Mitch's Blog

“Bikeshedding” is the futile expenditure of time and resources on marginal elements of an important technical decision. It’s based on a hypothetical story about a local planning organization tasked with reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant. They are overwhelmed by the cost and engineering of this advanced technological project, and instead focus on details of the bike shed proposed for plant employees.

Historian C. Northcote Parkinson noted the phenomenon in 1957. “The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved,” Parkinson said.

The idea of bikeshedding became popular in the open source community, which is where I encountered it.

I have been lately overwhelmed by organizing retirement, our estates, finances, decluttering the house and so on. Also, I’ve been dissatisfied with the dental floss I’ve been using. However, I have researched options thoroughly and I believe I’ve arrived at a satisfactory alternative floss.

I was thinking about “The Expanse” the other day, and I abruptly remembered the name of the technology that powered the spaceship engines: The Epstein Drive. That’s unfortunate

A friend shared rumors of poor ratings for Starfleet Academy, undercutting my theory that it was taken off the air because the network had gone anti-woke.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see where Starfleet Academy might have been doomed by its premise. Young people might consider Trek to be an old people’s show, and say “Pass.” Old people look at a show about teenagers and say, “Pass.”

Plus the show did too much fanservice. I loved Starfleet Academy, but the fanservice coiuld get annoying. An entire episode about the mystery of what happened to Ben Sisko. It was a good episode, but I never was that big a DS9 fan so I did not get so much from it as other fans might have.

Maybe Trek just needs to take a 10-20 year time-out, like Doctor Who did before 2005.

I have been using RSS daily for more than 20 years and I have no clue what the difference is between RSS and a JSON feed, and whether or why I should pick one over the other. This kind of thing is why more people do not use RSS.

I have been thinking for a long time that Mastodon was dying, that fewer and fewer people were posting less and less and that what they were posting was less interesting.

Then yesterday, I followed @lisamelton@mastodon.social. Boy, was I wrong!

Lisa doesn’t post much, but she is a fiend for boosting other peoples posts.

So many interesting posts! So many interesting people to follow!

Mastodon nowadays has a Tumblr vibe. If you want to build your business or brand or get your political message out to the broadest possible audience, you should use YouTube, Twitter, a newsletter, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, LinkedIn and maybe TikTok (though I hear TikTok is fading).

Like Tumblr, Mastodon is just a place to hang out and read fun and maybe informative posts. It has no practical value. I like it.

And unlike Tumblr, Mastodon is not perpetually at risk of money people pulling the plug. As long as a few people are interested in keeping it going, it will keep going.

I just sent this email to @manton: You asked for an update on my experiment using Micro.blog as my sole outpost on the fediverse. It didn’t work for me.

I’ve mentioned before that I’d love it if you’d make Micro.blog into a superset of Mastodon. Today, I’d add Bluesky to that wish. Support boosts/reposts, likes/favorites, quote posts, display names, link previews and the rest. I think based on prior discussions that this is downright antithetical to your philosophy of Micro.blog and I respect and appreciate that — but it frustrates me. I think you ike the peace and quiet of MIcro.blog, whereas I like the noise. On the other hand, It’s been many years since I’ve been the subject of a social media pile-on.

I want one place to post and have it automatically go everywhere. Micro.blog almost gets me there — but then it stops a few feet short of the destination!

I have resumed reading Mastodon and posting directly to it.

I experimented for a while with relying on ActivityPub federation from my blog on Micro.blog and reading Mastodon from the Micro.blog timeline.

But Micro.blog doesn’t support boosts, favorites or display names (it only shows Fediverse addresses). I want to see all those things. So I decided to reactivate my favorite Mastodon account (@mitch@hachyderm.io) and read Mastodon from there.

And then I figured why not reactivate cross-posting from Micro.blog to Mastodon?

Eventually, I suppose I’ll migrate my Micro.blog followers to Mastodon. But I’m in no rush.

I’m still looking for one place to post where everybody who wants to read me can just follow me. In theory, that’s the web, but in reality everybody likes to go off in their own little services — Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Tumblr, whatever — and not talk to people elsewhere. I have communities on Facebook, Bluesky, Mastodon, my blog and newsletter and Tumblr, and I don’t want to give them up. I have a few automation tools and other tricks for minimizing manual cross-posting, but it also involves too much cutting and pasting. Frustrating!

Ladies and gentlemen: The President of the United States.

Is Anthropic’s Mythos a cybersecurity breakthrough, or just ‘criti-hype’? Anthropic claims its Mythos AI model is too dangerous to release widely — but telcos should focus on security fundamentals, not the hype. My latest on Fierce Network.

Science fiction assumes the universe is impersonal and knowable. Fantasy assumes the universe is governed by gods and other supernatural entities and is fundamentally unknowable by humans.

Horror is like fantasy but it also assumes the supernatural entities are cruel.

I’m pretty sure Joe Haldeman gets credit for these distinctions. He noted that by these definitions, the genre closest to science fiction isn’t fantasy — it’s the procedural mystery.

This was more of a big deal in the 20th Century, but even then, the best writers shrugged it off and were happy to play across genres. Poul Anderson said the biggest fantasy is that our understanding of the laws of the universe would be valid in 1,000 years.

I love Star Trek but the science and technology of Trek is less plausible than Game of Thrones. The science and technology of Doctor Who is even more implausible than Trek, but I love Who too.

I prefer science fiction to fantasy but I don’t make a Thing about it, like Some People do (or did — I think perhaps this controversy died in the 90s, and good riddance to it). I literally have friends who are fantasy writers.

From an excellent Bluesky threadlaunched by John Scalzi.