Context is key when buying a car, in digital government or in PHP

I often find folks in tech to be very dogmatic. “Framework X is the best “, “Java is a terrible language”, “pineapple doesn’t belong on a pizza”, etc.

There seems to often be a lack of context when we throw out thoughts like that.

It’s a bit like someone asking you what’s the best car and you tell them a Ferrari. So they go and buy a Ferrari and they try to use it to move their family across the country.

I saw a talk by the creator of PHP Rasmuf Lerdorf looking back at the 25 years of PHP. If there’s one thing that everyone who’s been using PHP with version 4 knows is that register globals was a terrible idea.

For everyone didn’t code PHP way back in the day. Previously, if you had a GET or POST parameter such as ?test=random_string a variable called $test was created automatically with the value passed in. No sanitation etc. So if you had some code that let’s say checked if a variable existed, well an attacker could basically inject any variable they wanted. I (and pretty much everyone) always thought this was the dumbest thing.

In his talk Rasmuf talks about register globals. And one thing he mentions is that, when this was created, JavaScript didn’t exist….. That blew my mind. In that context it made much more sense! A whole attack vector just didn’t exist when it was created. Now I’m not saying it was a good idea even considering that but just learning about the whole context was mind opening.

I find that searching for the context behind decisions is at times missing in digital government. I’m working at CDS and when working with partners there are often technology decisions that will make people’s eyes roll (I’m sure I’ve been guilty of this as well).

I think those kinds of comments don’t help anyone. They certainly don’t help us understand the context in which these decisions were made.

It’s easy to shit on tech work in government, what’s less easy is really trying to understand the context that lead to these decisions. The constraints people were under, the requirements, the available resources. All those things we might not know about. Only after we’ve started to build a shared understanding of what the current context is can we, together, find a better solutions to serve people better

Mindfulness is Buddhism without religion

I’ve been re-reading Buddhism without Beliefs and I strongly recommend it. It’s a short book and I’ve been trying to not read more than a chapter a day to make sure I can focus on it.

It was written in 1996 and reading it, I couldn’t help but notice how what it advocates for is now basically referred to as mindfulness. A sort of religion free version of Buddhism.

Don’t use SMS for 2FA

I’ve been travelling recently and it’s ridiculous how many banking or finance app will use SMS as a second step for login.
There are 2 big problems with this:

1) Usability: If you detected that my IP is out of the country, what are the odds that I’m not using my local SIM card?
2) SMS is super not secure!

Let me use an authenticate app or check if my machine has already logged in from my home country or something.

How to convert currency quickly

You can get about 23 Baht for 1 Canadian dollar. So if you see a price like 850 to get the CAD amount you divide it by 23 right?

I don’t know about you, but figuring out 850/23 is pretty slow…

So don’t do that.

Here’s a trick one of my former colleagues (and all around great guy) Klaus showed me:
Instead of doing divisions, do multiplications!

So let’s say I have 23 to 1, instead multiply by 4. Now where the heck did 4 come from you may ask. To get 4 you take 100 and divide it by 23. And yes, that’s not exactly 4, but for our purposes (figuring out roughly how much that coffee costs) it’s close enough. So you take 850 *4. In most cases you just need to take the most significant digit, in this case 8 and do *4. Boom 32$.

(Now yes, it’s actually 36, but it took so much less time and it’s accurate enough for most cases [and yes you technically need to divide by 10, but usually you know if something will be 3,30 or 300$ instinctively so you can skip it)

Happy songs

Strangely enough I posted a bunch of pseudo playlists on here, mostly of songs that were meaningful in my life, but none of the actual playlists I use on a day to day basis.

Because of the sun I’m currently listening to this:

We’re basically plants

There’s this image that comes and goes on social media:

Image result for we're plants need water and sun meme — It seems to be from http://www.poorlydrawnlines.com/ but I can’t find the actual link to that comic

It’s silly how much of an impact sun has on me. I often don’t want to believe it you know? That all these complex emotions, thoughts, and feelings are deeply influenced from the fact that I’m in the sun or not. I often kind of diminish it’s impact, want to believe I can overcome it. But when there’s sun… It’s all just Sunshine Rainbows and Lollipops:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5Fgp-KihIA

Warren needs to drop out

You probably know that I’m a huge fan of Elizabeth Warren and think she’d be the best president of the USA from the list of contenders. And while I’m a bit late to this but I think she should of dropped out when Amy & Pete dropped out to support Biden.

Having Sanders there is more important than holding on to hope that you’ll come back from 4th place in the rankings. Since it’s not ranked ballot (which every vote should be) it’s not worth the chance of it splitting the progressive vote. The best thing to do for progressive politics in the USA would be for her to drop out. Hopefully Bloomberg siphons off the same amount of votes so that Sanders can still pull thru against Biden.

(Also, I know this is useless armchair politics and totally useless [that link is well worth the read])

Having self esteem makes you a bad person.

I’ve come to realize something recently with my therapist, and that’s a strange belief I have. The thinking goes that If you believe yourself to be a good person, you’re likely to not be on guard for if you truly are. You become unaware of your actions, your thoughts, and your intentions. By thinking yourself a good person, you put in place systems that make you slowly become a bad person.

And by bad we can go with something like morally dubious, unaware, not-compassionate, toxic in relationships, manipulative, self-centered, emotionally abusive etc. It ranges from being a “Douche Bag Bro” to someone on twitter insulting or being condescending at everyone who has a different opinion.

It feels very sophomoric (seriously my favourite word recently) as a way of thinking really. It’s easy to find an example of someone with self confidence who is a good person. (for whatever metric of good you want) Just as it’s easy to find someone with no self confidence who is a bad person.

And yet, I have a hard time shaking it. Part of the problem with these kinds of thoughts is, they’ve gotten me this far, so clearly it can’t be that wrong, right? If I’m generally happy with what I’ve accomplished, why should I change. Now clearly that’s also questionable logic right there. It’s always possible to be better no matter how well our current thoughts, actions and beliefs have served us.

It’s very hard for me to admit that it might not be true in my case (As in I don’t worry about others being a good or a bad person in relation to their self esteem, this just applies to me). I’d love to have a good conclusion here, a wrap to the story, something to the effect that I’m working on it or that I’ve changed my thoughts or some shit like that. But I haven’t, at least not yet. But I do know what the problem is.

The great rebalancing

Note: I originally wrote this Feb 24 but didn’t post it until now. I don’t think the current market crash really validates or invalidates any of what’s below.

Predicting the future is always tough. Doing so publicly is basically asking for trouble…. So I’m just going to do it!

I think something is going to happen with the market, that’s not really a prediction, something always happens to the market. But I think this time it will be different.

Right now everyone “knows” that index funds are the best way to invest. Just like everyone knew that buying a house was the best financial decision you could make (and many still do think that, especially in Canada which hasn’t really had a correction in the market…yet).

As soon as everyone knows something like this, it will eventually become false. By it’s nature, as soon as it’s popular the market will adjust to price that in. Everyone thinks buying a house is great, therefore everyone buys houses, the price of houses goes up and up and up until it reaches a level that doesn’t make sense.

I worry the same thing will happen with index funds. Last year the amount of money managed in index funds probably surpassed actively managed funds (Wall Street Journal) https://www.wsj.com/articles/index-funds-are-the-new-kings-of-wall-street-11568799004 that means that for all intents and purposes, everyone knows index funds are the best way to invest.

The problem is that index funds reward the top stocks, not because they are in any way good, but because they are popular. That worked incredibly well in the past since it for all intents and purposes took all of the available information and invested it based on that. But now, over 50% of that information is self referencing. In that the biggest funds are not big because a majority of people think they are valued correctly but because they were previously big.

Pump and dump isn’t a new thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump it’s been around for years. But now, all you have to do is get listed on one of big indexes and automattically millions of funds will rush to buy the stock. No need to convince people that this is the next penny stock that will be worth billions, just get listed. Now yes, I say just get listed like this is super easy, it’s not, but also not super hard in some countries [and you probably have a % of your portfolio in a global index fund])

Anyway all that to say that I have a crazy prediction and it’s that the next big thing will be some sort of “Great Rebalancing” (you know like the Great depression and the Great recession). And it’ll probably be linked to the confluence of index funds, consistent historically low interest rates, zombie company and stock buybacks. (note: or you know a pandemic…)

The only problem is I don’t know how to take advantage of if it’s true.

Also, this should be obvious but I’m not an economist, I have all of zero real knowledge in the matter, this is not financial advice and you should definitely not make any financial decisions based on reading the random musings I have on the matter.

Songs of past relationships

I think this is a common thing, there are a few songs that we associate with someone. It’s strange how now, even decades later (shit guy, I can use decades as a time period) whenever one of those songs comes up, it’s almost immediately a reminder. Here’s a few of mine. What are some of yours?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD4sxxoJGkA