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Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, September ...

Entropy Arbitrage Newsletter, September 2023

Oct 03, 2023

Today is Duinday, 16 of Habniah 4116. [4116.06.16]

…assuming you follow the Common Calendar, of course, but I assume you probably do not. Or should. Ahem. Newsletter!

Entropy Arbitrage welcomed visitors from Antigua & Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR China, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Somalia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and United States this month, which never fails to please me. Remember, all content is made available under the CC-BY-SA license, so if anybody needs to provide a translation, you don’t need my permission, provided that you comply with the terms of the license. However, feel free to ask for help or otherwise reach out, too.

September’s Idle Thoughts

Welcome to the thirty-ninth issue of the Entropy Arbitrage newsletter.

Following People on GitHub? In This Economy?

I thought that I had a handle on 2023’s social media weirdness. Seriously, after the past year, it feels like nothing should surprise any of us anymore.

And yet, I did not expect the rise of people who create GitHub accounts and then proceed to (seemingly) do nothing with those accounts except follow hundreds and then thousands of users.

Sometimes, the person’s biography strikes me as interesting and—not thinking about their possible behavior—I follow them back. If I do, I invariably wake up the next morning to a pile of GitHub notifications in my RSS feed. I then need to pull the plug on them, because their activity makes it more difficult for me to read the actual news of the day. I can’t remove the RSS feed or filter away the follow notifications, because if someone who I actually know follows someone on GitHub, I might want to know about that person.

Regardless, this raises the question: Why do they do this? Someone could have created the users as bots, sure—they often have overly polished, slightly uncanny headshots that an AI could have generated—but it doesn’t make sense as bot behavior. To my knowledge, your followers on GitHub only receive RSS notifications of your activity. You don’t have special permission to message them, like you would on LinkedIn, and I don’t believe that an algorithm recommends you to people based on engagement.

Has some weird Internet personality insisted that following thousands of people on GitHub magically makes a person more marketable? Does someone recommend this as a first programming project? It all seems so…odd.

Laptop Shopping Time, Part 2

As I mentioned in last month’s issue of the newsletter, I have needed to replace my laptop for a long time, arguably since I originally swung it into service after the power adapter’s receptacle fell apart on the previous laptop. While the search started with a lofty list of conditions—an x86-compatible processor, definitely runs Linux out of the box, repairable, Open Source Hardware, and Free Trade, with an honorable mention of not wanting to ship around the world—no company that I could find manufactures a product that fills all five criteria.

Two companies—System 76 and Framework—fill what I’d call two-and-a-half conditions out of five, and that seemed like the maximum, other than fringe projects that never really made it to market. They both ship with the correct processors. Framework has made its name on repairability and modularity, putting it ahead of System 76, which only “supports” repairability. But System 76 carefully tests and supports their Ubuntu derivative Pop!_OS indefinitely, whereas Framework provides no assurances.

Digging deeper, it started to sound like the Framework aluminum build tends to feel more secure than System 76’s mystery magnesium alloy. On the other hand, Framework’s more-square screen sounds interesting, but apparently doesn’t interact well with Linux’s handling of screen resolutions. Likewise, Framework provided more options, but has a much shorter battery life.

After looking at prices and a handful of smaller factors, I ultimately decided to go with System 76’s Pangolin “ultraportable” laptop. For my purposes, at least, it seemed like the right set of trade-offs, though I do wish that the model supported CoreBoot. For battery life and CoreBoot support the Lemur Pro might have worked out better, but the Pangolin should serve well enough.

Project Previews

The day job soaks up a lot of time that might have previously gone to side-projects, but I can still occasionally dig into weird ideas that might become something down the road…

Into the Rift

I don’t have too much to preview, here, but I will say that the world has enough in it for a large but independent media franchise…assuming that it attracts any attention.

Without getting into the background or implying that I’ve written anything that I haven’t, I expect the introductory story to involve a young person—from Earth, with a possibly familiar name—finding a hidden device that connects them to a distant galaxy, where the Regent plans to reactivate the ancient network of interstellar Riftgates, in order to push entire worlds out of real-space, to create spaces where he can purge the corruption destroying his body.

To secure the necessary labor, the Regent holds one world’s Dauphine hostage, leading our young person, a renegade Regency warrior-priest, and his android to seek the help of the Defiance. Along the way, our young protagonist-for-now must evade the forces converging on the strange signal emitted by the device that he needs to return home, and determine why he increasingly feels hungry for power.

I suspect that you’ll notice, even at this early and vague stage, that, while Star Wars forms the primary inspiration, the world—and its direct sources—have blended ideas from other franchises into its history. As such, you’ll see elements that have skewed parallels to Stargate, Middle Earth, and more.

Tutaititaa

I have the four Lewis Orné stories converted to Markdown and ready for reading…sometime during October, I hope, to meet the…actually, it looks like the deadline has changed to March 15th.

Dune: Part Two was originally scheduled to be released on October 20, 2023, but was delayed to November 17, 2023, before moving forward two weeks to November 3, 2023, to adjust to changes in release schedules from other studios. In August 2023, the film was delayed once more to March 15, 2024, due to the ongoing 2023 Hollywood labor disputes.

I can definitely work with that. On that timescale, maybe I can even commission some art and either write or have someone else write a fifth story.

Media

In no particular order, I present a list of some things that I finished watching, listening to, or read in September…which doesn’t seem like much.

No, I don’t remember when I started them, unless they didn’t take long. You can probably estimate that I watched about an episode of any given “archived” television show per day, though, if that helps. If you’d like to know what I finish watching as I finish it—sometimes I catch something during the narrow window when people can watch it free—you might consider becoming a member at Buy Me a Coffee.

  • While I wouldn’t go so far as to call The Other Merlin an “ultra-fresh take” on Arthurian lore as some reviewers have, I do appreciate a lot about the book and could see this becoming a mainstream teen drama series without stretching disbelief much.

  • Hamster and Gretel goes into the basket of shows that routinely make me laugh hard enough that I need to rewind the show to catch the follow-up joke. It looks like it shares some creators with Kim Possible, which makes a lot of sense, because that has had a similar effect on me.

  • Stateless seemed interesting enough, but I kept forgetting to get back to it, the first time that has ever happened to me…

  • The Tomorrow People does a decent job of rebooting the original—for which, see the June newsletter—though it takes some unsophisticated turns, such as making the “can’t kill” rule both superficial (in that they can still hurt people or plan deaths) and central enough that you know that they plan to routinely find ways around it.

    • I guess that, now, I need to track down the 2009 series, to complete the project…

  • I don’t have much to say about His Perfect Partner, since only the two protagonists matter to the story, and everybody including the protagonists know how it’ll end. I didn’t mind the writing, though.

  • Reservation Dogs, season 3 closed out the series, and…I feel confused. This season didn’t technically abandon the main cast, but we spent surprisingly little time with them, in favor of setting up the relationships between their elders. And we have never really cared about them before, and I don’t know that any of that story contributed to something else going on, leaving me wondering why bring in an effectively new cast for “world-building” on the way out. I didn’t dislike it, but mostly question the purpose of the season.

On the other hand, note that September makes a bad example. I haven’t watched or read much of anything, even though I have several long, book-like pages open in browser tabs in various states.

Blog Posts for September 2023

In case you missed one and don’t like RSS readers, here’s a round-up of the past month’s worth of posts.

I also revisited and updated some older posts, for various reasons.

Significant changes to the text come with clear and dated markings. Changing the wording or correcting a typo is more routine, but it indicates that I’ve at least been looking at the post. Longer changes probably have a brief write-up in this very newsletter.

The most popular posts on the blog have been Recutils — Small Technology Notes, Calafia, Queen of California, Copyright Searches, and Superheroes and Race for the month.

Articles I’ve Been Reading

You’ve seen some of these already in Friday posts, but here’s more from the sources in my RSS reader that I thought were worth reading.

Web Pages That Caught My Attention

These are pages I bookmarked, basically. They might be old articles, non-articles, fiction, or any number of other possibilities. You’ve seen the web. You know what it’s like out there. And you also know that half the titles are probably bogus, because people are terrible at setting their page titles to something useful.

That’s it for this month. Stop by the blog and leave comments or contact me however else you see fit.

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