Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]
34
It hasn’t even been a week since we started selling Campfire under the new ONCE model, but we’ve already sold more than quarter of a million dollars worth of this beautifully simple installable chat system. People are using it to replace existing systems costing tens of thousands of dollars per year, as well as all sorts of backup- or second-system setups. It’s a great start! While the Shopify store has been ringing up customers, we’ve been busy improving the software. Now the website promises at least 3 years of security updates, but we haven’t made any big promises about general improvements or new features (beyond adding a Bot API). But in the past week, we’ve been doing just that. Improving, tinkering, extending. Over-delivering on an under-promise. And I have to say, that process has worked out much better than I anticipated. I feared that going to an installable software model would give us some degree of a headache in terms of rolling out updates or people having a difficult...
a year ago

Improve your reading experience

Logged in users get linked directly to articles resulting in a better reading experience. Please login for free, it takes less than 1 minute.

More from David Heinemeier Hansson

Europeans don't have or understand free speech

The new American vice president JD Vance just gave a remarkable talk at the Munich Security Conference on free speech and mass immigration. It did not go over well with many European politicians, some of which immediately proved Vance's point, and labeled the speech "not acceptable". All because Vance dared poke at two of the holiest taboos in European politics. Let's start with his points on free speech, because they're the foundation for understanding how Europe got into such a mess on mass immigration. See, Europeans by and large simply do not understand "free speech" as a concept the way Americans do. There is no first amendment-style guarantee in Europe, yet the European mind desperately wants to believe it has the same kind of free speech as the US, despite endless evidence to the contrary. It's quite like how every dictator around the world pretends to believe in democracy. Sure, they may repress the opposition and rig their elections, but they still crave the imprimatur of the concept. So too "free speech" and the Europeans. Vance illustrated his point with several examples from the UK. A country that pursues thousands of yearly wrong-speech cases, threatens foreigners with repercussions should they dare say too much online, and has no qualms about handing down draconian sentences for online utterances. It's completely totalitarian and completely nuts. Germany is not much better. It's illegal to insult elected officials, and if you say the wrong thing, or post the wrong meme, you may well find yourself the subject of a raid at dawn. Just crazy stuff. I'd love to say that Denmark is different, but sadly it is not. You can be put in prison for up to two years for mocking or degrading someone on the basis on their race. It recently become illegal to burn the Quran (which sadly only serves to legitimize crazy Muslims killing or stabbing those who do). And you may face up to three years in prison for posting online in a way that can be construed as morally supporting terrorism. But despite all of these examples and laws, I'm constantly arguing with Europeans who cling to the idea that they do have free speech like Americans. Many of them mistakenly think that "hate speech" is illegal in the US, for example. It is not. America really takes the first amendment quite seriously. Even when it comes to hate speech. Famously, the Jewish lawyers of the (now unrecognizable) ACLU defended the right of literal, actual Nazis to march for their hateful ideology in the streets of Skokie, Illinois in 1979 and won. Another common misconception is that "misinformation" is illegal over there too. It also is not. That's why the Twitter Files proved to be so scandalous. Because it showed the US government under Biden laundering an illegal censorship regime -- in grave violation of the first amendment -- through private parties, like the social media networks. In America, your speech is free to be wrong, free to be hateful, free to insult religions and celebrities alike. All because the founding fathers correctly saw that asserting the power to determine otherwise leads to a totalitarian darkness. We've seen vivid illustrations of both in recent years. At the height of the trans mania, questioning whether men who said they were women should be allowed in women's sports or bathrooms or prisons was frequently labeled "hate speech". During the pandemic, questioning whether the virus might have escaped from a lab instead of a wet market got labeled "misinformation". So too did any questions about the vaccine's inability to stop spread or infection. Or whether surgical masks or lock downs were effective interventions. Now we know that having a public debate about all of these topics was of course completely legitimate. Covid escaping from a lab is currently the most likely explanation, according to American intelligence services, and many European countries, including the UK, have stopped allowing puberty blockers for children. Which brings us to that last bugaboo: Mass immigration. Vance identified it as one of the key threats to Europe at the moment, and I have to agree. So should anyone who've been paying attention to the statistics showing the abject failure of this thirty-year policy utopia of a multi-cultural Europe. The fast changing winds in European politics suggest that's exactly what's happening. These are not separate issues. It's the lack of free speech, and a catastrophically narrow Overton window, which has led Europe into such a mess with mass immigration in the first place. In Denmark, the first popular political party that dared to question the wisdom of importing massive numbers of culturally-incompatible foreigners were frequently charged with claims of racism back in the 90s. The same "that's racist!" playbook is now being run on political parties across Europe who dare challenge the mass immigration taboo. But making plain observations that some groups of immigrants really do commit vastly more crime and contribute vastly less economically to society is not racist. It wasn't racist when the Danish Folkparty did it in Denmark in the 1990s, and it isn't racist now when the mainstream center-left parties have followed suit. I've drawn the contrast to Sweden many times, and I'll do it again here. Unlike Denmark, Sweden kept its Overton window shut on the consequences of mass immigration all the way up through the 90s, 00s, and 10s. As a prize, it now has bombs going off daily, the European record in gun homicides, and a government that admits that the immigrant violence is out of control. The state of Sweden today is a direct consequence of suppressing any talk of the downsides to mass immigration for decades. And while that taboo has recently been broken, it may well be decades more before the problems are tackled at their root. It's tragic beyond belief. The rest of Europe should look to Sweden as a cautionary tale, and the Danish alternative as a precautionary one. It's never too late to fix tomorrow. You can't fix today, but you can always fix tomorrow. So Vance was right to wag his finger at all this nonsense. The lack of free speech and the problems with mass immigration. He was right to assert that America and Europe has a shared civilization to advance and protect. Whether the current politicians of Europe wants to hear it or not, I'm convinced that average Europeans actually are listening.

yesterday 5 votes
Serving the country

In 1940, President Roosevelt tapped William S. Knudsen to run the government's production of military equipment. Knudsen had spent a pivotal decade at Ford during the mass-production revolution, and was president of General Motors, when he was drafted as a civilian into service as a three-star general. Not bad for a Dane, born just ten minutes on bike from where I'm writing this in Copenhagen! Knudsen's leadership raised the productive capacity of the US war machine by a 100x in areas like plane production, where it went from producing 3,000 planes in 1939 to over 300,000 by 1945. He was quoted on his achievement: "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible". Knudsen wasn't an elected politician. He wasn't even a military man. But Roosevelt saw that this remarkable Dane had the skills needed to reform a puny war effort into one capable of winning the Second World War. Do you see where I'm going with this? Elon Musk is a modern day William S. Knudsen. Only even more accomplished in efficiency management, factory optimization, and first-order systems thinking. No, America isn't in a hot war with the Axis powers, but for the sake of the West, it damn well better be prepared for one in the future. Or better still, be so formidable that no other country or alliance would even think to start one. And this requires a strong, confident, and sound state with its affairs in order. If you look at the government budget alone, this is direly not so. The US was knocking on a two-trillion-dollar budget deficit in 2024! Adding to a towering debt that's now north of 36 trillion. A burden that's already consuming $881 billion in yearly interest payments. More than what's spent on the military or Medicare. Second to only Social Security on the list of line items. Clearly, this is not sustainable. This is the context of DOGE. The program, lead by Musk, that's been deputized by Trump to turn the ship around. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and Musk is dropping beats that Knudsen would have surely been tapping his foot to. And just like Knudsen in his time, it's hard to think of any other American entrepreneur more qualified to tackle exactly this two-trillion dollar problem.  It is through The Musk Algorithm that SpaceX lowered the cost of sending a kilo of goods into lower orbit from the US by well over a magnitude. And now America's share of worldwide space transit has risen from less than 30% in 2010 to about 85%. Thanks to reusable rockets and chopstick-catching landing towers. Thanks to Musk. Or to take a more earthly example with Twitter. Before Musk took over, Twitter had revenues of $5 billion and earned $682 million. After the take over, X has managed to earn $1.25 billion on $2.7 billion in revenue. Mostly thank to the fact that Musk cut 80% of the staff out of the operation, and savaged the cloud costs of running the service. This is not what people expected at the time of the take over! Not only did many commentators believe that Twitter was going to collapse from the drastic costs in staff, they also thought that the financing for the deal would implode. Chiefly as a result of advertisers withdrawing from the platform under intense media pressure. But that just didn't happen. Today, the debt used to take over Twitter and turn it into X is trading at 97 cents on the dollar. The business is twice as profitable as it was before, and arguably as influential as ever. All with just a fifth of the staff required to run it. Whatever you think of Musk and his personal tweets, it's impossible to deny what an insane achievement of efficiency this has been! These are just two examples of Musk's incredible ability to defy the odds and deliver the most unbelievable efficiency gains known to modern business records. And we haven't even talked about taking Tesla from producing 35,000 cars in 2014 to making 1.7 million in 2024. Or turning xAI into a major force in AI by assembling a 100,000 H100 cluster at "superhuman" pace.  Who wouldn't want such a capacity involved in finding the waste, sloth, and squander in the US budget? Well, his political enemies, of course! And I get it. Musk's magic is balanced with mania and even a dash of madness. This is usually the case with truly extraordinary humans. The taller they stand, the longer the shadow. Expecting Musk to do what he does and then also be a "normal, chill dude" is delusional. But even so, I think it's completely fair to be put off by his tendency to fire tweets from the hip, opine on world affairs during all hours of the day, and offer his support to fringe characters in politics, business, and technology. I'd be surprised if even the most ardent Musk super fans don't wince a little every now and then at some of the antics. And yet, I don't have any trouble weighing those antics against the contributions he's made to mankind, and finding an easy and overwhelming balance in favor of his positive achievements. Musk is exactly the kind of formidable player you want on your team when you're down two trillion to nothing, needing a Hail Mary pass for the destiny of America, and eager to see the West win the future. He's a modern-day Knudsen on steroids (or Ketamine?). Let him cook.

a week ago 7 votes
Servers can last a long time

We bought sixty-one servers for the launch of Basecamp 3 back in 2015. Dell R430s and R630s, packing thousands of cores and terabytes of RAM. Enough to fill all the app, job, cache, and database duties we needed. The entire outlay for this fleet was about half a million dollars, and it's only now, almost a decade later, that we're finally retiring the bulk of them for a full hardware refresh. What a bargain! That's over 3,500 days of service from this fleet, at a fully amortized cost of just $142/day. For everything needed to run Basecamp. A software service that has grossed hundreds of millions of dollars in that decade. We've of course had other expenses beyond hardware from operating Basecamp over the past decade. The ops team, the bandwidth, the power, and the cabinet rental across both our data centers. But none the less, owning our own iron has been a fantastically profitable proposition. Millions of dollars saved over renting in the cloud. And we aren't even done deriving value from this venerable fleet! The database servers, Dell R630s w/ Xeon E5-2699 CPUs and 768G of RAM, are getting handed down to some of our heritage apps. They will keep on trucking until they give up the ghost. When we did the public accounting for our cloud exit, it was based on five years of useful life from the hardware. But as this example shows, that's pretty conservative. Most servers can easily power your applications much longer than that. Owning your own servers has easily been one of our most effective cost advantages. Together with running a lean team. And managing our costs remains key to reaping the profitable fruit from the business. The dollar you keep at the end of the year is just as real whether you earn it or save it. So you just might want to run those cloud-exit numbers once more with a longer server lifetime value. It might just tip the equation, and motivate you to become a server owner rather than a renter.

a week ago 14 votes
It burns

The first time we had to evacuate Malibu this season was during the Franklin fire in early December. We went to bed with our bags packed, thinking they'd probably get it under control. But by 2am, the roaring blades of fire choppers shaking the house got us up. As we sped down the canyon towards Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), the fire had reached the ridge across from ours, and flames were blazing large out the car windows. It felt like we had left the evacuation a little too late, but they eventually did get Franklin under control before it reached us. Humans have a strange relationship with risk and disasters. We're so prone to wishful thinking and bad pattern matching. I remember people being shocked when the flames jumped the PCH during the Woolsey fire in 2017. IT HAD NEVER DONE THAT! So several friends of ours had to suddenly escape a nightmare scenario, driving through burning streets, in heavy smoke, with literally their lives on the line. Because the past had failed to predict the future. I feel into that same trap for a moment with the dramatic proclamations of wind and fire weather in the days leading up to January 7. Warning after warning of "extremely dangerous, life-threatening wind" coming from the City of Malibu, and that overly-bureaucratic-but-still-ominous "Particularly Dangerous Situation" designation. Because, really, how much worse could it be? Turns out, a lot. It was a little before noon on the 7th when we first saw the big plumes of smoke rise from the Palisades fire. And immediately the pattern matching ran astray. Oh, it's probably just like Franklin. It's not big yet, they'll get it out. They usually do. Well, they didn't. By the late afternoon, we had once more packed our bags, and by then it was also clear that things actually were different this time. Different worse. Different enough that even Santa Monica didn't feel like it was assured to be safe. So we headed far North, to be sure that we wouldn't have to evacuate again. Turned out to be a good move. Because by now, into the evening, few people in the connected world hadn't started to see the catastrophic images emerging from the Palisades and Eaton fires. Well over 10,000 houses would ultimately burn. Entire neighborhoods leveled. Pictures that could be mistaken for World War II. Utter and complete destruction. By the night of the 7th, the fire reached our canyon, and it tore through the chaparral and brush that'd been building since the last big fire that area saw in 1993. Out of some 150 houses in our immediate vicinity, nearly a hundred burned to the ground. Including the first house we moved to in Malibu back in 2009. But thankfully not ours. That's of course a huge relief. This was and is our Malibu Dream House. The site of that gorgeous home office I'm so fond to share views from. Our home. But a house left standing in a disaster zone is still a disaster. The flames reached all the way up to the base of our construction, incinerated much of our landscaping, and devoured the power poles around it to dysfunction. We have burnt-out buildings every which way the eye looks. The national guard is still stationed at road blocks on the access roads. Utility workers are tearing down the entire power grid to rebuild it from scratch. It's going to be a long time before this is comfortably habitable again. So we left. That in itself feels like defeat. There's an urge to stay put, and to help, in whatever helpless ways you can. But with three school-age children who've already missed over a months worth of learning from power outages, fire threats, actual fires, and now mudslide dangers, it was time to go. None of this came as a surprise, mind you. After Woolsey in 2017, Malibu life always felt like living on borrowed time to us. We knew it, even accepted it. Beautiful enough to be worth the risk, we said.  But even if it wasn't a surprise, it's still a shock. The sheer devastation, especially in the Palisades, went far beyond our normal range of comprehension. Bounded, as it always is, by past experiences. Thus, we find ourselves back in Copenhagen. A safe haven for calamities of all sorts. We lived here for three years during the pandemic, so it just made sense to use it for refuge once more. The kids' old international school accepted them right back in, and past friendships were quickly rebooted. I don't know how long it's going to be this time. And that's an odd feeling to have, just as America has been turning a corner, and just as the optimism is back in so many areas. Of the twenty years I've spent in America, this feels like the most exciting time to be part of the exceptionalism that the US of A offers. And of course we still are. I'll still be in the US all the time on both business, racing, and family trips. But it won't be exclusively so for a while, and it won't be from our Malibu Dream House. And that burns.

2 weeks ago 13 votes
Waiting on red

Americans often laugh when they see how often Danes will patiently, obediently wait on the little red man to turn green before crossing an empty intersection, in the rain, even at night. Nobody is coming! Why don't you just cross?! It seems silly, but the underlying philosophy is anything but. It's load bearing for a civil society like Denmark. Because doing the right thing every time can be put on autopilot, and when most people follow even the basic norms consistently, the second-order effects are profound. Like the fact that Copenhagen is one of the absolute safest major cities in the world. But the Danes also know that norms fray if they're not enforced, so they vigorously pursue even small infractions. The Danish police regularly celebrating ticketing bicyclists making even minor mistakes (like driving instead of dragging their bike on the sidewalk). And the metro is constantly being patrolled for fare evaders and antisocial behavior. It's broken windows theory on steroids. And it works. When we were living in the city for three years following the pandemic, the most startling difference to major US cities was the prevalence of unattended children everywhere, at all hours. Our oldest was just nine years-old when he started taking the metro alone, even at night. How many American parents would feel comfortable letting their nine-year old take the L in Chicago or the subway in Manhattan? I don't know any. And as a result, you just don't see any unattended children do this. But in Copenhagen it's completely common place. This is the prize of having little tolerance for antisocial behavior in the public space. When you take away the freedom from crackheads and bums to smoke up on the train or sleep in the park, you grant the freedom to nine-year olds to roam the city and for families to enjoy the park at dusk. This is the fundamental error of suicidal empathy. That tolerance of the deranged and dangerous few can be kept a separate discussion from the freedom and safety of the many. These are oppositional forces. The more antisocial behavior you excuse, the further families will retract into their protective shell. And suddenly there are no longer children around in the public city space or any appetite for public transit. Maybe you have to become a parent to really understand this. I admit that I didn't give this nearly the same attention before coming a father of three. But the benefit isn't exclusively about the freedom and safety enjoyed by your own family, it's also about the ambient atmosphere of living in a city where children are everywhere. It's a special form of life-affirming luxury, and it's probably the thing I've missed most about Copenhagen since we went back to the US. What's interesting is how much active effort it takes to maintain this state of affairs. The veneer of civil society is surprisingly thin. Norms fray quickly if left unguarded. And it's much harder to reestablish their purchase on society than to protect them from disappearing in the first place. But I also get that it's hard to connect the dots from afar, though. Many liberals in America keep Denmark as some mythical place where all their policy dreams have come true, without ever wrestling much with what it takes to maintain the social trust that allows those policies to enjoy public support. The progressive Nirvana of Denmark is built on a highly conservative set of norms and traditions. It's ying and yang. So if you're committed to those progressive outcomes in America, whether it's the paternity leave, the independent children, or the amazing public transit system, you ought to consider what conservative values it makes sense to accept as enablers rather than obstacles.

3 weeks ago 26 votes

More in programming

How to select your first marketing channel

When you're brand new, how do you select your first marketing channel?

22 hours ago 4 votes
Europeans don't have or understand free speech

The new American vice president JD Vance just gave a remarkable talk at the Munich Security Conference on free speech and mass immigration. It did not go over well with many European politicians, some of which immediately proved Vance's point, and labeled the speech "not acceptable". All because Vance dared poke at two of the holiest taboos in European politics. Let's start with his points on free speech, because they're the foundation for understanding how Europe got into such a mess on mass immigration. See, Europeans by and large simply do not understand "free speech" as a concept the way Americans do. There is no first amendment-style guarantee in Europe, yet the European mind desperately wants to believe it has the same kind of free speech as the US, despite endless evidence to the contrary. It's quite like how every dictator around the world pretends to believe in democracy. Sure, they may repress the opposition and rig their elections, but they still crave the imprimatur of the concept. So too "free speech" and the Europeans. Vance illustrated his point with several examples from the UK. A country that pursues thousands of yearly wrong-speech cases, threatens foreigners with repercussions should they dare say too much online, and has no qualms about handing down draconian sentences for online utterances. It's completely totalitarian and completely nuts. Germany is not much better. It's illegal to insult elected officials, and if you say the wrong thing, or post the wrong meme, you may well find yourself the subject of a raid at dawn. Just crazy stuff. I'd love to say that Denmark is different, but sadly it is not. You can be put in prison for up to two years for mocking or degrading someone on the basis on their race. It recently become illegal to burn the Quran (which sadly only serves to legitimize crazy Muslims killing or stabbing those who do). And you may face up to three years in prison for posting online in a way that can be construed as morally supporting terrorism. But despite all of these examples and laws, I'm constantly arguing with Europeans who cling to the idea that they do have free speech like Americans. Many of them mistakenly think that "hate speech" is illegal in the US, for example. It is not. America really takes the first amendment quite seriously. Even when it comes to hate speech. Famously, the Jewish lawyers of the (now unrecognizable) ACLU defended the right of literal, actual Nazis to march for their hateful ideology in the streets of Skokie, Illinois in 1979 and won. Another common misconception is that "misinformation" is illegal over there too. It also is not. That's why the Twitter Files proved to be so scandalous. Because it showed the US government under Biden laundering an illegal censorship regime -- in grave violation of the first amendment -- through private parties, like the social media networks. In America, your speech is free to be wrong, free to be hateful, free to insult religions and celebrities alike. All because the founding fathers correctly saw that asserting the power to determine otherwise leads to a totalitarian darkness. We've seen vivid illustrations of both in recent years. At the height of the trans mania, questioning whether men who said they were women should be allowed in women's sports or bathrooms or prisons was frequently labeled "hate speech". During the pandemic, questioning whether the virus might have escaped from a lab instead of a wet market got labeled "misinformation". So too did any questions about the vaccine's inability to stop spread or infection. Or whether surgical masks or lock downs were effective interventions. Now we know that having a public debate about all of these topics was of course completely legitimate. Covid escaping from a lab is currently the most likely explanation, according to American intelligence services, and many European countries, including the UK, have stopped allowing puberty blockers for children. Which brings us to that last bugaboo: Mass immigration. Vance identified it as one of the key threats to Europe at the moment, and I have to agree. So should anyone who've been paying attention to the statistics showing the abject failure of this thirty-year policy utopia of a multi-cultural Europe. The fast changing winds in European politics suggest that's exactly what's happening. These are not separate issues. It's the lack of free speech, and a catastrophically narrow Overton window, which has led Europe into such a mess with mass immigration in the first place. In Denmark, the first popular political party that dared to question the wisdom of importing massive numbers of culturally-incompatible foreigners were frequently charged with claims of racism back in the 90s. The same "that's racist!" playbook is now being run on political parties across Europe who dare challenge the mass immigration taboo. But making plain observations that some groups of immigrants really do commit vastly more crime and contribute vastly less economically to society is not racist. It wasn't racist when the Danish Folkparty did it in Denmark in the 1990s, and it isn't racist now when the mainstream center-left parties have followed suit. I've drawn the contrast to Sweden many times, and I'll do it again here. Unlike Denmark, Sweden kept its Overton window shut on the consequences of mass immigration all the way up through the 90s, 00s, and 10s. As a prize, it now has bombs going off daily, the European record in gun homicides, and a government that admits that the immigrant violence is out of control. The state of Sweden today is a direct consequence of suppressing any talk of the downsides to mass immigration for decades. And while that taboo has recently been broken, it may well be decades more before the problems are tackled at their root. It's tragic beyond belief. The rest of Europe should look to Sweden as a cautionary tale, and the Danish alternative as a precautionary one. It's never too late to fix tomorrow. You can't fix today, but you can always fix tomorrow. So Vance was right to wag his finger at all this nonsense. The lack of free speech and the problems with mass immigration. He was right to assert that America and Europe has a shared civilization to advance and protect. Whether the current politicians of Europe wants to hear it or not, I'm convinced that average Europeans actually are listening.

yesterday 5 votes
Using Xcode's AI Is Like Pair Programming With A Monkey

I've never used any other AI "assistant," although I've talked with those who have, most of whom are not very positive. My experience using Xcode's AI is that it occasionally offers a line of code that works, but you mostly get junk

2 days ago 6 votes
tracepoints: gnarly but worth it

Hey all, quick post today to mention that I added tracing support to the . If the support library for is available when Whippet is compiled, Whippet embedders can visualize the GC process. Like this!Whippet GC libraryLTTng Click above for a full-scale screenshot of the trace explorer processing the with the on a 2.5x heap. Of course no image will have all the information; the nice thing about trace visualizers like is that you can zoom in to sub-microsecond spans to see exactly what is happening, have nice mouseovers and clicky-clickies. Fun times!Perfetto microbenchmarknboyerparallel copying collector Adding tracepoints to a library is not too hard in the end. You need to , which has a file. You need to . Then you have a that includes the header, to generate the code needed to emit tracepoints.pull in the librarylttng-ustdeclare your tracepoints in one of your header filesminimal C filepkg-config Annoyingly, this header file you write needs to be in one of the directories; it can’t be just in the the source directory, because includes it seven times (!!) using (!!!) and because the LTTng file header that does all the computed including isn’t in your directory, GCC won’t find it. It’s pretty ugly. Ugliest part, I would say. But, grit your teeth, because it’s worth it.-Ilttngcomputed includes Finally you pepper your source with tracepoints, which probably you so that you don’t have to require LTTng, and so you can switch to other tracepoint libraries, and so on.wrap in some macro I wrote up a little . It’s not as easy as , which I think is an error. Another ugly point. Buck up, though, you are so close to graphs!guide for Whippet users about how to actually get tracesperf record By which I mean, so close to having to write a Python script to make graphs! Because LTTng writes its logs in so-called Common Trace Format, which as you might guess is not very common. I have a colleague who swears by it, that for him it is the lowest-overhead system, and indeed in my case it has no measurable overhead when trace data is not being collected, but his group uses custom scripts to convert the CTF data that he collects to... (?!?!?!!).GTKWave In my case I wanted to use Perfetto’s UI, so I found a to convert from CTF to the . But, it uses an old version of Babeltrace that wasn’t available on my system, so I had to write a (!!?!?!?!!), probably the most Python I have written in the last 20 years.scriptJSON-based tracing format that Chrome profiling used to usenew script Yes. God I love blinkenlights. As long as it’s low-maintenance going forward, I am satisfied with the tradeoffs. Even the fact that I had to write a script to process the logs isn’t so bad, because it let me get nice nested events, which most stock tracing tools don’t allow you to do. I fixed a small performance bug because of it – a . A win, and one that never would have shown up on a sampling profiler too. I suspect that as I add more tracepoints, more bugs will be found and fixed.worker thread was spinning waiting for a pool to terminate instead of helping out I think the only thing that would be better is if tracepoints were a part of Linux system ABIs – that there would be header files to emit tracepoint metadata in all binaries, that you wouldn’t have to link to any library, and the actual tracing tools would be intermediated by that ABI in such a way that you wouldn’t depend on those tools at build-time or distribution-time. But until then, I will take what I can get. Happy tracing! on adding tracepoints using the thing is it worth it? fin

2 days ago 3 votes
Evaluating overlay-adjacent accessibility products

I get asked about my opinion on overlay-adjacent accessibility products with enough frequency that I thought it could be helpful to write about it. There’s a category of third party products out there that are almost, but not quite an accessibility overlay. By this I mean that they seem a little less predatory, and a little more grounded in terms of the promises they make. Some of these products are widgets. Some are browser extensions. Some are apps. Some are an odd fourth thing. Sometimes it’s a case of a solutioneering disability dongle grift, sometimes its a case of good intentions executed in a less-than-optimal way, and sometimes it’s something legitimately helpful. Oftentimes it’s something that lies in the middle area of all of this. Many of them also have some sort of “AI” integration, which is the unfortunate upsell du jour we have to collectively endure for the time being. The rubric I use to evaluate these products remains very similar to how I scrutinize overlays. Hopefully it’s something that can be helpful for your own efforts. Should the product’s functionality be patented? I’m not very happy with the idea that the mechanism to operate something in an accessible way is inhibited by way of legal restriction. This artificially limits who can use it, which is in opposition to the overall mission of digital accessibility. Ideally the technology is the free bit, and the service that facilitates it is what generates the profit. Do I need to subscribe to use it? A subscription-based model is a great way to run a business, but you don’t need to pay a recurring fee to use an accessible website. The nature of the web’s technology means it can be operated via keyboard, voice control, and other assistive technology if constructed properly. Workarounds and community support also exist for some things where it’s not built well. Here I’d also like you to consider the disability tax, and how that factors into a rental model. It’s not great. Does the browser or operating system already have this functionality? A lot of the time this boils down to an issue of discovery, digital literacy, or identity. As touched on in the previous section, browsers and operating systems offer a lot to help you self-serve. Notable examples are reading mode, on-screen narration, color filters, interface and text zoom, and forced color inversion. Can it be used across multiple experiences, or just one website? Stability and predictability of operation and output are vital for technology like this. It’s why I am so bullish on utilizing existing browser and operating system features. Products built to “enhance” the accessibility of a single website or app can’t contribute towards this. Ironically, their presence may actually contribute friction towards someone’s existing method of using things. A tricky little twist here is products that target a single website are often advertised towards the website owner, and not the people who will be using said website. Can I use the keyboard to operate it? I’ve gotten in the habit of pressing Tab a few times when I first check out the product’s website and see if anything happens. It’s a quick and easy test to see if the company walks the walk in addition to talking the talk. Here, I regrettably encounter missing focus indicators and non-semantic interactive controls more often than not. I might also sometimes run the homepage through axe DevTools, to see if there are other egregious errors. I then try to use the product itself with a keyboard if a demo is offered. I am usually found wanting here. How reliable is the AI? There are two broad considerations here: How reliable is the output? How can bias affect someone’s interpretation of things? While I am a skeptic, I can also acknowledge that there are some good use cases for LLMs and related technology when it comes to disability. I think about reliability in terms of the output in terms of the “assistive” part of assistive technology. By this, I mean it actually helps you do what you need to get done. Here, I’d point to Salma Alam-Naylor’s experience with newer startups in this space versus established, community supported solutions. Then consider LLM-based image description products. Here we want to make sure the content is accurate and relevant. Remember that image descriptions are the mechanism that some people rely on to help them understand the world. If that description is not accurate, it impacts how they form an understanding of their environment. A step past that thought is the biases inherent in, and perpetuated by LLM-based technology. I recall Ben Myers’ thoughts on implicit, hegemonic normalization, as well as the sobering truth that this technology can exert influence over its users worldview at scale. Can the company be trusted with your data? A lot of assistive technology is purposely designed to not announce the fact that it is being used. This is to stave off things like discrimination or ineffective, separate-yet-equal “accessibility only” sites. There’s also the murky world of data brokerage, and if the company is selling off this information or not. AccessiBe comes to mind here, and not in a good way. Also consider if the product has access to everything you visit and interact with, and who has access to that information. As a companion concern, it is also worth considering the product’s data security practices—or lack thereof. Here, I would like to point out that startups tend to deprioritize this boring kind of infrastructure work in favor of feature creation. Not having any personal information present in a system is the best way to guard against its theft. Also know that there is no way to undo a data breach once it occurs. Leaked information stays leaked. Will the company last? Speaking of startups, know that more fail than succeed. Are you prepared for an outcome where the product you rely on is is no longer updated or supported because the company that made it went out of business? It could also be a case where the company still exists, but ceases to support the product you use. Here, know that sometimes these companies will actively squash attempts for community-based resurrection and support of the service because it represents potential liability. This concern is another reason why I’m bullish on operating system and browser functionality. They have a lot more resiliency and focus on the long view in this particular area. But also I’m not the arbiter of who can use what. In the spirit of “the best camera is the one you have on you:” if something works for your specific access needs, by all means use it.

2 days ago 6 votes