Via Alex Russell, I just found Guidelines for creating web platform compatible components, which further contains a link to The Gold Standard Checklist for Web Components, both of which look like excellent resources when creating custom elements. This is a good time to mention that work is progressing on elements-sk, a set of neat Vanilla JS custom elements.

Make Me Smart is a podcast with co-hosts Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood. One of the features of the show is asking both guests and listeners the “Make Me Smart Question”, which is: What is something you thought you knew, but later found out you were wrong about. For the final episode of the year, my answer got selected! It starts at minute 33 of the podcast.

Meritocracy A system in which venture capitalists give large sums of money to 20-something male Stanford graduates in computer science.

Alerting in Prometheus is great, and easy, but one of the gotchas is that there’s no warnings or errors if you write an alert rule and there’s no data for that alert. Now Prometheus does have the absent() function, and you could tack OR absent(some_metric_name) == 1 to the end of every alert you write, but that’s tedious and error prone. So I wrote promk-absent a quick little tool on Go to create a set of absence alerts based on an existing set of alerts.

With Spectre and Meltdown we can see the inevitable results of trying to squeeze more and more performance out of a small number of cores. I believe the future is in processors with a high number of cores, such as RISC-V. With hundreds or thousands of cores on a single chip you can stop doing time-slicing and start doing core-slicing. That is, instead of doing preemtive multitasking, each process will be scheduled with a subset of the total number of core.

Here are a few articles that are good background on what I am about to talk about: The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before. It Wiped Out Almost Everything. The Insect Apocalypse Is Here Here’s How Far the World Is From Meeting Its Climate Goals In my opinion, after watching climate change research for years and watching the effects of climate change arrive faster than predicted, and the continual shortening of timelines for climate change effects, and the fact that we are nowhere close to cutting emissions fast enough, I firmly believe that climate change is an existential threat to humans and that we need to start researching geoengineering strategies for cooling the planet today.

Don’t you just love it when oligopolies collude? {:title=“Alaska Airlines giving preferential treatment to Facebook and Apple."} Imagine you were a small startup with a new idea for a chat application. How could you ever compete with this? Is there any wonder there’s a startup slump?

The Monopolization of America: On Monday, the Open Markets Institute — an anti-monopoly think tank — is releasing the first part of a data set showing the market share that the largest companies have in each industry. Nothing surprising there, unless you didn’t realize you lived in a corporatocracy/oligarchy and not a functioning democracy.

This Yale Law Journal Note from Lina M. Khan on Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox is an amazing read on several levels. First, the case it makes against Amazon is impressive, shining a light on quite a few unsavory things Amazon has done over the years. Second, she then expands that case to the rest of the tech giants. Third, for a Note in the Yale Law Journal, the entire thing is very readable.

The Federalist Society The coonskip cap and musket branch of constitutional scholars.

You know what my favorite non-sound from the mid-term elections is? Paul Ryan slithering silently into political obscurity.

When I first started working I told everyone I could that I thought that the single most damaging entity to the American economy was the Harvard Business School. Little did I know that the University of Chicago Economics Department was like, “Hold my beer.”

Crowdsourcing, the idea of slapping together an algortihm that quietly works alone in the background on a large corpus of data to generate recommendations, most popular lists, etc. is slowly dying. I pointed this out in my 2018 Predictions post, but didn’t offer a concise explaination as to why that would occur, but as I’ve watched the year progress, and added more examples to that predicitions post, I’ve come up with a fairly simple model.

The kubectl command combined with jq is the Swiss Army Chainsaw of kubernetes management. Some of my more useful kubectl commands: watch 'kubectl get pods | column' # Delete all failed pods. kubectl get pods --field-selector=status.phase=Failed -o json | jq -r '.items[] .metadata.name' | xargs kubectl delete pod # All images running that have the word 'dirty' in their name. kubectl get pods -o json | jq -r '..|.containerStatuses?|select(.!=null)|.[].image' | sort | uniq | grep dirty

Firebase Hosting is amazing, so fast and easy to setup and they even take care of the SSL cert for you. I work for Google and didn’t even know we had this as a product, so just posting it here in case anyone else missed it.

Last August, as my team was pondering moving away from Polymer and creating our own set of neat vanilla js custom elements, I decided to take a data driven stab at deciding is this was a viable plan. My team has been building web applications for over four years using Polymer and that corpus of code could be used to guide the decision. The first thing I did was scan each project and record every Polymer or Iron element used in every project.

Here are the slides for my OSCON presentation Machine Learning for Continuous Integration. As usual my slides are pretty worthless on their own, except for the links. Update (24-Sep-2018) Recording is now available:

As usual, XKCD nails it, our society is built under the basic premise that people aren’t sociopaths. This is the root of Facebook and Twitter’s issues, which is that they have built platforms that are being exploited by sociopaths, but they seem unwilling to act, always concerned about free speech. It is a particularly Silicon Valley conceit to not understand the difference. While Zuckerberg is busy enabling holocaust deniers:

A simple demo of k-means clustering. The little squares are the observations and the cirles are the centroids. Press the 'Step:' button to step through the algorithm. Restart const K = 3; const WIDTH = 500; const HEIGHT = 500; const RADIUS = 0.1; const STEP1 = 'Step 1: Assign observations to clusters.'; const STEP2 = 'Step 2: Update centroids.'; const COLORS = ['darkgreen', 'blue', 'darkorange', 'red', 'purple']; let ctx = document.

The latest release of elements-sk has added elements for all the Material Design Icons. You can see the full set of icons in action on the elements-sk documentation site. Each one is its own module, so you only pay for what you use.