Personal – Spinor Info

How is it their business, pray tell?

Jul 192024

I admit I almost lost it last night.

I was attempting to sign up as an author with a notable scientific journal (who shall remain nameless as I am cowardly and I hope to remain in their good graces.) I was confronted with a questionnaire asking about some personal details.

Okay, so they want to know about my name, e-mail address, office phone and institution. All perfectly reasonable, even though I do not have a formal affiliation which sometimes means going through extra hoops, trying to convince the software that I am nonetheless legit. Then came more personal questions such as my gender and age. But then… race, ethnicity, sexual orientation…

Sexual orientation???

I beg your pardon?

Say what? I apologize for language that’s rude and crude, but what the fuck do my scientific contributions have to do with the privacy of my bedroom and how is that your fucking business?

I generally consider my ideological affiliation left-of-center, which is to say more likely leaning towards a progressive liberal attitude. But this? Granted, there was the option, “prefer not to answer”. Nonetheless, I was beyond offended. In this context, the question is downright creepy. What are they going to ask next from prospective authors? How often do you masturbate? Do you prefer conventional or unconventional positions while copulating? Are you into S&M?

I mean, seriously, all I am trying to do is to submit a physics paper to a scientific publication. Not interrogated about my bedroom habits.

Of course I know the answer. This is checkbox-driven DEI virtue-signaling. Someone, somewhere, will write a report about how well (or how badly) this scientific publication represents various communities. Never mind that the actual science should have absolutely nothing to do with race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. They now have checkboxes, and no doubt, folks patting themselves on the back being proud of what they have accomplished, making the world more inclusive and all.

Except that they didn’t. Except that these forms of aggressive, self-serving episodes of virtue signaling achieve the exact opposite: instead of steering the world towards a future in which such superficial characteristics no longer matter, instead of a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character, they not only keep divisions alive, they are actively deepening them.

And that’s why we can’t have nice things anymore.

From my Mom

Art, Hungary, Personal No Responses »

Jul 102024

Throughout her life my Mom earned a living as a artisan textile dyer in Hungary. Nothing fancy, her usual work involved bringing home to her workshop a few hundred, e.g., silk sheets, hand-dying them with predetermined, preapproved patterns (mostly fashionable headscarves, which were very popular in Europe in the 1960s, 1970s), then returning them to the warehouse, which then sent them out for further processing (steam fixing, hemming, etc.)

One day in 1984 she was asked to do something different: To prepare several silk sheets, using the designs, and under the supervision, of a well-known artist (Judit Szabó), for public display in a community hall in a small Hungarian town (Földeák).

She was reminded of this during our recent conversation. Though I had no high expectations, I searched for it using the name of the town and the artist. To our no small astonishment (and to my Mom’s great delight), I found it. The silk sheets are still there (or at least, they were back in 2021), adorning the walls of the town’s wedding hall. Not only that, someone actually took the trouble to take some decent photographs of it and publish it on a nice Hungarian-language Web site.

I forgot to celebrate

Internet, Personal No Responses »

Jul 102024

I was so busy with things like Linux updates, I forgot to celebrate. My main Internet domain, vttoth.com, was 30 years old just ten days ago.

$ whois vttoth.com | grep "^Creation Date"
Creation Date: 1994-06-30T23:00:00Z

To be sure, it’s not the oldest domain in existence, not by a longshot.

$ whois oracle.com | grep "^Creation Date"
Creation Date: 1988-12-02T05:00:00+0000

But then, look at these guys:

$ whois facebook.com | grep "^Creation Date"
Creation Date: 1997-03-29T05:00:00Z
$ whois google.com | grep "^Creation Date"
Creation Date: 1997-09-15T07:00:00+0000
$ whois whitehouse.gov | grep "Creation Date"
Creation Date: 1997-10-02T01:29:32Z

So yes, I suppose I’ve been around. Here’s the earliest version of my Web site as remembered by The Wayback Machine:

Well, I suppose Web sites have become a tad more sophisticated since then.

System upgrades

Computer Security, Computers, Personal No Responses »

Jun 212024

This consumed far too much of my time.

I had to update my server systems, both “on-premises” (meaning my home office) and “in the cloud” (my small cloud VM hosted by Amazon). They’ve been running CentOS 7 since 2016, and CentOS 7 reached its end-of-life. Back then, I of course anticipated that by this time, I’d have long ago upgraded my systems to CentOS 8. But that was before Red Hat decided to play hardball with all of us, turning CentOS from a robust open version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux into a bleeding edge, more or less experimental/test version.

So I had to switch. And it wasn’t easy.

I eventually opted for Oracle Linux (itself an RHEL derivative), after seriously considering both AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. It seemed like the best compromise. I wanted an RHEL-compatible distribution to minimize the pain of the upgrade, and I wanted to pick the distribution that was the most likely to have robust long term support. Considering how Red Hat continues to play hardball with others, Oracle seemed the safest choice: They have the requisite in-house resources to “go it alone” if needed, and their cloud infrastructure alone appears to guarantee a long-term commitment. We shall see if I chose wisely.

And yes, it’s OL8 for now, though this time around, I plan an upgrade long before this product line reaches EOL. But first, stability.

I think everything works on my servers, and things are settling down nicely. But some other machines that I am responsible for still need some gentle care and feeding. It was an educational experience. I dare not share my detailed notes here as they contain information that probably should not be publicly disclosed about details of my configuration, but I have dozens of pages of notes detailing the quirks that I encountered.

All is well that ends well. But why do I have the feeling that this forced upgrade represents many days of my life that were lost for no good reason, days that I’ll never get back? Oh well.

Busy day(s)

Computers, History, Personal, Space No Responses »

Jun 072024

I had a very busy day today. Or make that yesterday, since it’s almost 3 AM already.

I wanted write something about D-day. Eighty years. It’s been eighty years since Americans, Canadians, Britons and others of the Greatest Generation landed on the beaches of Normandy, opening a much-awaited second front in the global struggle against fascist totalitarianism.

The result: An imperfect, yet enduring world order, Pax Americana, which brought historically unprecedented peace, prosperity, and security to the majority of humans living on this planet.

Perfect it was not. Totalitarianism never vanished. Even after Stalin’s death, the USSR and its empire prevailed for another 36 years. Some of the worst excesses of communism were yet to come. And there were wars, big wars: I thought I’d list a few but there were too many. Even so, this was a period of global peace, a rules-based system that endured, beyond expectations I should say: When I was growing up, no sane adult existed anywhere I think who expected the world to survive beyond the year 2000 without a major nuclear war, yet here we are in 2024, and there are still no nuclear wastelands.

But eventually, all good things come to an end. This world order is crumbling. Will we survive without a civilizational catastrophe? I don’t know. I worry. Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan… who knows what else. The retreat of democracy and the rise authoritarianism. The storm is brewing.

Anyhow, enough about D-day. There were some good news. Boeing’s Starliner, though limping a little, made it to the International Space Station. Those astronauts were brave souls. Considering recent news from Boeing, their newfangled attitude towards quality control and safety, I expected, feared rather, a disaster. I am relieved that it has not happened, but NASA should still dump that overpriced, unsafe contraption.

Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX had a major success: Starship completed a full test, involving successful launch and “landing” (onto the ocean for now) of both its first stage and Starship itself. The re-entry was not without challenges, but they made it. This is a big milestone, a very big one. The promise of Starship is basically the holy grail of space travel: Fully reusable, rapidly refurnished vehicles. The fiery reentry was perhaps a bit more dramatic than planned, but the spacecraft made it, and that means that they can learn from the issues and improve both the vehicle and its landing procedure.

And I was only marginally paying attention because I am still struggling with forced upgrades: CentOS 7, the Linux version that I’ve been using since 2016, is coming up EOL (end-of-life) which means I must upgrade. But I cannot upgrade to CentOS because Red Hat turned CentOS into a bleeding edge version of Linux with a short support cycle. Joy. Anyhow, today I managed to complete another milestone of my transition plan, so I may still be able to get everything done in time.

Microlensing black hole shadows

Astronomy, Personal, Physics No Responses »

May 062024

A couple of months ago, I came across a nice paper, by Verma and Silk (of Silk damping fame, as he’s known to cosmologists), showing what would happen if we had a chance to view the “shadow” of a supermassive black hole as it is microlensed by an intervening smaller black hole along the line-of-sight.

It occurred to me that I have the means to model this. At first I thought I’d write a short paper. But there really is nothing new that I can add to what Verma and Silk said in their paper, other than a nice animation produced by my ray tracing code.

So here it is. A brief animation of a small black hole passing in front of the famous “shadow”.

Things are not exactly to scale, of course, but for what it’s worth, this video corresponds roughly to a 10,000 solar mass black hole passing through, halfway between us and Sagittarius A*.

Thanks, OC Transpo

Local Ottawa, Personal, Transportation No Responses »

Apr 302024

It is fashionable these days to curse our city’s transit company, but here’s some praise for a change.

I wanted to thank those employees of OC Transpo that I ran into the other day who helped me recover a lost phone. Not only was the phone located and returned to us in short order, the gentlemen I met, without a fault, were exceptionally polite, helpful, and, well, just genuinely nice! What could have been an awfully frustrating experience for us turned into something that, well, made my day.

Thank you, OC Transpo.

By the way, a large-ish city’s major bus depot is a fascinating 24/7 operation.

Three-cat household

Cats, Personal No Responses »

Apr 262024

As of yesterday, I think we again officially qualify as a three-cat household.

Which is to say, Rigby and Raina now have moved upstairs, no longer using our basement as their “safe place”. They are still a bit apprehensive: Rigby can be petted, Raina not so much, but they made friends with Freddy, the three cats now eat together, and they found new favorite sleeping spots around the house.

They are so… elegant. Beautiful little guys. I hope they will spend many happy years with us.

Kanadische Finanzbehörde?

Canada, Personal No Responses »

Apr 222024

Can someone explain, by any chance, why, when moments ago I logged out of the Canada Revenue Agency Web site after filing an HST return, I was greeted with a German-language message announcing that my logout was successful?

I mean, a French-language message, sure. Inuit, sure. Aber Deutsch? Ja, ich kann ein bisschen Deutsch sprechen, aber woher wissen sie das?

Rigby and Raina (and Freddy)

Cats, Personal No Responses »

Apr 082024

Hello, world, please meet Rigby and Raina.

Rigby and Raina are two cats from Arnprior, who now live in our home. They are still more than a little apprehensive, but at least they no longer feel compelled to always hide when we enter the basement, where they presently live. I hope that soon enough, they’ll be willing to venture forth and explore the house.

A house that might be full of dangerous wildlife! Like this one:

OK, don’t worry, it’s not a lion in a flimsy wooden cage. Just our cat Freddy. Nor is he in any sort of distress. He’s just looking at my wife through the kitchen patio door, meowing at her through the glass.

We have yet to see how Rigby and Raina will get along with Freddy, but we’ve been assured that they are okay with other cats and indeed, I’ve seen it at the shelter where they came from that they seemed comfortable in a room shared with several other cats.

So yes, we are again a three-cat household. Or will be, as soon as these two gray beauties find the courage to come forth and start exploring.

A calculator story

Calculators, Personal No Responses »

Mar 302024

Though vintage programmable calculators remain one of my oddball hobbies, it’s been a while since I last mentioned them in this blog. And it’s especially rare that I’d write about a non-programmable, perfectly ordinary, dirt cheap, dollar-store quality mass-produced Chinese scientific (“56-function”, standard chip) calculator, but this one is different.

Why? Because I fixed the darn thing, that’s why.

Why am I so proud of my accomplishment, fixing something that most folks would have thrown away as a worthless, broken piece of junk? There is a very specific reason.

The bane of cheap calculators for the past 20-odd years has been the connection between the calculator’s main circuit board and its liquid crystal display. The liquid crystal display contains transparent connections, but these, rather obviously (it’s glass!) cannot be soldered. So how do you connect the display and the circuit that drives the display? In the earliest LCD devices, this was accomplished by a strange, rubbery part, a conductive silicone “zebra strip” that made an electrical connection between a series of connectors on the circuit board and the corresponding leads on the display glass. The device worked if this zebra strip was properly sandwiched between the display and the circuit board and held together tightly, which required an appropriate mechanical construction.

More recently, these have been replaced by, ahem, I think they’re usually referred to as “zebra stripes” or maybe “zebra lines”: essentially, paper-thin sheets of plastic with parallel conducting lines. A short strip, or stripe, attaches on one end to connections on the circuit board, and on the other end, to the LCD display. The attachment is adhesive (which may be heat activated) and once attached, there’s no need for mechanical pressure to hold the parts together. This, I presume, makes the design less constrained, and reduces manufacturing costs.

The problem is that these zebra stripes can become detached. This leads to a failing display: Digits vanish, segments vanish, crosstalk appears, the display becomes garbled and unreadable.

In some cases, this can be reversed by (very) carefully pressing down the stripe on both ends, with a hard but not too sharp tool as you wish to apply pressure to reattach the adhesive, not destroy the plastic. Sometimes, a heated tool works better. But the result is uncertain: Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it fails a few hours, days, weeks later.

If the zebra stripe is mostly or completely detached, or if it is damaged, the device is dead. Or so I thought… until now.

When this nameless “scientific calculator” came into my possession (found in a small bag of goodies that we bought at a thrift store) it indeed seemed hopeless. But I decided that it can serve as a perfect test case. For the first time ever, I endeavored to purchase a small piece of replacement zebra stripes of the right size from AliExpress. I had no idea how to use it properly, or indeed if it would work or not, but I figured it’s worth trying.

My first few attempts were disastrous. Applying too much heat destroyed the zebra stripe. Glue and molten plastic residue contaminated both the circuit board and the LCD display. Scraping it off was difficult and I was probably one bad move away from cracking the display.

But I didn’t. And on the fourth try, the display more or less came to life! I was ready celebrate success even though the display was not quite flawless, as it was already a far better result than I had hopes for. But at this point I noticed that although the display was now working, the calculator itself wasn’t: it no longer responded to any of its keys. I went through several iterations trying to troubleshoot this new problem before I noticed something: The zebra stripe I used was a tad longer than it should have been, and it made contact with another lead on the calculator’s circuit board, effectively short-circuiting its keyboard.

Once I corrected that, the calculator not only came back to life, even its display was now working like a charm. I feel like celebrating.

I don’t know how long it sill last: Cheap hardware is still cheap hardware. But now I know that repairing broken zebra stripes is possible.

So yes, this is how I am having fun during the long Easter weekend. Happy Bunny Day!

Yes, Claude can do music

Cats, Cybernetics, Personal No Responses »

Mar 142024

Like GPT-4, Claude 3 can do music. (Earlier versions could, too, but not quite as consistently.)

The idea is that you can request the LLM to generate short tunes using Lilypond, a widely used language to represent sheet music; this can then be compiled into sheet music images or MIDI files.

I’ve now integrated this into my AI front-end, so whenever GPT or Claude responds with syntactically correct, complete Lilypond code, it is now automatically translated by the back-end.

Here’s one of Claude’s compositions.

That was not the best Claude could to (it created tunes with more rhythmic variation between the voices) but one short enough to include here as a screen capture. Here is one of Claude’s longer compositions:

I remain immensely fascinated by the fact that a language model that never had a means to see anything or listen to anything, a model that only has the power of words at its disposal, has such an in-depth understanding of the concept of sound, it can produce a coherent, even pleasant, little polyphonic tune.

Rufus

Cats, Personal No Responses »

Feb 282024

Our cat Rufus is no longer. Today, his journey on this planet came to an end. He has been our companion for nine and a half years.

We mourn him.

Rufus

Cats, Personal No Responses »

Jan 312024

This here is our ~11 year old cat Rufus. Exact age unknown as he was a stray when we adopted him back in early autumn 2014, but he was assessed to be about 1 year old back then.

This picture was taken late last night. Today, Rufus had an ultrasound that confirmed what we feared: That not only does he have a tumor in his abdomen, but that it is inoperable, and chemotherapy is also unlikely to help.

So we are left with the final option: Palliative care, taking care of Rufus as long as we can, so long as he can still have some quality of life.

So far so good. Tonight, despite the hours-long stay at the vet, Rufus came home ready to eat a little, drink a little, even play a little. So it’s one day at a time, all the while recognizing that in this increasingly troubled world, we are among the lucky ones, so long as our main concern is the welfare of our cat.

MOG talk

Personal, Physics No Responses »

Jan 182024

I gave a brief invited talk today via Zoom, participating in a workshop on cosmological models, organized by Complutense University of Madrid, Spain.

The subject of my talk was John Moffat’s theory of gravitation, MOG/STVG, to which I made significant contributions myself over the past 18 years, in an on-going collaboration with John. Judging by the questions that followed my short presentation, I think it was reasonably well received.

The workshop was streamed live on YouTube, and the video is archived.

A memory

History, Hungary, Personal No Responses »

Jan 132024

In 1981-82, I served as a conscript in what was then called the Hungarian People’s Army.

As an engineering student, I was trained as a radar operator, which is several notches above cannon fodder I suppose. Still, I do not have fond memories of the time.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that there were some educational moments.

Having once lived in a resort hotel that my stepfather was managing, in the spectacular, historic small town of Visegrád at the bend of the Danube, I learned how a commercial-grade kitchen, serving 100+ people, operates. Standards in Hungary were quite strict at the time, and managing such a kitchen entailed both enforcing food safety and hygiene standards and tasks such as managing and recycling meal samples, which would be used by health authorities in case of a suspected case of food-borne illness.

The military base where I spent most of my time as a conscript was an active air defense installation, part of the country’s peacetime air defense network. Nonetheless, they had a chronic shortage of officers, which meant that many tasks that would normally have been assigned to commissioned or non-commissioned officers were instead handed to us conscripts. Once they learned that I had some knowledge of how a kitchen is run, I was frequently assigned kitchen duty: No, not washing dishes (though I did that, too, in the early months of my service) but as kitchen supervisor, responsible for everything including obtaining the needed ingredients from our food storage (run by a civilian employee) and taking samples. It was a surprisingly educational experience.

Or how about the time when I was tasked with ordering… a freight train? Not just any train, mind you, but a specialized train (and route) to carry oversize equipment (our large Ural trucks that carried radar equipment and electronics) with a larger-than-standard cross-section to the USSR border, to participate in some international war games exercise. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go myself, my participation was limited to a journey to the regional headquarters of Hungary’s national railway company, where I had to patiently, and correctly, explain to the person responsible what kind of train we needed and why.

I also did minor tasks such as keeping the base’s one and only television set (an aging color set, a Videoton Color Star television, a mostly Soviet design I was told) alive. I was also responsible for the base’s movie projector, and I took weekly trips to Budapest to get a fresh movie on film, for movie night Mondays (back in the early 1980s, there was no television broadcast in Hungary on Mondays.)

The base where I served no longer exists. First, the military abandoned it. The municipality that inherited it tried to sell without much success, even as the facility was stripped, e.g., of nearly all metal bits by (I presume) metal thieves. Someone took a walk around the base in the early 2000s and put the resulting video on YouTube; it looked almost like parts of the city of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, except that in this case, I was looking at a building that I remembered very well personally, having spent some nine months of my life there.

In the end, the entire facility was demolished, to make way for a solar energy farm, if memory serves me correctly.

All that is to say that I was quite surprised, pleasantly I might add, when I discovered the other day that back in 2022, the local municipality decided to install a small memorial plaque thanking all those who served there in defense of Hungary’s airspace. The cynic in me was wondering if there was any profit in this act (it was, after all, partially financed by the EU, it says so on the plaque itself) even as I actually felt a bit of gratitude that our service was not completely unnoticed after all.

What can I say? The plaque is actually quite nice. I might even visit the spot some day.

Happy 2024!

Personal No Responses »

Dec 312023

Happy new year, everyone!

Peace on Earth

Personal No Responses »

Dec 242023

At this time of the year, especially in these tumultuous times, is there anything else I could possibly wish for?

Earthrise from Apollo 8

“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.“

Year in review…

Personal No Responses »

Dec 242023

I don’t think I’ve ever done a “year in review” bragfest thing in my blog, but this year has been… well, surprisingly productive, helped in part by our AI friends.

Here are some of the things I created this year:

A science-centered front-end for the major large language models, with support for LaTeX, markup, SVG graphics generated by the AI, and good quality PDF output. Also, savable conversations and compatibility with several Anthropic and OpenAI models. I am quite proud of this, not to mention that it has since become my primary means of accessing LLMs. (I even thought about commercializing it, but I fear it’s way too much hassle and in the end, without proper marketing, just not worth the effort.)
A Web-based application to model image recovery of a rotating exoplanet with varying illumination, viewed through the solar gravitational lens.
A Web-based application to model a constellation of four satellites, used in a precision gravitational experiment to detect the presence of a specific type of deviation from Newtonian gravity.
A Web-based application to model imaging by multiple gravitational lenses.
Another Web-based application to process and analyze emergency room medical data using machine learning.
A custom telnet implementation to finally make it possible to access my game sites, british-legends.com and mud2.com, from within the browser but without third-party plugins.
A reimplementation of my “seas of Mars” Web applet, written originally in Java, showing what Mars would look like if it was flooded with an ocean.
A reimplementation of code I wrote many years ago, constructing a psychrometric chart and calculator, running in a Web browser.

I also published a number of papers, both on my own and with coauthors:

A paper with Slava Turyshev in Phys. Rev. D, on imaging with the realistic solar gravitational lens (SGL), accounting for its deviation from perfect spherical symmetry
Another paper with Slava in Phys. Rev. D, on the spherical harmonic representation of gravitational lenses
A paper with several (mostly NASA) authors in Planetary and Space Sciences, on the use of solar sailing smallsats for projects, including the SGL
A paper with Slava in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, related to the software I described above about imaging a rotating planet with varying illumination
Another paper in MNRAS, this one with John Moffat, on applying his Scalar-Tensor-Vector Gravity to the case of a difficult galaxy, NGC-1277
Yet another paper in MNRAS under my own name, on recovering our key results on the SGL using strictly geometric optics
Finally, another sole-author paper of mine, published in Astrophysics and Space Science, also related to the corresponding software, about using a satellite constellation for gravitational anomaly detection.

Additionally, I completed several in-house projects, including a much dreaded major Joomla! upgrade: Joomla! is the content management system I use for several of my Web sites, and the upgrade required first upgrading PHP, which in turn required fixes to countless instances of PHP code I wrote as many as 20 years ago, code that is not compatible with modern PHP versions. In the process, I also wrote replacement alternatives to two no longer supported third-party Joomla! components, to view images as thumbnails, and to view an image slideshow.

I also completed the Google foobar challenge, Google’s secret recruiting tool. No, I am not looking for a job at Google, but the challenge was, well, challenging (in a fun way) and it also allowed me to learn Python, the language I chose to implement the code that the challenge required. So now I know Python. Not a Python expert by any means, but I feel confident in my ability to use that language (which, incidentally, turns out to be more fun than I anticipated.)

So not quite an annus mirabilis (I don’t expect to discover a new relativity theory anytime soon) but not a bad year. And at least for a small part of this work, I even got paid. Not much, mind you, but I’ve been able to pay our bills so I am not complaining. I suppose if I were smarter, I’d do more work for money, but then again, there’s the quality of life thing, too…

Seriously, who designs these things?

Computer Security, Personal, Programming No Responses »

Dec 142023

I wanted to check something on IMDB. I looked up the film. I was confronted by an unfamiliar user interface. Now unfamiliar is okay, but the UI I saw is badly organized, key information (e.g., year of release, country of origin) difficult to find, with oversized images at the expense of useful content. And no, I don’t mean the ads; I am comfortable with relevant, respectful ads. It’s the fact that a lot less information is presented, taking up a lot more space.

Fortunately, in the case of IMDB I was able to restore a much more useful design by logging in to my IMDB account, going to account settings, and making sure that the Contributors checkbox was checked. Phew. So much more (SO MUCH MORE) readable, digestible at a glance. Yes, it’s smaller print. Of course. But the information is much better organized, the appearance is more consistent (no widely different font sizes) and the page is dominated by information, not entertainment in the form of images.

IMDB is not the only example. Recently, after I gave it a valiant try, I purposefully downgraded my favorite Android e-mail software as its new user interface was such a letdown. At least I had the foresight to save the APK of the old version, so I was able to install it and then make sure in the Play Store settings that it would not be upgraded. Not that I am comfortable not upgrading software but in this case, it was worth the risk.

All this reminds me of a recent discussion with a friend who works as a software professional himself: he is fed up to his eyeballs with the pervasive “Agile” fad at his workplace, with its mandatory “Scrum” meetings and whatnot. Oh, the blessings of being an independent developer: I could tell him that if a client mentioned “Agile” more than once, it’d be time for me to “Scrum” the hell out of there…

OK, I hope it’s not just grumpy ole’ complaining on my part. But seriously, these trendy fads are not helping. Software becomes less useful. Project management culture reinvents the wheel (I have an almost 50-year old Hungarian-language book on my shelf on project management that discusses iterative management in depth) with buzzwords that no doubt bring shady consultants a lot more money than I ever made actually building things. (Not complaining. I purposefully abandoned that direction in my life 30 years ago when I quietly walked out of a meeting, not having the stomach anymore to wear a $1000 suit and nod wisely while listening to eloquent BS.) The result is all too often a badly managed project, with a management culture that is no less rigid than the old culture (no fads can overcome management incompetence) but with less documentation, less control, less consistent system behavior, more undocumented dependencies, and compromised security. UI design has fads that change with the seasons, united only by results that are about as practical as a Paris fashion designer’s latest collection of “work attire”.

OK, I would be lying if I said that only bad things come out of change. Now that I use AI in software development, not a day goes by without the AI teaching me something I did not know, including tools, language features and whatnot that can help improve the user experience. But it would be so nice if we didn’t take three steps back for every four steps forward.

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