I have not posted in a bit, as happens. I have never managed
to get any kind of consistency as to the topic of this phlog
vs. my other phlog at circumlunar.space[0]. I just randomly
decide to write and write from wherever I am logged in. Some
day maybe I will land on something. I always feel like it'd
be cool to have a phlog dedicated to a specific subject/type
writing.... until then things will be haphazard life and
code updates.
Surveilance
-----------
So, on the former: the baby is doing really well. We had a
stressful time with her daycare recently. My wife and I both
really dislike having to take her to daycare at all, but we
cannot afford to not both work full time. So I was dropping
my daughter off and noticed a little hand written sign:
"Remember to have your watchmegrow releases signed by next
week"
I had not heard of this but immediately dreaded what I was
quite sure was going on. Upon asking I was told that they
were installing cameras in all of the classrooms so that
parents could stream video of their children (and everyone
else's) all day long. My wife and I refused to sign and told
them we would be looking for other arrangements. We were
given two weeks before the cameras would be turned on with
or without our consent/release. They were very nice about it
and made sure we knew that they, the staff at this location,
were not happy about it either. No one likes someone looking
over their should all day while they work.
Now, I absultely understand the instinct that would make a
parent want to be able to monitor their child in this way.
But I dont think it does what they think it does. There is
always an area off camera or a blind spot. Plus they cannot
be watching all the time. As such, I am not sure what is to
be gained aside from just the joy of seeing your baby
throughout the day. I can however think of quite a few
downsides.
We frantically searched for a daycare. We widened our search
to homes as well (so long as they were licensed). Right at
the end of the two weeks we finally found one. We toured it
and it seemed great. We put down a $100 deposit and told
them we would start on Monday. On the way to the door we
found out a bunch of stuff that made us question things: the
daycare did timeout... even with infants, they only had one
crib and said it was ok that they just have the babys sleep
next to them, they wont pick up a crying baby in order to
"not teach them they can get whatever they want by crying".
All of those, by my book, are at the very least questionable
and go against the modern pediatric and psychological advice
available. We felt worse and worse about it and decided we
would not be doing that.
I called the parent line for the WatchMeGrow service. I
asked about data collection (if I do not sign up for their
app... which my school does not require I do, they do not
even have my childs name), archiving of footage (they do
not keep any, just live stream), and CCPA rights since we
live in CA (if they had any data they are aware of what
they are required to do upon request for CCPA purposes).
Ok. So I thought maybe this would be better. Whatever my
politics about surveilance... I feel like my baby is safe
at this daycare. I trust the people there as much as I can
trust anyone outside of family/friends with my baby. Then
I asked the final question: facial recognition. I was told
that their developers are looking into facial recognition
but that they do not currently have it implemented and it
is not a foregone conclusion that they will do so. The
school would be notified of this change though.
In the end we decided to stay so long as the school lets
us know the second they hear anything about facial reco-
gnition being implemented for that system.
We did get some support from parents and staff. My wife's
explanation of her major beef with technology of this
sort (when combined with data collection and facial rec-
ognition) won a lot of people over. The explanation is:
We cannot predict how data will be used. It may seem quite
useless right now. But what happens when someone discovers
that children who have more bowel movements per day are
more prone to certain types of cancer later in life (for
example)? You could easily see a future where that person
could have a hard time getting insurance or services at
some point in their future due to the "increased risk".
Bottom line, people should be cautious about _any_ info
they allow services to capture about them... who knows
what the future will hold and once it is out there it is
impossible to take back, even with new laws that try to
help.
Code
----
In my spare time I have been reading the Brian Kernighan
(et al) Awk book. It is pretty straightforward. I knew
how to use awk already, but it was a cheap book used and
it has been pretty cool to see some applications I would
not have thought of.
I have been slowly adding features to Hermes[1], the text
editor I have been working on. I recently made it so that
when you change modes (command, input, visual) the status
bar changes color so that you can more easily tell what
mode you are in. I also added auto closing parens as an
option in the config.h file. Similarly I have been working
on auto-indent for known filetypes. I have it working
at a usable level. It does not know to dedent on closing
a paren of the like, but it does a good job of opening
up to the correct indentation. That feature is also
something that can be toggled on or off at compile time
via the config.h file. C as a language is still quite a
confusing beast for me. Powerful, but I miss features I
am used to in Golang. I do like the access to termios
pretty easily. In Go I would have to use an external lib,
which is something I generally avoid.
I have also been writing a package manager of sorts. It
is called scbm (sloum's compiled build manager). It works
with git repos. You can do things like:
$ scbm get
http://git.somesite.com/myprogram
That would clone the repo to the scbm files area in
/usr/local/share/scbm and add the program to the scbm
manifest file. An scbm file will also be created to
track various aspects of the programs state on the
system.
To have programs install you still have to manually
look at the README or code and determine how it gets
built (or how _you_ want it built). you can then run:
$ scbm set myprogram "make && make install"
The above would set the install command for the
program. It subprocesses out to sh for running
the commands.
This allows for things like:
$ scbm update
Which will pull and install any updates.
You can freeze applications so that they are still
under management but will not pull new updates. You
can also revert to a previous version. So if you
update and one of your programs does not function as
expected you can automatically switch back to the
previous commit that you know worked and install that
one and then freeze the program until you have a
chance to debug the situation.
I am mostly building this for me. So that I can manage
my various software projects easily. But it has also
worked quite well for the other projects I build from
source (tabbed, st, etc). It still requires a user to
read about and understand the source they are building.
But for trusted software, particularly personal projects,
it is really quite helpful.
I think that'll probably do it for this udpate. It has
already been a bit longer than I intended it to be.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 8< - - -
Recently I...
read "Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits" by David
Wong. It was good, but not as good as the John Dies at
the End series.
read "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World"
by Haruki Murakami. It was great. Now one of my favorites
by him.
listened to "Far Out" by Cloakroom. It has been a favorite
for a while now.
listened to "Nocturnal" by The Midnight. It has some good
80s-ish synthy coolguy stuff going on.
played Mario Kart for switch. Always a fun way to wind
down with family at the end of the day.
was contacted by Tomasino who informed me of a really
awesome looking Metroid (nes) remix/mod that I want
to find time to play through.
