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.