it's not just about protecting myself from myself, but also protecting myself from other people. Anyone who has used the internet for more than checking the weather forecast in the past decade or so knows what a hellhole it can be. Discourse on the internet is terrible, and everybody knows it.</p> If being in academia & government for nearly a decade has taught me anything it's that you have to be very selective in how, when, and from who you solicit feedback. Not all feedback is created equal. Contrary to what people seem to believe, feedback is not relationship-independent. However good the feedback, it simply makes a difference in who is saying it, whether for better or for worse (insert discussion about "white saviour complex" here).</p> This doesn't mean that people you don't agree with can't give you good feedback, but it does rely on whoever is giving the feedback to be able to communicate with you effectively. So it's not that I'm not open to criticism of any kind, just that I'm not open to it being hurled at me from a firehose. If you know me, or can get into contact me I'd love to hear what you think. Having a bit of confidence that the other party realises there's an actual bonified human behind the keyboard typing this goes a long way to foster proper discussions from all parties involved in my experience.</p> How you can interact with me or this website</h2> Even though I've just explained why there are little to no interactive parts to this website and why that will stay like that for the foreseeable future, there are ways you can keep up to date with this blog if you so wish.</p> This website has something called an Atom feed (which you can find here</a>). Often they are also called RSS feeds but for all intents and purposes those are interchangeable these days. Applications that can read one should also be able to read the other. This is a part of the website that presents most of the content of this website in a machine readable, rather than a human readable way so that apps can keep track of things like updates more easily. Many apps can read a feed like that and will allow you to either read the content there in the app if you so choose or just let you know when there is a new post. This is a really old-school way to do it, but it is by far the most privacy-friendly one I know of apart from by smoke signal.</p> As for interacting with me? Well if you know me, I'd love to hear what you think. Despite the number of words I've spent on why I don't like to interact with people on this website, I do actually appreciate getting other people's perspectives on what I put out. It's just that I like to have a bit more control over how and when I have those conversations. I am curious to hear what you think, just not here.</p> How being queer will occasionally make me racist 2022-05-29T00:00:00+00:00 Depending on your view I've either chosen a deliberately inflammatory title or a completely descriptive one. I prefer to think of it as the latter. Despite how I've chosen to phrase the title, I really strongly believe in Ibram Kendi when he writes</p> "Racist" is not – as Richard Spencer argues – a pejorative. [...]. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to constantly identify and describe it – and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction. — How to be Anti-Racist, Ibram X. X. Kendi</p> </blockquote> Or in other words "Racism is not a thing you are, it is a thing you do". This is not a call-out post. Of me, or anyone else. This is, again in the words of Kendi, "Doing the basic work, of defining the people we want to be [...]". This post is mostly by, for, and about me. Sometimes writing for public consumption is one of the best ways for me to structure my thoughts. I have written this also in the hope that I inspire other people to do some self-reflection in a similar way, but I'm trying to keep my expectations realistic. That means that this post is meant mostly for other white people. Of course, my siblings of colour are welcome to stay if they so choose, but they know these tendencies better than I ever could, and I will not presume to tell them anything they don't already know.</p> A bit of context</h2> Sometimes the way I find out if an idea is really good is just by procrastinating the shit out of it and if it sticks around then I know it's a good enough idea to try out. The bad ones I either stumble on to reasons why it isn't very good or just forget about. This blog post is one of those ideas that has stuck around for years. I think the earliest inception of this idea was back in 2018 when I first started my PhD.</p> In case you didn't know this about me, I am non-binary. I don't often dress very non-conforming for a whole host of reasons, but what that means is that most people wouldn't "clock" me as they call it.</p> At the time when the story I'm about to tell you takes place, I had just moved to Wales. This was about a year after I'd discovered I was trans, meaning that I was even less secure about it and how to deal with it at that time than I am now (and that says something). It was, however, another opportunity to reinvent myself.</p> Getting to my actual point</h2> On the first day, we had an introductory day to meet our department colleagues, our fellow PhD students and their research topics. You know, the standard stuff.</p> During that meeting, at one point one of our colleagues told the group that he was from Saudi Arabia. This set me into alarm mode pretty much immediately. As I'm sure you're well aware, Saudi Arabia is not.... a famously chill place for queer people. You know, mass public executions</a>, suppression of women rights</a>, persecution of gay people</a>, that kind of stuff.</p> My immediate instinct was that "He's probably very transphobic", and I was afraid that if he found out, the working environment could get... unpleasant. Given that my queerness was something very new to me I also did not have very much confidence in myself to know how to handle such conflicts efficiently.</p> I also have quite the distrust of most institutions I am a part of. They have never really managed to actually provide me with the guidance, support or protection that they claim to extend to everyone. I blame primary school, but that's a topic for another day. My point here is that the onus has always been on me to come up with solutions for problems like these and then convince higher-ups that those solutions were both correct and necessary. So I did not count on the university of my supervisors to step in if I'd need help in a collegial conflict, especially at the beginning. Looking back at how the rest of my PhD unfolded, I maintain that this was the right decision.</p> Now, I did not fear for my physical safety around him. Even then I knew that even if those are the kinds of beliefs he held, he wouldn't get away with that, but the fact that train of thought went through my head is already not a good sign.</p> A post-mortem</h2> Now, let me be immediately clear here, this was racism or at least xenophobia. There was no indication except prior stereotypes that he would have been transphobic or homophobic. Maybe he was even gay himself. It's possible that he had fled Saudi Arabia for that exact reason, I don't know. The point is that I didn't give him a fair chance.</p> The point where this get's more complicated in my opinion is the fact that at least in my perception, my "safety" was at stake. Due to traumas in the past, I thought that I would be left to fend for myself if any conflict had presented itself. Because of that, the mere presence of someone who might be disposed to conflict with me was cause for distress. Not that I really did anything or behaved inappropriately towards him (at least as far as I know), but these kinds of internal reactions are the seeds of worse behaviour and therefore deserve introspection in my opinion.</p> I'm not trying to excuse my behaviour, simply to make observations about it. Mental health is not an excuse to treat people poorly or unfairly, as they say. Being queer, or having any other form of oppression for that matter, does not in any way make it okay to participate in other kinds of prejudice such as racism. It can make it harder at times, but that does not mean we do not have to do the work. Not the least of which in this case because queer history</a> is black history</a>.</p> I like the theory of intersectionality and although I don't know nearly enough about it, it rings very true to me whenever I hear about what it preaches. However, I rarely hear about this flipside of intersectionality. That might again be because I am not very learned in this field. Still, I think it's important to recognise that one kind of intersection can make you predisposed to handle other intersections much worse, (see also: Pick me gays</a>)</p> And that's basically it, there is no real resolution to this story. There is no "well luckily I realised what was going on and now I've resolved to never do a racism again". These are tendencies that we have to be aware of and work against. I think it is the same reaction I have when I have to walk past a group of Maroccan (looking) people on the street. It's an instinctive fear that part of my brain tries to convince me is legitimate. It's a tendency that I still have, although I am trying to minimise it. In the end, this behaviour is about me and I want</em> to do the work of resolving these conflicting beliefs within me. I say want to as opposed to having to although both are true. Hopefully in the process, I hope I've given you an avenue to work on for yourself as well.</p> P.S. Thank you to the wonderful Silvia Reis for proof reading this piece, her comments gave me the confidence I needed to finally publish this.</p> Web Proof Reader 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 The Web Proof Reader is a tool I made to help me automate some of the work necessary for updating this website. Things such as proofreading, accessibility checking and metadata validation. These are things that I want to be done but am too lazy actually to carry out myself. You can find the project on my GitHub</a> if you want to learn more about it or use it. I've also made it available as a pre-commit hook</a>. At the moment, it's limited in scope but has already proven helpful to me. For the time being, it only checks HTML files according to the structure of this website and does not provide any configuration, but it's been a fun learning experience.</p> RMS, the FSF and the myth of FOSS 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00 If you're not into extremely niche tech news, you might understandably have no idea what that title or any of the acronyms mean. Don't worry; I'll give a brief overview of the situation for context.</p> Acronyms</h2> Before we start talking about this subject, let me admit to you that I know next to nothing about RMS or the FSF. I'm doing what reading I can for writing this blog post, but there may be some unintentional falsehoods. With that out of the way, here is the relevant situation.</p> For brevity's sake, I'll quote from the RMS Wikipedia page since they do a better job of it than I could:</p> Richard Matthew Stallman</strong>[...], also known by his initials, RMS</strong> is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed so that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation [FSF], developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License [GPL]</p> - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman</a></p> </blockquote> While there may be some slight difference, free software is mainly used interchangeably with FOSS or Free and Open Source Software. Foss means that not only is a piece of software legally obtainable for free, but so is the software code that is used to make it, meaning that you can recreate, modify and redistribute it yourself. To understand the distinction: Firefox is FOSS, whereas Google Chrome is not. That's because while Google is free to use, Google has not released all of the code that makes Chrome. On the other hand, Firefox is not only free to use, but you can actually also obtain the code, compile it, and even make changes to it and then distribute the changed version</em>. This process is usually referred to as "forking" some software. Basically, a fork of something is the software equivalent of legally distributed fanfiction.</p> Another point that I want to reiterate that to be termed "free" in this specific way, software must guarantee all</em> of the freedoms mentioned in the blurb above. Google Chrome is actually another good example here. Chromium is a Google sanctioned fork of Google Chrome. The two browsers share the vast majority of their code, however, since Google Chrome includes some extra code compared to Chromium that is not open to the public, Chromium is FOSS, and Google Chrome is not.</p> Controversy</h2> Without going into detail about all of RMS' controversies or making any kind of statement about him, RMS has been a controversial person for many years. He has been accused of being sexist</a>, pro-pedophelia</a> and critical of child pornography laws</a> as far back as 2003</a> (referencing the 25 May post) amongst others.</p> In 2019 RMS resigned</a> from his positions at both MIT and the Free Software Foundation (FSF), following controversy about his comments about rape concerning the preceding debate over Jeffrey Epstein.</p> The backlash</h2> In March 2021, RMS announced that he would be returning to the FSF board of directors, sparking wide-scale outrage among the FOSS community. Shortly after the announcement, an open letter</a> was posted calling for RMS's immediate resignation and along with the entire FSF board of directors for allowing him to return, which has been signed over 2500 times at the time of writing.</p> This decision to let RMS back onto the FSF board of directors has been decried and denounced by many organisations such as the Free Software Foundation Europe</a>, KDE e.V.</a> and Mozilla</a>.</p> Disclaimer</h2> Before we go on, let me reiterate two essential points. Firstly, as with all internet controversy, there is also a counter controversy</a>. Therefore, let me be clear again: I have no interest in making any public comment on the validity of either of these points of view, as I don't have the time, energy or willingness to construct a well-founded opinion on the matter.</p> Secondly, I am about to criticise people and organisations for the things they say. That is not because I do not share their values, points of view, bear them any ill will or even because I think they are responsible for the things I'm about to criticise. Especially in the case of the FSFE, which I might appear to address more directly. I love FOSS, and I think organisations such as FSFE do incredible work. We good? Okay!</p> Getting to my actual point</h2> In their news item about RMS being reinstated, the FSFE says:</p> In 2019, Richard Stallman resigned as president and board member of the Free Software Foundation. On 21 March 2021, Stallman announced he is a member of the board again. The FSFE only learnt about that fact through his public announcement.</p> We believe this step and how it was communicated harms the future of the Free Software movement. The goal of the software freedom movement is to empower all people to control technology and create a better society for everyone. Free Software is meant to serve everyone regardless of their age, ability or disability, gender identity, sex, ethnicity, nationality, religion or sexual orientation. This requires an inclusive and diverse environment that welcomes all contributors equally. The FSFE realises that we ourselves and the Free Software movement still have to work hard to be that place where everyone feels safe and respected to participate in it in order to fulfil the movement's mission.</p> - https://fsfe.org/news/2021/news-20210324-01.en.html</a></p> </blockquote> The bit I want to call attention to is this: "Free Software is meant to serve everyone regardless of their age, ability or disability, gender identity, sex, ethnicity, nationality, religion or sexual orientation. This requires an inclusive and diverse environment that welcomes all contributors equally."</em> I hate to say this, but while I 100% agree with this goal, FOSS as a movement has never been inclusive or open to most people. This is true both on the development and the use side of it, and I'll address them one at a time.</p> People who can use FOSS</h2> While the goal</em> of FOSS is indeed to "serve everyone", it does not do so currently at all. Using FOSS has an incredibly high barrier to entry, not the least of which that you need to know what it actually is. In the age of adverts, data mining, and free trials, the difference between FOSS and software you don't pay for has become a lot harder to tell for a layperson. This is partly because of the rise of software popularity like Google Chrome, which has a largely FOSS codebase with only a few proprietary bits sprinkled in.</p> This next bit might sound derogatory or demeaning, and I don't mean it in that way in the slightest. Still, it is effortless for people like myself to astronomically overestimate people's capabilities when it comes to tech. Living with my parents again for a year has reminded me of that. It's not just a generational thing, though. At work, I'm teaching Python to a colleague of mine. So far, the most challenging thing for her has been installing the damn thing. The difference between an editor, a language, a terminal, an interpreter and a programme is overwhelming. That's not because she is stupid; on the contrary, she's brilliant, but the learning curve is just incredibly steep when talking about things like that.</p> As much as Nerds myself like to joke and scoff that, "HTML is not even a programming language, it's only markup", the vast majority of people would panic if they saw the HTML this page consists of. Again, I don't mean to talk down to them, but it is tough for me and people like me to keep that perspective in mind.</p> This also brings me nicely to another point: often, the most challenging thing about using FOSS is just installing the damn thing. Most people don't even know the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit software, let alone having them need to install GCC 5.3 for the compilation step but 8.9+ for the linking, using old tools that still support the plugin required for a memory hack to work, all the while using install scripts that they don't know how to run which don't even work because the wrong version of a system interpreter is earlier in their PATH than the one they just installed. If you use FOSS regularly, I dare you to look me in the eye and tell me you haven't been in a situation like that at least once.</p> And that's not to even start about the time investment needed to use FOSS. Let's be honest here, what you don't pay for in money you pay for in time and patience when using FOSS. That's because FOSS is primarily made by people like me, for people like me, or in most cases, people who are</em> me. The vast majority of FOSS that I use I have either worked on or started using because I've worked on it. There is definitely an incredible pleasure in making things that exactly do what you need them to; I'm not decrying that. But when that is your goal, you don't tend to focus on ergonomics or stability because that's more work you don't see the benefit of (in most cases). Those things are critical for other people, especially for people with a lower skill level.</p> People who can make FOSS</h2> I have often heard that you should try and contribute to open-source software to get into programming as a hobby. I think this is a terrible idea that is much more likely to turn people away from programming altogether rather than to pull them in. There are more reasons for this than I have time to get into, but I'll highlight those that stand out to me.</p> The first reason for this is that there is no clear entry point and an enormous learning curve. Whenever you are talking about a piece of software that is large enough for mainstream people to find, you will find it full of specific tooling, code standards, frameworks, idiomatic documents and heavy competition. The work that will be available to you as a beginner is usually also quite tedious and situational, like minor bug fixes, formatting issues or translating documentation. Unless you're very determined, people will just bounce off that instantly, and rightfully so. If you're going to work on a smaller project, then you actually need a lot of expertise to tell whether a project is even still alive, much less worth working on.</p> Another of the reasons is that the term "Open Source Community" is a misnomer. There exists no such thing as the open-source community. At best, it is a collection of people interested in open-source software, which is definitely not the same as a community. Any group of people I have ever seen around FOSS is either totally decentralised with almost no direct interaction or centred around a monolithic oligarchy with total control over anything and everything. The actual "community" part of it is never addressed beyond "Here is our discord/forum link," which, let's be honest, is a laughable standard to count as community building.</p> Even if FOSS can constitute a community, it is an incredibly toxic one. Just go onto any software forum and mention any of the words "Rust", "Haskell", "Electron", or "PHP", and you will have flame war content for the years to come. Angry nerds will jump down your throat after even just hearing that you deign to use something as "outdated" as PHP. (disclaimer: even I'm somewhat prone to this) FOSS is not a community; it is a proving ground at best and a toxic circle jerk at worst.</p> Similarly, people are left to fend for themselves, often to a fault. As an example, this is a fairly common sentiment within FOSS circles in my experience:</p> "Classic Unix documentation is written to be telegraphic but complete… The style assumes an active reader, one who is able to deduce obvious unsaid consequences of what is said and who has the self-confidence to trust those deductions. Read every word carefully because you will seldom be told anything twice."</p> - Eric Raymond, The art of UNIX programming.</p> </blockquote> That's not terribly inviting now, is it? Especially considering that what counts as "obvious" in that sentence is very</em> subjective. And it goes much further than that. People have no patience for beginners. I am willing to bet money that 80% of the questions on Stackoverflow.com are of the format:</p> Question: How do I do Blorb?</p> Answer: Don't do Blorb, blorb is terrible, and anyone who uses it is stupid. Instead do Zurgub</p> </blockquote> (Fill in values for Blorb and Zurgub as relevant). If you're lucky, you might even get an explanation about why Blorb is terrible. I'm not saying that having standards for contributions of requests are unreasonable, or if someone is trying to do something that is a known bad idea, you shouldn't tell them, but it is done in a very demeaning way.</p> There are also very rigid standards that get enforced, and I don't just mean programming best practices. For example, if your English isn't excellent, you stand little to no chance in FOSS. People are hostile towards that, and you are very unlikely to get any interaction on whatever you produce, even if it's reasonable under the surface.</p> That's assuming you even have access to computers and the time and energy to learn any of this. That means no school computers, smart devices and in many cases no Windows, which is a real obstacle for a staggeringly large part of the global population. No wonder that researchers have found, for example, that only 1.5% of FOSS contributors are female</a>.</p> My own part in this</h2> I'd call myself a mild veteran of FOSS. I've contributed</a> to</a> a few</a> FOSS</a> projects</a> and even</a> made some</a> of my own</a>. I'm not a true veteran in that my time and contributions to FOSS are somewhat limited compared to the full-time giants (which I think is an unreasonable standard, but that's a discussion for another time). So I will be talking about this using myself as a standard. Not because I think I'm particularly great in the "If I can't do it, it's impossible" kind of way, but because I think I'm a reasonable upper bound. I can do many things with tech that laypeople simply cannot, so I think it's a fair comparison.</p> I struggle with a lot of the things I mentioned in this post before, from installing things to dense documentation to lack of time and energy to use or otherwise interact with a piece of FOSS. Now, Let me be clear: I love FOSS. I think it is fantastic, and it has come an incredibly long way, but as is, it is failing at most of the things in its mission statement.</p> In a lot of cases, the things I mention come as a result of being free. It's hard to expect people to really commit to community building, robust testing and documenting and explaining things time and time again to beginners when you realise that they are doing all of it in their free time. But the other side of that coin is that it can often encourage a resentful userbase, both in terms of end-users and developers. Of the projects I've worked on, I've gotten often gotten frustrated by the interactions I had around them. Pull requests can sometimes take weeks or months to get reviewed, let alone be merged; the demanding tone that maintainers use when telling me to make specific changes or the fact that nobody says thank you are all frustrating things to work with. This is, again, all reasonable from their perspective but still detrimental to a good community.</p> As someone who has often been on both sides of the equation I'm describing, I empathise with both sides. The main point I'm trying to make here is not that people are terrible (although they sometimes are) but that the system does not incentivise the things we would like to see at all. That's a problem worth addressing, in my opinion.</p> Using fancy words</h2> I think most of my points come down to the fact that FOSS is essentially about negative</em> freedoms, and I think it should be more about positive</em> freedom. Negative freedom means that you are not to be obstructed in doing something. An example of negative freedom would be to start your own business. Nobody should prevent you from doing so, but it is not required to help you do it in any way either. A different kind of freedom is the freedom to access public spaces. If space is public, then the owner of that space must make reasonable efforts to make sure you can access those spaces. Although this is not official terminology, I like to think of them as passive and active freedoms. Negative freedoms are passive because people need nearly not actively work against you, and positive freedoms are active because you actively have to work to guarantee them.</p> My guess is that almost all of the freedoms mentioned in FOSS definitions are meant to be passive. You're not to be obstructed by legal barriers from using, studying or modifying software. But the abysmal state in which almost all the user experiences of FOSS find themselves mean that FOSS has very little positive freedom.</p> This is probably a controversial opinion, but in that sense, I think something like Discord is much more accessible and open than GCC. Regardless of how much some people like to rail against Discord, the fact of the matter is:</p> You can get a hold of it.</li> You can probably use it.</li> You can customise it reasonably effectively.</li> With some tinkering, there is a lot that a layperson can get done in, for example, making a discord bot to help with community management.</li> </ul> Despite the source code for Discord not being available to the public, in some ways, it is much more accessible than some of the software that " [...] was developed to be 100% free software, free in the sense that it respects the user's freedom."</a> even if Discord has some bad privacy policies</a></p> And you know what? I get that. The trick with positive freedom is that it's hard to take that one step at a time because if you take that to a logical conclusion, that would mean you'd have to solve things like racism and global poverty, which is obviously a bit outside the scope of a static website generator or whatever. My point is not that FOSS or the people around it should solve these problems. We inherit much trouble around it from the societies we live in. But this is an angle that has been neglected for a long time. Small Tech</a> is actually the first party in tech that I know of that has come even close to addressing this.</p> I'll be honest I have no idea how to solve any of the problems I'm railing against. It's all hard. These are all generational problems in every sense of that word. But I hope that by addressing this part of the conversation, I can help make that happen. I find community building fascinating. Ironically, it is one of the things humanity has been doing the longest, while at the same time still being one of the hardest things you can do. There is a universality to both its accessibility and its difficulty that is impressive in a weird way. I just hope we can find ways of making FOSS more community focused so we can deliver on more of its promises and thus be more open in the positive sense.</p> My wish list for Rust 2021 2020-09-14T00:00:00+00:00 TL;DR</h2> As someone unfamiliar with the ecosystem I want a better way of assessing the maturity of a library to make prototyping easier</li> As a pragmatic DIY programmer I want a better cross-platform GUI experience in pure Rust that doesn't require JavaScript or browsers so I can make tools for non-tech users without having to use complex build environments</li> As a data scientist, I want more robust/ergonomic numeric computation and data wrangling libraries so I can take advantage of Rust's performance and correctness guarantees to improve my simulations and data manipulation</li> </ul> STL; DR:</strong> higher-level ergonomic integration and entry points, please.</p> Introduction</h2> Before I launch into a more detailed discussion of the points that I'd like to see from Rust, I wanted to say that I know I'm asking for a lot here. These things I will mention here I consider a wish list in the loosest way possible. I understand these are huge things I am asking for, and I am not skilled enough in Rust or project/community management to assess whether these things are attainable. I present them as things that would make me very happy to see.</p> Secondly, I think it's a good idea to give a little background about myself for the context of this blog post. If that doesn't interest you, you can safely skip to the next heading.</p> I am primarily a data engineer and data analyst, but I also love other forms of programming in my spare time. Sadly I don't get to use Rust at my day job, which already takes up a lot of my creative energy. That means that the times I code outside of that, I want to keep pragmatic. I don't have time to develop large, robust codebases, actively maintain the things I build for very long, or (and in my opinion most importantly), spend much time setting up complex development environments that use multiple languages. That has already caused me to give up on a few projects which I find a shame.</p> The next point somewhat ties into the last. While I love learning new concepts and improving my craft, there are a few things I have very little interest in learning: system's programming, other languages like JavaScript and frameworks in different languages like Qt. That is not because I see no value in them, but because I don't have the time for it. I have little enough time left for programming my projects and taking things like learning new frameworks in other languages makes it all too complex to understand effectively. I want to focus on Rust, not on other languages.</p> Finally, I want to tell you a bit about my preferences. I come to Rust primarily for its correctness guarantees and helpful error messages. The compiler in Rust is unlike anything I've ever seen in other places and in my opinion that is what makes it great. Things like performance, low run time overhead and low-level access when needed is nice and cool, but that's not why I'm here. I'm here because Rust helps me write better code from the get-go.</p> With that preamble out of the way, there are the three points I'd love to see addressed in Rust most.</p> Native GUIs</h2> I use Linux, and a lot of the things I make are used via the command line. Clap is excellent, and the Rust support for making things programmatically available via the command line is good. However, some tasks, such as things that require visualisation or image manipulations that aren't very well suited to command-line interactions. Not only that, but sometimes I want to make tools for people that aren't as technically inclined. More specifically, people for whom the idea of using a command-line induces severe anxiety. Building tools for them that have simple GUIs just rolled into a single binary that doesn't require extra setup would be incredibly powerful to me.</p> Now I'm aware that bindings from Rust exist for a lot of the big GUI frameworks like Qt, but this has a few dealbreakers for me. First of all, I don't know them and spending time learning them takes time away from learning Rust, which I don't want for obvious reasons. Secondly, and more important to me, installing, setting up and compiling of projects with multiple languages is COMPLICATED. As good as Rust's FFIs are, they are still complicated, and even if those are perfect, I have to deal with the tools on the other side. I have tried and failed many times to get a project with Qt or webview going. The setup and the amount of extra tooling necessary for those kinds of projects make it not worth it for me to use them on projects at my (small) scale. I love that Rust has such robust integration tools and good FFIs. The cost of this, unfortunately, is that the native rust solutions have been neglected somewhat and as someone who isn't versed in the standard options like JavaScript and doesn't want to spend the time to learn that as well, there are few options.</p> Next to the bindings, there are also a handful of GUI libraries written in pure Rust. Such as Azul</a>, orb-tk</a>, druid</a>, conrod</a> and iced</a> but these all have problems of their own. The main thing is that none of these libraries gives the impression that they will keep developing. I don't mind unstable APIs very much, most of the tools I use myself install from some dev branch. However, missing features that I consider essential and incomplete documentation are bigger problems than that.</p> Another problem is that GUI libraries or frameworks, by their nature, tend to be very complex due to a very circular flow of information. While learning complex libraries in and of itself is not a problem for me, if it does the job properly, having to learn several</em> complex libraries to assess which one does the job well enough is.</p> More high-level computation and data wrangling</h2> A lot of data science involves a Jupyter notebook and some python libraries for good exploration and prototyping. That is unlikely to change, just because of the nature of interpreted vs compiled languages and I don't think it has to change. However, I would like Rust to become a more significant part of my data science toolkit for various reasons. Not because I want one language for everything, but because I think Rust has some genuine strengths to offer.</p> It comes back again to correctness. Rust has good options for data wrangling that I would love to use. Algebraic enums, pattern matching, more robust mechanisms like Option and Result would significantly improve the quality of data wrangling. It would help flesh out different edge cases, consider what things are in scope and what isn't, and how to handle things when they go wrong, just like in regular code. However to make these an option I think we'd need more high-level file manipulation for various file types like CSV. I'd imagine a kind of syntax like</p> 1</td> let</span> data_set = </span></td></tr> 2</td> wrangling::read_csv(&file_path, |</span>rec</span>| </span>validate</span>(&rec))? </span></td></tr> 3</td> .</span>map_over_successes</span>(|</span>valid_rec</span>| valid_rec.</span>preprocess</span>()) </span></td></tr> 4</td> .</span>map_over_errors</span>(|</span>invalid_rec</span>| log!("</span>invalid record: {}</span>",&invalid_rec)) </span></td></tr> 5</td> .</span>collect</span>() </span></td></tr></tbody></table></code></pre> I'm glossing over many details here, but I'm taking some inspiration from something like the hash_map</code> and or_insert_with</code>. I hope the idea is clear: Read something from a file, check if it's valid according to your logic. If it is, pre-process it, if not do whatever error handling is appropriate. This kind of defensive programming would be golden for data wrangling.</p> Similarly, I would love to do my simulations in Rust. One of the most frustrating things in Python when I move from just prototyping to a more robust exploration or simulation is when the program runs for a long time. Then I get an AttributeError: 'int' object has no attribute 'append'</code>, which in Rust would have been solved by a quick cargo check</code>. Some tools, like MyPy</code> help with that sort of thing. However, I feel like that's a band-aid rather than a real solution.</p> Additionally, it is when running more extended simulations or analyses with large models taking up much memory that I think Rust's strengths start to show themselves. Rust helps me write my code, so it uses less memory than it would in Python. Therefore I can run more elaborate simulations on my machine compared to when I was using Python that is a huge win.</p> Sadly numerics in Rust are... let's say, awkward. I think the lack of const</code> generics has been a significant barrier for bigger libraries being written. Writing optimised code for fast Fourier transforms simply outside my ability, and having to find a new library for every new such thing is a large barrier.</p> Now I don't want this post to turn into the reveal for arewenumpyyet.com nor similar ones for libraries pandas, scipy or sklearn. I'm not saying that I want something that emulates those libraries. They have their flaws (cough</em> panda's naming scheme cough</em>) and some of the ways they are designed would map onto the Rust paradigm quite poorly. But they do represent a standard robust (enough) toolset that I am currently missing in Rust. I think that solidifying a reliable default option for this kind of work would be huge for a lot of data science in Rust.</p> Picking libraries</h2> Let me first say I love crates.io and how cargo works with it. Especially compared to something like C++, it's great. Both in terms of discoverability and accessibility. Both from a consumer and publisher standpoint crates.io is a good platform as far as I am considered.</p> However, I do miss some better curation tools occasionally. Often on crates.io, I have much trouble telling the difference between an obscure library and an unmaintained one. Another problem which irks me is that there is much name-squatting on crates.io. These are by no means problems unique to Rust. I realise that a lot of what I'm about to talk about here is a "problem" that stems from Rust being an open and somewhat young platform. That is not something I want to change. Rust being accessible to everyone is a good thing. However, I would like some better mechanisms to assess whether a library is still usable.</p> A big problem with this is my relative lack of skill with Rust. When I am looking for a new library in Python, the well-maintained ones usually have enough documentation and are simple enough that I can pick it up and take it for a spin for a few minutes. The complexity of using Rust means that it's much harder for me to assess whether a library does not fit my use case or whether I am misusing it. That is something that will solve itself over time for me specifically, but that is a problem for more newcomers to the language and ecosystem. Sadly I don't have a solution to this one, but I imagine it is something other people struggle with as, so I hope that by bringing it to the attention of people smarter than me we can further this cause somewhat.</p> Conclusion</h2> If I had to summarise this post, it is "I need more high-level libraries for the things I want to do". I love Rust, but I don't have the time or energy to become enough of an expert in all the things I want to do to use the low-level libraries that are out there. I would say that Rust at the moment, has a solid foundation, but it is time to start building something beautiful upon that foundation.</p> A quick and dirty DIY rsync for S3 websites 2020-08-24T00:00:00+00:00 As you might know, this website is served to you from an S3 bucket which is great because I don't have to pay for computation that I don't use because all my content is static. That does mean that every time I want to make a change because, for example, I made a new blog post, I have to re-upload the relevant files. Now the crucial thing to know here is that uploads are significantly more expensive than downloads. What that means is that getting traffic for my website is pretty cheap, but if I upload a lot of changed files that gets expensive. To get an idea of what I mean, in the AWS Free Usage Tier you get in your first year of use, you get 20,000 free downloads but only 2,000 uploads, an order of magnitude less. Until now that workflow has been somewhat inefficient, and today I made a quick and dirty solution for it. In the spirit of keeping this blog alive and also defeating perfectionism, I wanted to show you that solution and the journey that got me there.</p> My old workflow</h2> For those of you unfamiliar with static website generators what happens is that I have some content and template files on my local machine, and every time I want to make a change to the website, the entire website</em> gets re-rendered. That is necessary because as a static webpage re-rendering, the entire thing is the only way to make a change like update links in index pages. That is an important detail because it means that even if I don't change the content on files, it still gets a new creation timestamp in the file system.</p> The way that I used to upload the files to my S3 bucket is using the aws</code> CLI utility. That has a lot more functionality, but the part of it that I would always use was s3 sync</code>. That takes as input an S3URI</code> and a folder path, and it will synchronise the two directories. It decides which files to update based on the file size and the timestamp that the file was last modified. Now, usually, this is fine, however since my site generator regenerates my entire website every time I make a change, file sizes and creation dates can still vary even if I didn't make significant changes. Sometimes it can be tough to properly control things like white pace when you generate web pages from templates. That means that I have to use a lot more uploads than necessary, and that annoys me. It also helps me save a little bit of money, especially while I'm still on the free usage tier.</p> Luckily because I use version control (as are you right?) and I try to make a commission every time I upload a new version, I have a local copy of the version that is on the web at all times. I figured that this setup and workflow would be universal for people using a static website generator, especially since it does require some technical know-how. So my first instinct was to bake it right into the website generator itself.</p> Over-engineering a solution</h2> If you know me, you'll know that over-engineering is my superpower. Seriously, I will spend weeks programming to save myself minutes of work if I don't keep myself in check. So I happily set out to try and integrate this idea into the site generator. Trying this, I immediately ran into two problems: git</code> and s3</code>. While Rust is an excellent programming language, it's still relatively new and as such misses mature tools for dealing with many things, git</code> and s3</code> included. There are tools out there to work with those systems, but they are for the vast majority either very immature and unstable or very poorly documented. I am honestly surprised how poorly the aws</code> CLI is written given the massive technical weight behind it. One of the biggest problems I had with the documentation of both of these systems was telling whether any piece of documentation I was looking at was still relevant or deprecated. I'll spare you the details, but seriously, it was such a pain.</p> My next go-to was Python. I had already used the Python SDK for AWS boto3</code>, and while still had some of the same problems there as I did in Rust, I was a little more comfortable with that tool. However, I wasn't happy with the tooling that Python had available for interacting with git</code>. I'm not saying the library itself was horrible, but both the installation process and the documentation for it were pretty bad. At this point, I was already getting pretty frustrated, so I quickly moved on from that solution as well. Eventually, I very grumpily reached for the tool I ended up sticking with bash.</p> KISS or "Keep it, simple sweety."</h2> Originally I had hoped to make something that integrated nicely with other systems I used, and that was robust enough that I could give it to other people. However, but this point it was starting to dawn on me that that was probably out of reach. I had run across the acronym KISS a couple of times, which stands for "Keep is simple sweety" (usually it's actually "stupid" instead of "sweety", but I like this version better). If you are searching for programming help on the internet, you will inevitably run into this phrase. It's a philosophy that says things work best when they are simple and focused instead of elaborated and complicated so I decided to go for a quick and dirty solution that would work for me, so I decided to make a bash function to do the job.</p> To me bash is the programming equivalent of duck tape and fishing line, it's great for quick and dirty work, but it's as crude as it is simple and it breaks very quickly, so I try to go for it only as a last resort. The upshot of using bash is that I can use many tools like git</code> and the aws</code> CLI directly, instead of having to rely on some intermediate product.</p> My first idea was to use rsync</code>. rsync</code> is a very well used and well-regarded package commonly used in GNU systems. It's made for remote backups and has quite sophisticated ways of determining which files need to be updated and avoid unnecessary uploads. Sadly, as far as I could tell, it is not compatible with the S3</code> protocol, so that would not work.</p> A DIY rsync</h2> While rsync</code> itself wasn't going to work, I did want to use the same kind of idea, so I decided to make a straightforward DIY solution that acted kinda the same. Circling back to my previous statement, I realised that I could use git diff HEAD --name-status</code> to figure out which files were modified and how. That would tell simultaneously tell me which files I'd have to process and what I had to do with them (upload for created or modified files, delete for removed files).</p> Because at this point I was going for quick and dirty I decide to use AWK to process the output from git</code> since the output format suited that quite nicely. After some trail and error I settled on this command:</p> 1</td> BEGIN</span>{</span>FS</span>=" "} </span></td></tr> 2</td> /</span>^[</span>M|A</span>]</span>/ </span>{ </span></td></tr> 3</td> </span>printf </span>"</span>aws s3 cp </span>"</span>$2</span>; </span></td></tr> 4</td> </span>gsub</span>(</span>/'</span>$</span>root'\//</span>,"",</span>$2</span>); </span></td></tr> 5</td> </span>print</span>"</span> s3://'$bucket'/</span>"</span>$2</span>"</span> --dryrun </span>" </span></td></tr> 6</td> } </span></td></tr> 7</td> /</span>^</span>D/ </span>{ </span></td></tr> 8</td> </span>gsub</span>(</span>/'</span>$</span>root'\//</span>,"",</span>$2</span>); </span></td></tr> 9</td> </span>print </span>"</span>aws s3 rm s3://'$bucket'/</span>"</span>$2</span>"</span> --dryrun </span>" </span></td></tr> 10</td> } </span></td></tr></tbody></table></code></pre> (in this the --dryrun</code> is just for testing).</p> In case you don't know AWK, this is a little programme that outputs the cp</code> command if the input line starts with an M</code> (for modified) or and A</code> (for added) and outputs the rm</code> command if it starts with a D</code> (for delete). The gsub</code> is to replace the local directory name that I passed in because if I want to sync the directory website</code> and git tells me to sync website/index.html</code> then I need to execute aws s3 cp website/index.html s3://<BUCKETNAME>/index.html</code> so we need to strip the directory name.</p> This is done for every line that's output by the previous git command. At this point all that is necessary is to pipe those commands back to bash itself so it can execute them. Finally I also wrapped all of this in a function so I could take the website directory and bucket name as an input and a git commit</code> at the end so I won't forget to actually commit the changes I just uploaded. The final function looks like this:</p> 1</td> function </span>s3-update</span>(){ </span></td></tr> 2</td> </span>bucket</span>=$</span>2 </span></td></tr> 3</td> </span>root</span>=$</span>1 </span></td></tr> 4</td> </span>git</span> add . \ </span></td></tr> 5</td> && </span>git</span> diff HEAD</span> --name-status </span>$</span>root </span>\ </span></td></tr> 6</td> | </span>awk </span>'</span>BEGIN{FS=" "} </span></td></tr> 7</td> /^[M|A]/ { printf "aws s3 cp "$2; gsub(/</span>'$</span>root</span>'</span>\//,"",$2); print" s3://</span>'$</span>bucket</span>'</span>/"$2} </span></td></tr> 8</td> /^D/ {gsub(/</span>'$</span>root</span>'</span>\//,"",$2); print "aws s3 rm s3://</span>'$</span>bucket</span>'</span>/"$2}</span>' | </span>sh </span></td></tr> 9</td> </span>git</span> commit; </span></td></tr> 10</td> } </span></td></tr></tbody></table></code></pre> Some quick testing and benchmarks</h2> To wrap it all up I wanted to make sure that it had any benefit. I tested the function on this website using this very blog post as a test case. With find public | wc -l</code> I found out that the whole website contains 216 files at the time of writing (including directories). Using the aws</code> CLI like I normally would:</p> aws</span> s3 sync <DIRNAME> s3://<BUCKETNAME> --dryrun | </span>wc -l </span></code></pre> it had decided that it would re-upload 93 files. However, my little function agreed that I'd only need to upload 11 files. That is almost an order of magnitude lower. I am not quite sure why the aws</code> CLI decided that those would need to be updated, but I did manually verify with the use of diff</code> that some of the ones that my function didn't select were indeed identical to the ones that were already in the air. All in all, not the most elegant or robust solution, but pretty good for about an evening of work.</p> A response to the UNESCO call for an ethical AI framework 2020-04-23T00:00:00+00:00 I want to start this blog post with a disclaimer. This blog post will be a response to this UNESCO article</a>. It might seem in this post that I am criticising UNESCO directly. That is not my intention. UNESCO is an excellent independent body doing meaningful work. Additionally, I'm well aware that the post I will be talking about is not a whitepaper, so I understand that the scope is entirely different. However, I do think there are several points of information missing in the post I am about to discuss. I hope to expand and contribute to this conversation, both by proposing more specific issues I think the position should have addressed, and highlight points where I take umbrage with the picture it paints and why. I hope you will see this post as an attempt to add to the conversation, not detract from it.</p> A call for an ethical framework</h2> First off, I will start with the generally positive notes. First off, I am glad that UNESCO is making this call. One of the things that they mention is that AI lacks in a unified effort to create an ethical framework and that more strict coordination is needed to make a reasonable attempt. It writes:</p> Many actors—businesses, research centres, science academies, United Nations Member States, international organisations and civil society associations—are calling for an ethical framework for AI development. While there is a growing understanding of the issues, related initiatives need more robust coordination. This issue is global, and reflection on it must take place at the worldwide level to avoid a 'pick-and-choose' approach to ethics. Furthermore, an inclusive, international policy, with the participation of United Nations funds, agencies and programmes, is required if we are to find ways of harnessing AI for sustainable development.</p> </blockquote> That is, hopefully obviously, correct. These things are so desperate and its applications so diverse that a united effort is required. As it also points out, I think that UNESCO is a very well positioned body to play a central role in this as they highlight themselves:</p> UNESCO will be a full and active participant in this global conversation. Our organisation has many years of experience in the ethics of science and technology.</p> </blockquote> More specifically, I am glad that an independent body that is specifically not a tech company or body is making these moves. I think that UNESCO will be able to pay more attention to the more human side of AI, a perspective which is sorely lacking in my opinion, but that is something for another post.</p> Another point that I am pleased to see included the focus on demographics that are traditionally excluded:</p> UNESCO priorities must also guide our international action in this area. It is essential to ensure that Africa fully participates in transformations related to AI, not only as a beneficiary but also upstream, contributing directly to its development. In terms of gender equality, we must fight against the biases in our societies to guarantee that they are not reproduced in AI applications.</p> </blockquote> At this point, the impact of AI systems on people of colour has been well documented</a>. I wholeheartedly believe the only way to solve this (and we should if AI is to have any right to exist in our society) is to include more of the people that are being excluded. That will be in no means sufficient, but it will be necessary, so I am happy to see this clause.</p> Caveats</h2> As a young data scientist, I am equal parts excited and sceptical of AI. I think it has enormous potential, but not in the way that it is commonly discussed. That is where I want to start to highlight some of the places where I think the call could have gone further. Again, this is not meant as an attack on UNESCO but an attempt to contribute.</p> Education</h3> My first point of criticism is that the UNESCO post has fallen a little bit prey to the technology hype train without critical examination, in my opinion. For example:</p> Education is already being profoundly transformed by AI. Very soon, the tools of education—the way we learn, access knowledge and train teachers—will no longer be the same.</p> </blockquote> But will it? Because I don't think that it will, or at the very least it shouldn't. I am not an educational scholar, but as far as I can see, the primary form of formal education has changed remarkably little since the industrial revolution. Subjects, modes of communication and ideas about education maybe have changed and will continue to change, but in a more abstract sense, it is still remarkably similar. We still get presented with information about a wealth of subjects, and then we are usually asked to reproduce the information or apply it in very controlled settings.</p> If we look at the last educational revolution that I am aware of, the internet, we can see that indeed education has changed in its delivery somewhat. Classes are done more online, information is more readily available, the scope of education has changed as a result of it, and as a result, education is changed shape. But is it fundamentally different than what it was before? I don't think so.</p> The same is true for AI. it has great potential to change the scope and mode of communication of education, but I do think it is dangerous to assume that once AI enters the picture, nothing of what came before still applies. AI is not the messiah; it is merely another tool. If anything, COVID-19</a> has done more to change education than AI has. I know tech companies are all too happy to promise golden mountains, but I hope that UNESCO can exercise a bit more caution in with claims like these in the future.</p> Yes, AI has the potential to change the way education is applied radically. Still, equally, it will not change its essence, and those at the vanguard of tech have a well-documented history of having the arrogance to think they can revolutionise fields they understand poorly.</p> So too does UNESCO offer no specifics on how AI is set to change education fundamentally. Again, I know this is not a whitepaper. Still, it is this sort of unexamined "assumption of impact" that can lead people to try and reinvent the wheel, taking away vital resources that the current system so desperately needs. That is something that I would love to avoid, which is why I think we ought to be careful to use the kind of language UNESCO uses in their post.</p> Lack of specifics</h3> Ethics is complicated. While I am not an ethics scholar, I do carry significant interest in it. From my perspective, one of the most significant sources of difficulty is the dissonance between the general and the specific. Do you do what is good because it is right regardless of outcomes, or do the ends justify the means? You can find unintended consequences in almost any ethical framework. All of this is to say, that doing ethics comes down to specifics. For example, consider the trolley problem, an old thought experiment that has entered the mainstream consciousness now that self-driving technology is coming closer than ever to the consumer. The trolley problem is basically entirely</em> comprised of specifics.</p> That is where I wish that the article had been a little bit more specific. I understand that you can't make specific promises in articles like these, but some ways aren't much harder to get into texts like these without going into a ton of detail. For example, when they write:</p> It is essential to ensure that Africa fully participates in transformations related to AI, not only as a beneficiary but also upstream, contributing directly to its development.</p> </blockquote> While this is true, this gives no further information. For example, at which level should we work to include Africa? Do we incentivise states, academic institutions, private corporations or even individuals to contribute to AI? Should Africa be more involved with all AI endeavours or just ones that directly affect it?</p> It's a start, but one that has been made before</h3> These are questions that probably didn't have hope of being addressed in this article, but I think it would have been good to mention them. I believe that even if the answers to these questions would be as vague as "all" or "yes", I think it helps to mention that explicitly.</p> I think it is essential to address these things more explicitly because a lot of the problems mentioned have solutions that will include far more than AI. For example:</p> Can freedom of action be guaranteed when our desires are anticipated and guided? How can we ensure that social and cultural stereotypes are not replicated in AI programming, notably when it comes to gender discrimination? Can these circuits be duplicated? Can values be programmed, and by whom? How can we ensure accountability when decisions and actions are fully automated?</p> </blockquote> To address any of these questions, much more will have to be addressed than just the AI applications themselves. It will involve cultivating a more nuanced understanding of discrimination in AI developers, changes to education, law and cultural experience.</p> While UNESCO is an excellent form to house the primary debates, these issues are too diverse and far-reaching to be decided in those debates alone. Therefore I think it is critical to give as much factual information to the people this article is addressing as possible. The fact is that an article like this represents an implicit invitation to contribute to the discourse and as such, I think it is essential too, in some way, address which issues are going to be addressed.</p> It is true that at the time of writing the UNESCO think-tank is set to finish their first meeting tomorrow</a> so I expect that the discussion will continue. UNESCO will soon come with more specifics on the issues that should be addressed and proposals for potential solutions, but until then, this call for an ethical framework is just one</a> more</a> among</a> droves of other calls.</p> Stop using those daft WiFi capture portals 2020-04-08T00:00:00+00:00 Let's talk about public WiFi, shall we? It's been a while since having a WiFi network in a public place has become somewhat standard in the places I've lived, especially if the site is in the hospitality business like a cafe. Sometimes you're lucky, and the network has a password that the staff will tell you. However, more often than not these days, the WiFi will be an open, unencrypted one and when you connect to it a browser with a login portal opens up. It's become common enough that nobody will bat an eye at it. This. Needs. To. Stop. And in this blog post, I'm going to explain to you why.</p> It's bad for security</h3> First things first, these portals are very</em> bad for security. First of all, because, at every step of the authentication process, the WiFi is public, passwordless, and unencrypted, the users of that network are entirely unprotected.</p> If you're not in CyberSec, I don't think you grasp how easy it is to hack people without proper protection. If your WiFi network is unencrypted, I can just come in, set up a WiFi Pineapple</a> and listen in on everyone's</em> traffic. Some applications have proper man-in-the-middle attack</a> protection, but by no means, enough of them do not have to worry about this. This vulnerability is why people tell you to never-ever-ever-ever-ever</em> do essential tasks that require authentication over a public unprotected WiFi network.</p> Even if you only use public WiFi for trivial matters, using unencrypted networks can still be problematic. With the networking gear that comes with almost any Linux distribution and a little bit of know-how, I can find out a surprising amount about everyone in who's on that network. One time I was helping a friend, who shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons, with their WiFi at their office. I tried to log into their router to configure some things, only to discover that I'd accidentally found and entered their NAS without them having told me the password! I had access to all of their client data! (don't worry I've made sure that hole has been thoroughly plugged since.) If your security isn't top-notch and you use unencrypted networks, you're at significant risk, even if you don't do anything significant on it.</p> Inviting hackers</h3> Very often those networks are called something along the lines of BTHub-Tj5Qr_</code> or KPN-39AVD</code> or whatever naming scheme your default provider has. First of all, this is just a bad look; it looks unprofessional. But second of all, it makes you a prime target for hackers. Nothing screams 'password to the admin account is probably admin</code>' like a WiFi network with the default network name. Let me tell you friend, 50% of hacking is knowing how to pick your target, and that unaltered WiFi name is an advertisement to come and try the first three things that come to mind if you're a hacker. If it didn't have a decent chance of landing me in hot legal water, I probably would have tried some basic penetration-testing</a>.</p> It teaches actively bad security practices</h3> The use of these portals actively tampers with adequate security and teaches users lousy security practices. Things like SSL and TSL</a>, which are security protocols your devices use to secure your traffic behind a password, are designed to be tamper-proof, i.e. prevent all of the stuff I mentioned above. They detect when someone in the middle modifies the data you're sending and flashes big bright red warning signs if they do and with good reason! So every time you go to a website that uses HTTPS, which is thankfully increasingly common thanks to things such as Let's Encrypt</a>, the router and your device will both throw a hissy-fit because their intentions are misaligned.</p> However, that is precisely what these portals do. They capture your traffic, alter the connection and address that gets returned and ask you to provide copious amounts of information (we'll get back to the information bit in a second). The point is that this is probably exactly what a hacker would do, so you are training people to do exactly all the things you don't want them to do and also ignore every possible warning sign!</p> Incidentally, if you struggle with this, some charming internet folks taught me that you could pretty reliably find the portal by going to one of these websites: example.org</a>, neverssl.com</a>, detectportal.firefox.com</a>. Since those websites will never use HTTPS, they will redirect you to the correct page without throwing up warning signs; it's worked so far in my experience.</p> It disrupts applications that don't have an entire browser attached</h3> Additionally, it provides a problem for applications that don't have their browser inbuild. Applications like that are much more common than you would think, even on laptops. For example, if I am working on some code and not using the web for anything else, many applications still have to access the internet for brief periods. For example, Cargo</a>, Rust's package and compiler manager, pulls a dependency tree from Crates.io</a> every time I compile something. Neither Cargo nor the router that's making the login portal was designed to handle this case. And it is surprisingly difficult to find the damn portal if it doesn't redirect you properly.</p> One of those things that don't work correctly with those portals are Virtual Private Networks (VPN)</a>. These are things that you can use to both encrypt and anonymise your internet traffic, as I do whenever I'm out and about. However, as previously mentioned, the WiFi portal acts just like a hacker would, so obviously, my VPN doesn't like that. However, the router won't let me do anything else. So if you encounter one of these while the VPN is on, then you enter a state where they both continuously try to redirect you to their sources making the internet virtually unusable until you resolve the situation. I don't think that I have to explain how having to turn off a security feature to use some infrastructure is a bad thing.</p> It's terrible for privacy</h3> The login portals that I have seen come in three main varieties:</p> The tracker</li> The collector</li> The completely redundant one</li> </ol> I'll address them in reverse order.</p> The first issue is the completely redundant one. These portals do nothing except make you tick a box that essentially says "I won't do anything illegal". While I am in no way a legal expert, I think that there must be a clause in the law stating that you can't be held responsible if someone does something illegal with your infrastructure without your knowledge. OR, it is something that isn't dismissed with such an easy-to-fool measure. Just stop it.</p> Who cares? It's just a date of birth</h4> Secondly, there is a collector. This one collects some basic info about you like name, date of birth, gender and email. I will momentarily take off my CyberSec hat and put on both my data science engineer hat and my privacy advocacy hat, to tell you that this is dangerous</em>. You might think that's over the top of me to say but stick with me for a moment.</p> I don't think many people realise how incredibly sensitive something like your date of birth is. First of all, which should be fairly obvious, is that it's non-renewable. You can't get a new one if it gets compromised. But you might say "who cares if someone knows my date of birth?". If that is you, I have one thing to say to you: That's where you're wrong kiddo!</p> I can do an enormous amount with your date of birth. Here's the thing, maybe on its own it's not that useful, but it's a critical piece of connecting information. The reason they tell you never to reuse passwords is that if some website that has lousy security gets compromised, everything</em> gets compromised. The first thing hackers do when they find your password is to go and try it on pretty much any service they can find you. This process works similarly with data, except that you can't</em> renew your data. Imagine two data breaches have separate information. I can use your date of birth, together with some other statistics that are very widely available</a>, to link that data together, and the more information I have, the easier it gets to guess more data correctly.</p> To give you an idea of how easy this would be to do, I was assessing a company where I wanted to work as a data scientist a couple of months ago. The company shall remain unnamed, but the assessment was "here are some fairly mundane data about a bunch of people, build a model that identifies this person</em>". I had a week to do this. So, yes, your date of birth getting compromised is a big deal.</p> And for what?</h4> So here's the thing about all of this data. First of all, I'm 90% sure that 80% of the places that ask you for this kind of information to use their WiFi don't have proper security in place to be handling data like this. I am not a legal expert so I don't know how the GDPR deals with this, but I smell more non-compliance than you'd think.</p> Second of all, they don't need it. They plainly don't need it. There is no good reason for them to have to know your date of birth, your gender, your name or anything to give you WiFi access. I'll get to the ones that use it to track you next, but suffice it to say that WiFi worked just five before these portals became standard. Having functioning WiFi is (or should be) and expected part of doing business these days. If you offer a service in your place of business, I am allowed to expect that it adheres to proper safety standards, just like hygiene.</p> Some people might say, "well they use it for marketing", to which my answer is "no, they don't". If these places can't be bothered to rename their WiFi network, I'm almost sure that they don't have the proper infrastructure or know how to set up a half-decent marketing campaign. One other option for them would be to sell the data at which point I'd like to refer you back to the date-of-birth argument above.</p> Lastly, I don't want to turn this into a gender/race discussion necessarily. Still, I do think it is worth to point out that this puts up unnecessary barriers to people who have conditions including but not limited to:</p> Being non-binary</li> Preferring a different name or pronouns</li> Having a name you can't spell with ASCII encoding (having proper UTF-8 handling is shockingly rare)</li> </ol> Finally, there is the last kind of portal, which is the tracker. This one goes through some effort to identify you, usually by asking for a valid email, social media account or even in some cases, a phone number. These are the only ones that give me some kind of assurance that they know what they are doing. I still think they have no darn business snooping around in my life just so I can check my email, but at least they seem to show they have some security savviness. Very often these are big chains like Costa, or O2 which brings with it it's own host of privacy concerns. Have I talked to you yet about dates of birth and how big a deal they are?</p> At this point for me, usually, one of two scenarios plays out. First of all, if the network allows identification through email, I fat-finger everything. Very often they'll try and force you to link a social media account but if you look around there usually is an email option. I can't tell you how many times I've been Ms alvnq;/aef20 fjoiv2</code> born 01-01-1904 with email none-of-your-damn-business@temp-mail.org</a>. Disposable email services</a> are surprisingly easy to use once you know about them, and there's not a good way around them for the portals since those serviced do accept email properly. If that's not an option, I usually leave. I like working in cafes, but not enough to put up with that kind of invasiveness.</p> Now, after reading all this, you might say "But Sam! they are just serving coffee, they can't be expected to know all this!" to which is say "yes, you're right!". I don't expect baristas or even business holders to be security experts or be able to hire one just to set up shop. But there is a straightforward way to solve this, which is to follow these three simple steps:</p> Rename your WiFi network</li> Use a WPA2 password</li> Stop using those daft WiFi capture portals</li> </ol> PyNeg 2020-04-02T00:00:00+00:00 A Python library for simulating automated negotiations. If you wanna jump in straight, it is available on Github</a>, pip</code></a> and DockerHub</a>. The Docker image comes with all optional requirements installed, but the pip</code> version requires some extra installation steps to use the PySDD</a> dependency.</p> PyNeg was developed during the writing of my ACOP</a> paper. The only other known library for simulating automated negotiation was Genius</a>. This library was quite mature as it was used in all of the Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC)</a>. However, it did also have some drawbacks, namely that it was in Java instead of Python. While I am proficient in Java, it does lack a lot of the analyses tools I use and inter-language communication is always something that I try to avoid whenever possible. Additionally, I knew that down the line I wanted to incorporate Problog</a> into it, which is considerably more comfortable with Python given that there is already a ProbLog package on PyPi. Another reason was that Genius included many infrastructures that made it difficult for me to set up the kinds of scenarios that I wanted. All of these things taken together led me to decide to write my library in Python, the only one at the time of writing as far as I am aware. That also helped me understand the actual mechanics of automated negotiation a lot better. Below I'll talk a bit about some extra perks I managed to get out of writing a library from scratch.</p> </span></a> Design philosophy</h3> A native Pythonista will probably look at the code of PyNeg and give me some side-eye afterwards. I will admit it's not written in very idiomatic Python, that is partly deliberately. I started my programming career in C++ and used that for the majority of my formative programming years, after which I switched to Java before I got into Python. So even though Python is my primary language, for now, there are some concepts that I've never really been able to let go of, most notably static typing, and object orientation. While Python doesn't natively support type annotations, there is an excellent library that does an excellent job of that: MyPy</a>, which I have used to annotate the entire library. While it has caused a few odd pieces of code, it has helped me stay sane throughout the debug phase, so overall I think it's a win.</p> Additionally, while I was working on this library, I was also learning Rust</a> as a hobby and precisely the idea of composition over inheritance resonated with me. That, together with a few other concepts I integrated into the library might lead to some unusual coding styles, but I personally really like the way it turned out.</p> </span></a> Decentralised communication loops</h4> Because the research group I was working with did much work on coalitional and decentralised settings, there was quite a bit of talk about integrating this work into different projects along the way. For example, there was the idea that I might collaborate on a Reinforcement Learning project, one of my colleagues, Laura D'Arcy</a> was developing. That meant that fairly early on, I decided that I wanted the communication loop to be decentralised. What I mean by that is that there is no external structure that has to manage the communication between the agents actively. All the outer system did was set up the negotiations, set up the agents and tell them to start the negotiation. While I didn't have time to implement it, this has the nice perk that it would be relatively easy to extend the current code to be able to handle multi-to-multi party negotiations or let the negotiation agents work asynchronously.</p> </span></a> Composition over inheritance</h4> I tend to think in a very object-oriented way, which has its drawbacks. For example, in the library, there are many different kinds of tasks an agent can and can't do, but here I will focus on three specific ones:</p> Base (B) vs Constraint aware (C)</li> Probabilistic (P) vs Deterministic (D)</li> Linear (L) vs Non-Linear</li> </ol> If you want to make any pair of combinations of those traits an option, you almost inevitably end up with a dependency tree that looks a bit like this:</p> </p> The biggest problems with this is that:</p> The tree will grow exponentially as you add more traits</li> You either end up with unnecessary duplication (L+C+D</code> vs C+L+D</code>), or you have to make a very arbitrary decision about what lives where.</li> </ol> That is where the idea of composition instead of inheritance comes into play. Instead of building agents into a rigid dependency tree like that, we define components that can or can't do certain things. Rust has an elegant Trait</code></a> system to deal with this. I tried to emulate that to a certain degree, though it was a bit harder to do that in Python. The idea is that an Agent</code> has an Engine</code> that does all of the reasoning, while the Agent</code> itself only has to deal with the communication. We can then build different Engine</code> classes that can be any of the combinations above, instead of having to make an entirely separate class for these kinds of agents we implement the pieces into an engine, and that can work with any of the other components within the library. It did mean I had to make a few empty passthrough classes to make them play nicely with MyPy, but overall I like the result.</p> </span></a> Easy extendibility</h4> This part is a bit of an extension to the previous point, but because of the kinds of comparisons that I wanted to do, I also wanted to make sure that it was as easy as possible to create new types of agents with different kinds of properties. If someone wants to make another type of agent, all they have to do is provide an implementation for the Engine</code> class, which is what they'd have to do and make a simple factory function, and that's it! Pretty neat right?</p> This website 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00 TL;DR this website = A rust static site generator + S3 + CloudFront</strong></p> This website turned out to be quite the project for me, so on this page, I'll give you a bit of a behind-the-scenes.</p> When I began dreaming this place up, I had a few things that I wanted to keep in mind:</p> Cost.</strong> I don't have a lot of money or income right now, and I don't expect the website to get much traffic, so keeping costs down was an absolute must. 8£ a month for a traditional hosting solution might not sound that bad, except for something that I expect to be visited maybe a couple of times a month when I don't have an income it kind of is.</li> Customisability.</strong> I'm a tinkerer, and I like things to be the way I like them.</li> No ads or unwanted popups.</strong> I value experience and aesthetics and ads, and popups make that impossible. I also think good content is its marketing, so I don't think I need them.</li> Blog (optional).</strong> I've tried to keep a blog once or twice before and while I enjoyed it, and keep thinking of things I want to write about, I also really struggled to stay consistent on that front. Therefore, if it would be possible to have a blog with this website, that would be a nice bonus, but not a deal-breaker.</li> </ul> </span></a> Backend</h2> Given the criteria above, I decided pretty quickly that this website was going to be a static one since it is pretty much the only solution that fits the above criteria. Since I do everything locally and upload the result, I can set up whatever toolchain I want as long at it all outputs valid HTML at the end. I'll talk more about the one I picked in the next section, but suffice to say I'm thrilled with it.</p> Static websites are also much cheaper to maintain than traditional dynamic websites. Partly because of size, partly because they don't need any computing resources. This website is, at time of writing, around 8.3 MB, with the vast majority of that consisting of logos, pictures and other static resources like PDFs. Another point is that I only need to pay for storage instead of a whole server. All you're doing when you visit this website is requesting a file, instead of having a server do all sorts of calculations and creating the files it sends you on the fly. That also has the added benefit that the site loads fast!</p> It also came with a lot of other added benefits. First of all, privacy and security, mainly yours to be specific. I wanted something that would log as little as possible. There are many reasons for this, such as "You can't leak any data, when you don't have any data". For example, GDPR is enforcing stricter regulations on websites, keeping logs and other data costs money, and the more moving parts you have to a website, the harder it is to make it secure. I don't want to be implicated in another security scandal, and I don't have enough working hours to monitor this space actively. But I also wanted this because I believe in only collecting what that you need. One of the oldest adages in both computer science and statistics is:</p> Garbage in, garbage out</p> </blockquote> This website has a very minimal amount of javascript that all runs in your browser, and at the moment, it doesn't take any input or log anything. If you do those things that give hackers more opportunity to do weird things you didn't consider, so my best defence is just not doing any of that.</p> That is all part of a sort of life philosophy I try to follow.</p> Get what you need, but not more than that</p> </blockquote> That makes things easier to maintain, (though I have been known to overengineer thing from time to time I'll admit) and is overall better for the environment. Technology is still advancing rapidly, but I don't think that the way we treat things like storage and computation is sustainable. Let us start looking at things like efficiency again instead of just raw performance.</p> This static website is all I need, and so I wanted to limit myself to that. That helps me maintain the darn thing, keep costs low, and make sure I don't become part of the next privacy scandal. Pretty good deal, right?</p> </span></a> Picking a static site-generator</h3> So now that I'd decided to use a static site generator, I had to pick one. Can't be that hard, right? Well, not exactly. I went through quite a few options. There are a lot of them out there such as Jekyll</a>, Sphinx</a>, Ghost</a>, Gatsby</a>, Hugo</a> and Zola</a>.</p> My first consideration was that I wanted a stack that I knew somewhat. I knew I was going to customise pretty much everything heavily. Therefore knew I'd already had to dive back into HTML and CSS, so I wanted to spend as little time as possible learning new languages/toolchains. That already cut out Ghost, Jekyll and Gatsby.</p> Secondly, I wanted something with a healthy ecosystem. Because this is just a side project, I can't spend too much time on it, so while I often don't mind taking a DIY approach to stuff, I knew that that would prove fatal for a project like this. That limited my options quite a bit since healthy ecosystems are rare, especially when you're a hipster like me.</p> Sphinx I already had some experience with, since that is what I'm using to document my python project PyNeg @/blog/pyneg/index.md. Still, I find it very cumbersome to use, especially if customisation is involved. It's hard to get at the internals or interact with it in different ways than strictly intended, and I got put off by that prospect. Additionally, I find it relatively slow and let's be honest; I don't want to have to wait for my dopamine thank you very much.</p> That left me pretty much with Hugo and Zola. Hugo, I liked it. I had already used it once before to make another website. It was fast, customisable, has a healthy ecosystem with lots of themes and extensions and some excellent QoL features. Initially, I thought I'd go with that and started my work with it. I'm not super familiar with Go, but enough that I was willing to give it a try.</p> Overall I liked Hugo, except for one thing. The templating engine it uses drove me crazy. Mostly the inconsistent scoping and the weird prefix syntax that was applied very selectively put me off.</p> So I finally settled on Zola, and so far I'm pleased with it. It's written in Rust</a>, which means that it's pretty darn fast. I've also been interested in Rust for a while now, so I figured making this in something that uses Rust might help me get into that more. What's more, the community and documentation are good enough that I find it very usable, and the templating engine is robust and consistent sufficient for my liking. So there we go, Zola, it is!</p> </span></a> Hosing</h3> Next was the hosting. I knew this was going to be the most significant source of cost, so I took quite a while to decide on this. I thought about self-hosting for a bit, but I eventually decided that would mean too much overhead and too little downtime. I also didn't want to go with any of the free hosting services because of my concerns mentioned above about security, privacy, ads and popups. If you put your stuff on someone else's platform that is generally very hard to control, ask any Youtuber about COPPA. I also still believe in the saying that "if you don't pay for something, you're the product".</p> I also wanted something away from recommendation algorithms. Just something I can point to when someone asks me about my work. I don't expect to build a following, and that is what most services are focused on.</p> That leads me quite quickly to cloud hosting. For this, I had three main contenders. AWS</a>, DigitalOcean</a> and ExoScale</a>.</p> ExoScale is a relatively small (relatively mind you) Swiss competitor to AWS. The advantage of them is that they are an EU based company, meaning they are bound by EU regulations and at least theoretically not bound by foreign governments. The problem with them was that I couldn't figure out how to host a static website on it, which was a bit of a problem. Another problem was that their pricing came in tiers, meaning that if I wanted to upgrade from one website to two, I'd have to spring for a lot more infrastructure which I didn't like. The</p> So the final race was between DigitalOcean and AWS. With this, it ultimately came down to pricing. DigitalOcean has reasonable pricing, but they start you off at a minimum of 5$ per month for 250GB, which is astronomically more than I need. In contrast, AWS has pay-as-you-go, so that's what I eventually decided on. Right now, this website is served from a simple S3 bucket which costs me less than a dollar per month, pretty neat right?</p> The final piece of the puzzle is that I added AWS' CloudFront, a content delivery network. I would have just not taken this step since I don't expect the demand for this website to be that high or widely spread, but using CloudFront was the only way I could have the website be served over HTTPS instead of HTTP and I was quite adamant that I wanted HTTPS.</p> One added benefit of using AWS is that it's an industry standard so that can go on my CV as well. It also gives me easy integration with other AWS services such as AWS Lambda, which I am planning to use to have this website also serve content security policies, but that is a story for another day.</p>

Reading Slay the Princess: the Child, the Fascist and the Woman

2025-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Prologue</h2>

INT. THEATRE - EVENING</div> </div>

A spotlight shines on the stage, curtains down. DIRECTOR enters stage right, dressed in black tie. A polite applause emerges from the audience.</div> </div> </p> </p>

DIRECTOR </div>
Welcome dear members of the audience. The performance you are about to watch is something truly special, if I do say so myself. It is unlike any other piece that has graced the stage of our fine platform, and because of that I thought it appropriate to give you some context before we get started. Rather than the technical or philosophical forum that you have become accustomed to; tonight's performance is an artistic work of narrative analysis.</div> </div> </p>

Audience murmurs</div> </div> </p>

DIRECTOR (CONT'D) </div>
Now, now, don't you worry. Plenty of the high quality content you are used to from us will always be present. Tonight is just a little experiment if you will. I have always found the arts to be just as important to keep the mind nimble as the sciences, as I'm sure you'll agree. Slay the Princess is a psychological horror visual novel with many</em> thematic layers to it. It has a lot to say about the nature of trust and relationships, which is why most narrative explorations of it, have focused on those aspects. Tonight, however, we hope to give you three novel perspectives on the game.</div> </div> </p> </p>

DIRECTOR (CONT'D) </div>
(Nervously looks around the audience)</div>
It is vital to know that tonight's analysis will rest very firmly on the so called 'death of the author'. As I'm sure you're well aware, this simply means that we disregard any intentions the original authors may have had—or, more critically in our case, not had. Most notably, when we discuss the nature of fascist rhetoric, it is important to remember, that none of this is aimed at the original authors, as my lawyer has made me promise to remind you.</div> </div> </p>

He wrings his hands nervously, though the larger-than-life smile never leaves his face.</div> </div> </p>

DIRECTOR (CONT'D) </div>
Just like the game, our exploration is of a certain cyclical nature. It aims to explore situations in a myriad of ways to 'gain many perspectives'. For the purposes we will pull material from all over the game. As such one could reasonably argue that there are many 'spoilers' in tonight's performance. However, I feel they are all placed in a sufficiently different context that they actually reveal very little about what can happen in the game—or how it can happen. Of course, it is up to you, to decide whether you are comfortable with that.</div> </div> </p>

He claps his hands, visibly pleased to be done with this part</div> </div> </p>

DIRECTOR (CONT'D) </div>
With all that out of the way, we can finally start tonight's performance. Thank you for joining us, and I really hope you enjoy, this rendition of Reading Slay the Princess: the Child, the Fascist, and the Woman.</div> </div> </p> </p>

FADE OUT </div>
</div> </div> </p>
Act 1: The Child</h2>
Slay the Princess is a 2023 horror adventure game developed and published by Black Tabby Games. It is a visual novel that plays heavily with themes of archetypes, and meta-narratives. One of the most prominent characters in the game is The Narrator, who not only narrates the actions you take and the world around you, but with whom you argue, and who gives and reminds you the titular task of the game: that you are here, to slay a princess. The game has a beautiful monochrome hand-drawn art style that is incredibly versatile, and lends itself excellently to all the different styles you might encounter, and the excellent music and voice acting really bring the game to life.</p>
However, at its heart, Slay the Princess is a story about being a child in a world of adults. Though it is very much a game about adults, and is not in any way suited for children, Slay the Princess is a game where you are treated as if you were a child. The stakes and consequences are kept deliberately vague, and you soon get the idea that everyone involved is very uninterested in your understanding and agency within this story. Instead, they seem much more concerned with how to manipulate you to fit their goals. This begins early on with The Narrator. If you question him about why</em> you're to slay the princess, he quickly becomes evasive. Look how his responses are phrased:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
Don't linger on the specifics. You have a job to do here. Just get in there and do what needs to be done. We're all counting on you.</div> </div> </p>
There is no explanation given, no reasoning, he just appeals to authority and character.</p>

NARRATOR </div>
If you don't slay the princess, the world will end. This is an immutable truth, you'll just have to trust me on this.</div> </div> </p>
In the parlance of rhetorics, the Narrator is operating purely on Ethos</em> at this point in the story. He is trying to position himself as a knowledgeable and trustworthy individual. Critically, however, he does so without providing any justification for that trust. He operates on a sort of ivory-tower model, portraying very much to us that there are</em> good reasons for making us do this, but that they would be too complicated to explain. Only he knows what is best for us. He is not interested in what we want, despite being self-convinced he knows what we should want. In other words: a parental figure.</p>
Phrases like these evoke the curious feelings of being a child asking questions about why the world is the way that it is, and the corresponding feelings of being met with annoyance and dismissal. It reminds me very much of conversations that myself and many others have had as children:</p>

CHILD </div>
Why do we have to go to school?</div> </div> </p>

PARENT </div>
To learn how the world works.</div> </div> </p>

CHILD </div>
But I am not learning anything there!</div> </div> </p>

PARENT </div>
You still have to go.</div> </div> </p>

CHILD </div>
But why then?</div> </div> </p>

PARENT </div>
You'll understand when you are older.</div> </div> </p>
When these sorts of conversations inevitably fail to persuade us, we move into the Pathos</em> mode of arguing, or appeals to emotion. Suddenly the world isn't just incomprehensible, but it is dangerous</em>. Best not talk to anyone, best not stray from your path or terrible things will befall you. If we forgo the instructions of the narrator to bring a blade with us to exert violence on the princess, who is indeed, chained up in the basement of some forlorn cabin, we are chastised by him.</p>

NARRATOR </div>
You're only making this more difficult. You're making a huge mistake</div> </div> </p>
He tries to impress upon us, in no uncertain terms, the danger we are in.</p>

NARRATOR </div>
Don't let the princess fool you, it is all part of the manipulation. You're playing a dangerous game by coming here unarmed.</div> </div> </p>
If we progress further without doing as he says, his scolding becomes even more intense over time.</p>

NARRATOR </div>
This would have been so much easier if you'd have just taken the blade like you were supposed to</div> </div> </p>

VOICE OF THE HERO </div>
Easier for whom?</em></div> </div> </p>

NARRATOR </div>
Easier for everyone</em>. Look at the mess you're in.</div> </div> </p>
Going further forward, the scolding turns into vague threats of the future.</p>

NARRATOR </div>
You won't like what happens if you do that...</div> </div> </p>
Ultimately no matter how much appeals to authority or emotion the narrator makes, not once does he use any logical explanation to try to convince us. In other words, the one thing he refuses to do is to provide context and detail, and then trust us to make the right decision ourselves. In simpler terms, he refuses to respect our agency.</p>
Become disobedient enough, and he even takes matters into his own hands:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
No. We won't have any of that. The stakes are too high. You can't just let her escape into the world. No. I can't just let her escape into the world.</div> </div> </p>

NARRATOR (CONT'D) </div>
As the princess approaches the bottom stair, your body steps forward and raises the blade</div> </div> </p> </p>

VOICE OF THE HERO </div>
Wait... this isn't fair. You can't just do that!</div> </div> </p>

NARRATOR </div>
Watch me.</div> </div> </p>
This eventually turns into:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
Stop it! Stop trying to resist me! I'm trying to get you out of here alive!</div> </div> </p>
The princess is not much better in this regard, though, perhaps less so of her own volition. If we choose to engage her in conversation, something expressly discouraged by the narrator, she is often similarly evasive on her intentions, refusing to tell us more about herself:</p>

PRINCESS </div>
You can address me as 'your royal highness'. Or you can just call me 'princess' if 'your royal highness' is too formal.</div> </div> </p>

Pause</div> </div> </p>

PRINCESS (CONT'D) </div>
I'm sorry, I've been down here so long I guess I've just forgotten. I must have a name though! Everyone has a name.</div> </div> </p>
She even argues with us in a similar ethos-based mode as the narrator:</p>

PRINCESS </div>
What I'd do if I got out of here doesn't really matter right? At the end of the day, whatever the two of us have going on down here is about trust. Whoever sent you to slay me claimed I was a threat to the world, but they didn't tell you why. I don't trust that, and I don't think you do either, or you wouldn't have come down here to talk. So this shouldn't be about what I'd do if I got out of here, or me saying the right thing to convince you to save me.</div> </div> </p>

Pause</div> </div> </p>

PRINCESS (CONT'D) </div>
So I could tell you that I'd lead a quiet life in the woods, or that I'd open an orphanage, or that I'd do any other number of 'good' things that I'm sure I think you want to hear. But you don't really know me, do you? What can my word possibly be worth in a situation like this? Like I said, it's all about trust, blind trust.</div> </div> </p> </p>
However, regardless of whether we invest more in the Narrator or in the Princess, our choices are always framed by either of their individual wants. At times, it feels like the Princess and the Narrator are almost having an indirect conversation with each other, mediated through the player. This is a deeply uncomfortable situation to be in. You know that you will ultimately have to make a decision on what to do, and yet both sides of the conflict are very open about the fact that they are withholding information from you. A situation very familiar to any child that remembers being caught between two authority figures with conflicting information, such as that between a teacher and a parent perhaps?</p>
This evokes many unpleasant memories of being caught in the crossfire of two adults, debating the path forward for you to follow, and the feeling that you will inevitably have to disappoint one of them, no matter what you do. All this leads to feeling like you don't really have a good way to resolve the tension between the two. It is a masterful dance that the game executes very well, and, as is all too often the situation, both as a child and as an adult there are no perfect ways out of a bad situation. You were put here in this place by external forces, and you must find a way out. Despite your best efforts there are very few things you can do that will not end this tale of you with the words</p>

NARRATOR </div>
Everything goes dark, and you die.</div> </div> </p>
Act 2: The Fascist</h2>
Slay the Princess is a 2023 horror adventure game developed and published by Black Tabby Games. It is a visual novel that plays heavily with themes of archetypes, and meta-narratives. One of the most prominent characters in the game is The Narrator, who not only narrates the actions you take and the world around you, but with whom you argue, and who gives and reminds you the titular task of the game: that you are here, to slay a princess. The game has a beautiful monochrome hand-drawn art style that is incredibly versatile, and lends itself excellently to all the different styles you might encounter, and the excellent music and voice acting really bring the game to life.</p>
At its heart, however, Slay the Princess is a story about violent fascist whispering in your ear who will stop at nothing to get you to impose his will on the world through violence.</p>
The Narrator of the game is very insistent and consistent on his view of the world: if you don't slay the princess, the world will end. How or why, is left conveniently vague. It is repeatedly, and unconvincingly conveyed to us:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
If you don't slay the princess, the world will end. This is an immutable truth, you'll just have to trust me on this.</div> </div> </p>
What exactly does the narrator mean with this "end of the world"? Well, somehow he manages to answer that, too, in the least helpful way possible:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
I'm talking about the end of everything as we know it. No more birds, no more trees, and perhaps most problematically of all, no more people. You have to put an end to her.</div> </div> </p>
Before we even meet the Princess the narrator is sure to impress upon us the danger of listening to her at all:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
But a word of warning- if you go in prepared to hear her out, she could easily trap you in her web of lies. And the more you listen to her honeyed words, the harder it'll be to pull yourself out.</div> </div> </p>
We are told that having any kind of dialogue with "the enemy", which, let's reiterate, at this point, we have never seen or met, much less have had any reason to believe would mean us harm. This is putting us directly onto the path towards destruction. This all reeks of propaganda and dogma designed to scare us into hateful actions before</em> we can discover that the other side is a lot more human, and thus, perhaps deserving of empathy. It is explicitly told to us that it is better if we don't know too much:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
I've told you everything you need to know. Going into more detail would just overcomplicate things and make an otherwise simple job more difficult. The less you know about her, the better.</div> </div> </p>
This very much evokes the dehumanisation of oppressed groups by fascist regimes. In his forward to psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl's book "Yes to life", Psychologist Daniel Goleman describes this very dynamic:</p>

[Ervin] Staub [another survivor of the Nazis] studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers.</p>
For Frankl, the "not-knowing" he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbours who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well.</p> </blockquote>
Similarly, we are always told that knowing more will only be a liability:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
A warning before you go any further...</div> </div> </p>

NARRATOR (CONT'D) </div>
She will lie, she will cheat, and she will do everything in her power to stop you from slaying her. Don't believe a word she says.</div> </div> </p>
As if trying to avoid being slain is somehow a dark and sinister conspiracy instead of simple self-preservation.</p>
How exactly she will come to end the world is again</em> left similarly vague:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
She just can. Believe me, I wish I could tell you more, but you'll just have to trust that what I'm saying is true and that, despite it all, you're fully up to the task that's been given to you</div> </div> </p>
Similarly, even listening to our own perceptions or trusting our own intuitions is framed as dangerous:</p>

NARRATOR (CONT'D) </div>
But slaying the princess and saving the world is going to be much more difficult than it has to be if you're going to spend all this time second guessing yourself.</div> </div> </p>
Of course, all the justifications are incredibly vapid if not outright absent. The narrator even goes as far as telling us to not consider morals in the same breath as he is making a moral assertion himself:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
Oh don't you start grandstanding about morals. The fate of the world is at risk right now, and the life of a mere Princess shouldn't stop you from saving us all.</div> </div> </p>
The narrator is essentially giving us a version of the Trolley Problem</a>. Though he isn't saying it out loud, his implication is that it would be better</em> for us to Slay the Princess than let all other life die (if we accept his premise), which is a moral assertion.</p>
This derealization and encouragement of believing dogma over one's own deductive reasoning is a popular rhetoric tool in the induction of cults. A fact that makes this hit home even harder.</p>
Any attempt at empathy or humanisation of "the enemy" is met with scorn.</p>

VOICE OF THE HERO </div>
Look how reasonable she's being, let's just drop the blade and talk this out.</div> </div> </p>

NARRATOR </div>
Don't you dare.</div> </div> </p>
And similarly:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
I don't know what you're hoping to accomplish here, but I can assure you there's no reasoning with yer.</div> </div> </p>
He even frames the Princess as being as manipulative as himself:</p>

PRINCESS </div>
Did they tell you how</em> I'm supposed to end the world?</div> </div> </p>

NARRATOR </div>
She knows what she'd do. She's just searching for whatever answers she thinks you want to hear.</div> </div> </p>
Eventually, the narrator starts telling us we are "the chosen one", the only that can save the world from certain doom:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
Look, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but it's because you're special. You're the only</em> person capable of doing this. Call it a prophecy of sorts if that helps, but it is just the way things are.</div> </div> </p>
This is very reminiscent of the siren call that fascism has been transmitting since its inception. Portraying one's own people as "the chosen people" by whatever power a regime wants to appeal to is a well-trodden path for authoritarians. From the Nazi ideal of the Aryan to the contemporary idea of "the great replacement", we can see that this narrative is alive and well on the very day that I write this.</p>
The story has been and always will be the same according to the narrator: the world is about to end, and this conveniently underrepresented group of people is going to cause it if they are not stopped at all cost, preferably with violence. No matter how downtrodden and oppressed they are, such as being chained to the wall of an abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods, they are still dangerous to the world as we know it.</p>
Not just that, but it isn't merely their actions that are deemed dangerous, but their very existence that poses a threat to all that we hold dear.</p>
This is even mentioned explicitly by the narrator If we later argue with him that she doesn't seem particularly motivated to end the world, or even sure how to do it.</p>

NARRATOR </div>
She doesn't have to know how to destroy the world to be capable of doing it.</div> </div> </p>
What exactly makes these people so dangerous is left deliberately vague, because it is "plain for all to see." (again, according to him). It is clear that the narrator will accept nothing but violence being exerted on the princess. As he envisions it, only her total annihilation is acceptable to the world order.</p>
Regardless of how much we try to empathise with the princess, the narrator is always there, whispering in our ear about the possible dangers. Which, often expressly through the consequences of the narrators meddling, always end with the words:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
Everything goes dark, and you die.</div> </div> </p>
Act 3: The Woman</h2>
Slay the Princess is a 2023 horror adventure game developed and published by Black Tabby Games. It is a visual novel that plays heavily with themes of archetypes, and meta-narratives. One of the most prominent characters in the game is The Narrator, who not only narrates the actions you take and the world around you, but with whom you argue, and who gives and reminds you the titular task of the game: that you are here, to slay a princess. The game has a beautiful monochrome hand-drawn art style that is incredibly versatile, and lends itself excellently to all the different styles you might encounter, and the excellent music and voice acting really bring the game to life.</p>
You awaken to the game in a situation that is all too familiar for many trans women. You are in a nondescript place and are told to do something that makes no sense to you. Who tells you these things? The world itself around you, here personified by a literal Narrator. This Narrator tells you that somewhere, tucked away deeply in the crevices of some damp and forsaken place is a woman that you must slay, and if you don't, it will mean the end of the world.</p>
Why any of this is the way that it is seems very illogical to you, but you don't remember the rest of your life being any different. In fact, thinking about it, you remember very little of your life before this point at all. It is all just a gray blur of meaningless actions. You don't have goals so much as you just go places and do things. But most importantly, you know that it is dangerous to listen to your own intuition and senses. They are easily mislead by "honeyed words" and can lead to dangerous outcomes.</p>

NARRATOR </div>
But a word of warning- if you go in prepared to hear her out, she could easily trap you in her web of lies. And the more you listen to her honeyed words, the harder it'll be to pull yourself out.</div> </div> </p>
Like you have done so many times before, you steel your resolve and go to the cabin, to do what you are supposed to, to fulfil your destiny, to do what the world asks of you, to be</em> what the world asks you to be. But throughout all of this there is something that gnaws at the back of your mind, that this is somehow wrong. You have been instructed not to heed these thoughts, but you can't help it, they will not leave you alone.</p>

VOICE OF THE HERO </div>
We're not going to go through with this, right? She's a princess. We're supposed to save princesses, not slay them.</div> </div> </p>

NARRATOR </div>
Ignore him, he doesn't know what he's talking about.</div> </div> </p>
You can feel that you are connected to this woman in some way, though exactly how is unclear to you. Even before you lay eyes on her, it becomes clear that there is something special about her:</p>

PRINCESS </div>
H-Hello? Is someone there?</div> </div> </p>

VOICE OF THE HERO </div>
It's hypnotising. It's the kind of voice you only have to hear once to remember the rest of your life.</div> </div> </p>
But the world does not want for you to recognise in her an ally:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
Don't let her voice fool you. It's all part of the manipulation. You're playing a dangerous game by coming here unarmed.</div> </div> </p>
Something about all of this feels off to you, in more way than one. Why does the narrator have so much hatred towards the princess? When you engage her in conversation you discover that she has been chained up and stuffed in a damp and dark basement for so long that she no longer remembers the outside world:</p>

PRINCESS </div>
Is that why they threw me down there? But I don't want to hurt anyone. I like the world!</div> </div> </p>

Pause</div> </div> </p>

PRINCESS (CONT'D) </div>
I think...</div> </div> </p>

Pause</div> </div> </p>

PRINCESS (CONT'D) </div>
I don't remember much about it to be honest. I've been down there for so long.</div> </div> </p>
You talk to her. Slowly you come to realise that this woman is part of you. It is the part of you that was taken from you at your birth: your femininity. Ripped from you by the world. Though you long to be reunited with her, trust returns as slowly as the roots of an uprooted tree take to regrow.</p>
Was it really the world that imprisoned her here? Or was it you yourself? Has the voice of hatred seeped into your very soul over time? Perhaps it was the world that taught you to hate her yes, but you wonder if it was not still by your hand that she ended up there.</p>
In return, she has also resorted to desperate deeds from time to time. This cycle of bitterness and struggles for control serve neither of you, and breaking it demands great bravery from you both.</p>

PRINCESS </div>
I... I want to trust you. But you're hiding something, aren't you? Why would you help me if you weren't helping yourself?</div> </div> </p>

PLAYER </div>
You're not the only one who yearns for freedom. I'm as trapped as you are. I think we need to leave together.</div> </div> </p>

PRINCESS </div>
that sounds... nice. I'm so tired of the bad blood between us. But it's hard to let it go. You've hurt me... and I've hurt you...</div> </div> </p>
The willingness to heal together doesn't always come easy. Old habits have to be unlearnt, and old expectations have to be ignored until they leave by themselves,</p>

NARRATOR </div>
She flinches again as the last of the vines is cut away, as if, after all of that, she's still expecting you to turn on her and stab her in the heart.</div> </div> </p>
Along the way there are also painful realisations to be made about yourself.</p>

PLAYER </div>
So what do I look like?</div> </div> </p>

PRINCESS </div>
Scary. It's... hard to describe. It's hard to look at you.</div> </div> </p>
Though the work is slow and gruelling at times, with time comes understanding,</p>

PRINCESS </div>
I don't know why you did what you did, but it's hard to be mad when you're just as stuck as I am</div> </div> </p>
And eventually with understanding comes healing.</p>

PLAYER </div>
You're different. Your whole mood is different.</div> </div> </p>

PRINCESS </div>
I'm just trying to make the best of things.... You could always make the best of things too, if you want. We both have a chance to start over. Besides, there's something about you being here with me that feels... Right. I never wanted to be your enemy.</div> </div> </p>
All the while the narrator is loathed to witness what is happening between you two:</p>

NARRATOR </div>
you'd do best to remember that some wounds will never heal. Some rifts can never be mended. Even in rebirth, some things never come back the same</div> </div> </p>
he tries again and again to regain his hold on you, his whisperings turning into darker and darker growls as time limps forward</p>

NARRATOR </div>
You aren't whole. You'll never be whole again. This struggle is meaningless. Whatever you think you're doing, you will fall apart.</div> </div> </p>
But he is wrong. Dead wrong. Rather than fall apart you grow ever closer together. You begin to find in her a loyal confidant</p>

PRINCESS </div>
That's because you aren't small, even if you act that way. We're both so much more together than we were apart. And we can be so much more still. Vast. Unfathomable.</div> </div> </p>
As you begin to trust her, yourself, you realise that all that you have internalised is not you.</p>

PLAYER </div>
I'm sick of this guy, how do we get rid of him?</div> </div> </p>

PRINCESS </div>
We push back. It may feel like he's everywhere, but presence isn't strength. Otherwise, we would have torn us apart by now. There must be a crack in the walls of his prison. There must be a way for us to be free from him.</div> </div> </p>
It becomes hard to describe your being, and yet, it feels right. Nobody is owed justification for your being.</p>

PRINCESS </div>
Does it matter what we call ourselves? It's just another label, and I don't think labels have ever helped us. All they do is cram us into boxes where we don't fit</div> </div> </p>
As you are able to fight back the narrator's influence more and more with each passing moment, realisations about your past, present and future bring you their gifts again: first understanding, then healing.</p>

PLAYER </div>
None of this was ever really fair for either of us, was it?</div> </div> </p>

PRINCESS </div>
No. It really wasn't. But just because it hasn't been fair doesn't mean that it hasn't been worth it. I'm... really glad I got to know you.</div> </div> </p>
Until you are finally ready to show the world your true self.</p>

PRINCESS </div>
This is it, I have no idea what it's going to be like out there. Not that I'm scared or anything. It's exciting, really. Anything could happen. And if it's bad then</div> </div> </p>

She hesitates</div> </div> </p>

PRINCESS (CONT'D) </div>
It won't be bad. Not with you.</div> </div> </p>

FADE OUT </div>
</div> </div> </p>

An honest talk about evangelism

Maybe you do get what it's like

Diving into something nu

Life skill: No False Options

I accidentally did NaNoWriMo

What women REALLY want

Thoughts from a Rustacean learning React

Wanted: Creative work. Originality not required, inquire within.

What devs and doctors wish you knew about writing bug reports

Why you cannot interact with me on this website

How being queer will occasionally make me racist

Web Proof Reader

RMS, the FSF and the myth of FOSS

My wish list for Rust 2021

A quick and dirty DIY rsync for S3 websites

A response to the UNESCO call for an ethical AI framework

Stop using those daft WiFi capture portals

PyNeg

This website

Slow Coder

2025 in Review

Things consumed</h2>

Books</h3>

Zola.nvim

Reading Slay the Princess: the Child, the Fascist and the Woman

Dotfiles

Weather is here, wish you were fine

Cite me bro

Web business card

3 and a half frustratingly difficult career tips

A deep dive into the strange world of Python versioning

Performance isn't just for FORTRAN

Slow Coder

2025 in Review

Things consumed</h2>

Books</h3>

Zola.nvim

Reading Slay the Princess: the Child, the Fascist and the Woman

Prologue</h2>

Dotfiles

Weather is here, wish you were fine

Cite me bro

Web business card

3 and a half frustratingly difficult career tips

A deep dive into the strange world of Python versioning

Performance isn't just for FORTRAN

An honest talk about evangelism

Maybe you do get what it's like

Diving into something nu

I'm not like other shells</h2> So why are we talking about this? To answer that I'm going to quote from the Nushell website:</p>

Life skill: No False Options

I accidentally did NaNoWriMo

What women REALLY want

Thoughts from a Rustacean learning React

Wanted: Creative work. Originality not required, inquire within.

What devs and doctors wish you knew about writing bug reports

Why you cannot interact with me on this website

How you can interact with me or this website</h2> Even though I've just explained why there are little to no interactive parts to this website and why that will stay like that for the foreseeable future, there are ways you can keep up to date with this blog if you so wish.</p>

How being queer will occasionally make me racist

Getting to my actual point</h2> On the first day, we had an introductory day to meet our department colleagues, our fellow PhD students and their research topics. You know, the standard stuff.</p>

Web Proof Reader

RMS, the FSF and the myth of FOSS

My wish list for Rust 2021

A quick and dirty DIY rsync for S3 websites

A response to the UNESCO call for an ethical AI framework

Education</h3> My first point of criticism is that the UNESCO post has fallen a little bit prey to the technology hype train without critical examination, in my opinion. For example:</p>

Stop using those daft WiFi capture portals

It's bad for security</h3> First things first, these portals are very</em> bad for security. First of all, because, at every step of the authentication process, the WiFi is public, passwordless, and unencrypted, the users of that network are entirely unprotected.</p>

It's terrible for privacy</h3> The login portals that I have seen come in three main varieties:</p> The tracker</li> The collector</li>

PyNeg