Weeknotes for 7/22/2024

Last week was pretty noisy; both in the world and locally. I hope you're able to find some time to yourself and some ability to be in the community that'll keep you safe and grounded. I have a few calls this week for work and a potential lead; still early but things are looking up. That said, I'm open to a new role and eager to chat. I was planning on releasing this yesterday but I got wrapped up with stuff.

Reading

The Victorian Internet

I'm biased in favor of expanding "world history" to include the lives for those who are rarely recorded and deemed as more to be property of the wealthy. That said, I finished reading my copy of this book a few days ago. The book ended as it began, a mix of praise of the ingenuity of entrepreneurship and the undying zeal for human connection. At least that's how Standage reported it in repeating the recorded accounts of the time. I still can't help but notice a similarity in how technology of that time mirrors that of today. For example, Standage makes the claim that "the telegraph community was a meritocracy - it didn't matter who you were as long as you could send and receive messages quickly - which was one of the reasons that women and children were readily admitted to the profession" but on the following page highlights that once through the door when "a young operator had gained a foothold in a city office, he or she could expect to be subjected to a humiliating induction ritual, known as salting, [where] ... the operator would be sent bogus messages addressed to "L. E. Phant" or "Lynn C. Doyle" .. [that] the unwary beginner would be asked to operate a wire with a particularly fast sender at the other end, who would start sending at a reasonable rate but then gradually pick up the pace". I think the word meritocracy has rarely actually been deployed in a case where the definition mirrors reality and this example shows that. Following that, Thomas Edison, the golden child of the electric era, is praised for his ability to move quickly and grow. I think that, in reading this, I was expecting something that was going to speak more to the lives of people who were using and impacted by the (seemingly short) era of the telegraph. Instead, I got mainly the wealthier class of folks and the floundering of such a system.

That aside, the mobilization of effort, the amount of capital required, the international efforts to have countries agree on how to send, protect and handle messages and the way that telegraphy warped (and evolved) the public self hides something very lightly mentioned. Despite the sense of an erosion of borders and the melding of the "Old World with the New World", telegraphy technology effectively reinforced the need for building a nation-state in these times. Who else had the fulcrums of power (at that time) that could convince people to lay down cabling from England to New York? One could point to the early companies that did it but these required the blessing of the institutions that validated their corporate charters. It was critical in the American Civil War, as mentioned when "a total of 15,000 miles of telegraph wire" was laid down (which would also require constant protection and repair, most likely done in combination with technicians and the most expendable soldiers) to keep deployment and resources at high tally. I have more to say about this book and what I feel about it but that's for another post - I have to read a bit more about Standage himself. His narrative self both obscures some of these points and elevates I'm trying to flesh out and the book I'm hoping to use as a counterbalance will be Liberalism At Large.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

I'm nearing the end of the book by Chomsky and Herman and I'm finding things in it that I can see had a huge indirect influence on how people are perceiving online journalism to exist today^[1]. I'm finding it harder to not see how things like social media might have played heavily into the hands of corporate America to both weaken the trust in public journalism and reduce the resources spent on it as a whole.

Coding Books

I started Programming Interviews Exposed on a whim because nothing can hurt my chances right now in this job market. I don't have a lot of books about software in print because I find it a lot more useful to keep it open on one screen and work through examples on another. But this book had me pull up Zeal a lot more for remembering C++ primitives. I don't normally work with the language but the lack of the harnesses normally found in languages like JavaScript or even Rust felt actually a bit enjoyable^[2]. Implementing the linked list was straight forward once I refreshed myself on initialization logic. I got way too used to Rust and JavaScript's approach.

Another book on code (though a bit more indirect and more on the theory) that I've started has been Practical Cryptography. The book is about twenty years old, which gives room for a fair amount of skepticism on the applicability of what's inside. That hasn't been the case for me so far. The book makes very good points about the nature of software engineering as being more subservient to satisfying the production needs of business and less on the security needs. There's an example of an office where locks are installed on each door and the immediate way how such a setup enables simpler hacking due to the physical weakness of the ceiling being artificial and the increased barrier for physical auditing by night-time security. The lesson from that, from what I gathered, was on making security less difficult to obscure and keep track of who has access to what and when they did so. There's things here that I can see being applied to the realm of organizing, as I do believe that there's a strong notion of weak surveillance by the State when they've been the main drivers of the growth of the systems that you use to view this text right now. It's something that's growing my interest in the concept and providing concepts like the aforementioned that I can bring back to my everyday work.

Coding

So it looks like I'm not alone on my venture to build The One True CMS. Jeff Eaton mentioned their work which reminds me a lot of what I want Shock to develop into. I've given up on making that happen in this year and instead focusing on just getting parts working such that I can get a Voltron-esque situation going. I've written about the current side-project to this, the plug-in/scripting/addons system I'm still fleshing out, while also reworking how I want the presentation of things to look. I haven't touched things like searching just yet but it's on the roadmap for next week as a bit of a stop-gap to the issue with the slow approach to loading content from Calibre at the moment.

Seeing

You get a few photos this time around!