Let’s settle on a newline standard

Posted on August 29, 2023 by jmischel

We’re, what, 70 years into the “computer revolution?” By the late ’70s, we’d pretty much settled on one of two different character sequences to denote the end of a text file line. Either a single line-feed (LF) character, or a carriage-return/line-feed pair (CRLF). Well, there was the classic Macintosh that used a single carriage-return (CR), but that’s essentially gone: the Mac these days uses the LF.

The history of line endings is kind of fascinating in a geeky sort of way, but mostly irrelevant now. Suffice it to say that by the late ’70s, Unix systems and those descended from it used LF as a newline character. DEC’s minicomputers, and microcomputer operating systems (like CP/M and later MS-DOS) used CRLF as the newline. If you’re interested in the history, the Wikipedia article gives a good overview.

And so it persists to this day. To the continual annoyance of programmers everywhere. There are Linux tools that don’t handle the CRLF line endings and Windows tools that don’t handle the LF line endings. Everybody points fingers and seemingly nobody wants to admit that it’s a problem that would easily be solved if everybody could get together and decide on a single standard.

Having come up with early microcomputers running CP/M in the early ’80s, I actually used a teletype machine as an I/O device. That machine required a carriage-return to return the print head to the leftmost position of a line, and then a line-feed to advance the paper one line. Thus, the CRLF line ending. Printers, too, required CRLF to start printing on the next line. If you just sent an LF then you’d get something like this:

The quick red fox jumped
                        over the lazy brown dog.

Instead of:

The quick red fox jumped
over the lazy brown dog.

And if you just sent a CR, you’d get the second line printing over the first. (I suppose I could try to figure out how to do that with HTML/CSS in WordPress, or post an image, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I expect you get the idea. The result is a single physical line with overprinted characters.)

I’d sure like to see the industry settle on a single standard. I don’t have a strong preference. LF-only seems like the more reasonable standard, simply because it’s one less character. It’s not like many people talk directly to printers or teletypes anymore: that’s done through device drivers. At this point, the CR in the CRLF line ending is nothing more than an historical remnant of a bygone era. There is no particular need for it in text files.

Microsoft could lead this change pretty easily:

  1. Fund a development effort to modify all of the standard Windows command line tools to correctly handle both types of line endings on input, and provide an option for each command to specify the type of newline to use on output. With the default being LF.
  2. Modify their compiler runtime libraries to intelligently interpret text files with either type of newline. And to output LF-only newlines by default, with an option of CRLF.
  3. Fund a “newline evangelism” group that advocates for the change, writes articles, gives talks, and provides guidance and assistance to developers who are making the switch.

It’d cost them a few dollars over a relatively short period of time, but it would save billions of dollars in lost time and programmer frustration.

Posted in Software development | Tagged | Leave a comment

It’s not a First Amendment issue

Posted on August 16, 2023 by jmischel

Anybody who tells you that the two indictments of Donald Trump (one Federal and one in Georgia, see below for links) concerning his unsuccessful attempt to defraud the American people by overturning the results of a free and fair election are in any way, shape, or form First Amendment issues is lying to you. They’re either ignorant of what’s actually in the indictments or they know but they don’t want you to know.

Neither indictment is about punishing the Bumbling Buffoon for his well-documented tendency to lie through his teeth. Nobody’s saying that spouting bullshit is against the law, even if you know what you’re saying is false. What the indictments are saying is that the sitting President of the United States entered into a criminal conspiracy to illegally change the results of an election.

“But he really believed that the election was corrupt.”

I don’t believe that. But let’s say it’s true: that Donald Trump at the time really was (and, what the hell, still is) dumb enough or stubborn enough to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that there was, as the Federal indictment puts it, “outcome determinative fraud.”

That doesn’t justify entering into a criminal conspiracy to violate the law. It doesn’t excuse filing official documents that contain false statements or opinions asserted as fact, especially when those statements are not backed up by anything approaching solid evidence. It doesn’t excuse the use of intimidation to influence witnesses. It doesn’t exonerate the attempts to convince officials to violate their oaths of office. It doesn’t excuse the President of the United States for suggesting to his subordinates that they violate the law. Those actions are crimes–felonies–regardless of whether one believes that in committing them he is somehow “righting a wrong.”

This isn’t new territory. We don’t let somebody off the hook for murder because they thought the victim deserved it: “The court found him not guilty, but I know he did it.” We call that vigilantism and as far as I know it’s illegal everywhere in the country.

Trump and his defenders will have you believe that he’s being persecuted because he’s a threat to Democrats in the 2024 election. They want you to believe that these criminal indictments are products of a handful of overzealous anti-Trump prosecutors who’ll use any excuse to prevent him from being on the 2024 ballot. They want you to conveniently forget that both indictments are brought, not by the prosecutors, but rather by ordinary citizens–a grand jury that’s selected from qualified citizens in the jurisdictions that the indictments are brought. The prosecutors present evidence to the grand jury and the citizens vote to determine whether the evidence presented is sufficient to charge the persons in question with crimes. They’ve decided that, yes, there is sufficient evidence to accuse Donald Trump and his cabal of co-conspirators with crimes: that there should be a trial.

The Trump apologists, the “what about” crowd, and those who seek to minimize the gravity of the alleged offenses are not being honest with you. These indictments have nothing to do with First Amendment rights. The Federal indictment explicitly asserts the defendant’s rights to say what they please, regardless of the veracity of their statements.

Do yourself a favor: read the indictments yourself.

Federal Indictment

Georgia Indictment

Posted in Politics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Trump apologists are lying to you

Posted on August 3, 2023 by jmischel

Prominent Republicans, whether they’re Trump supporters, apologists, or announced candidates for the Republican nomination are speaking out against Tuesday’s indictment of former President Trump. In doing so, they’re deliberately missing the point, trying to couch it as a First Amendment issue, or saying things like, “If Trump is guilty of incitement for the Jan 6 riot, then Schumer and Sanders should be held accountable for incidents, too.” See, for example, Scott Walker’s comments. Or Marco Rubio’s tweet:

“Apparently it is now a crime to make statements challenging election results if a prosecutor decides those statements aren’t true.

“So when should we expect indictments of the democrat politicians who falsely claimed Russia hacked the 2016 election?”

I have two points to make.

First, not one of the four charges in the indictment has anything to do with incitement to riot or violence of any kind. The argument made by Scott Walker and others of his ilk is a red herring. Whether Trump, Schumer, or Sanders is guilty of incitement or similar is a separate issue that should not be conflated with the subject of this indictment.

Second, this is not a First Amendment issue. Item 3 in the introduction to the indictment (the second page) says:

“The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won. He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures. Indeed, in many cases, the Defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results. His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.”

If you read the indictment (and if you’re forming an opinion on it without first reading it, how can you have any confidence that your opinion is at all realistic?), you’ll see that the charges are for conspiracy, obstructing and impeding an official proceeding, and interfering with citizens’ right to vote and to have their votes counted. Specifically:

Count 1: From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 20, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government.

Count 2: From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 7, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to corruptly obstruct and impede an official proceeding, that is, the certification of the electoral vote, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1512(c)(2)

Count 3: From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 7, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, attempted to, and did, corruptly obstruct and impede an official proceeding, that is, the certification of the electoral vote.

Count 4: From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 20, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, DONALD J . TRUMP, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States—that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.

The indictment clearly lays out evidence of those conspiracies, detailing how the defendant was instrumental in organizing and putting in place an illegal scheme to create fraudulent electors in an attempt to change the election result in his favor. An election that he knew, as shown by his own words, that he had lost. This indictment is not about the President lying. No, this indictment is about the President’s participation in a conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government using lies, false accusations, and intimidation to enlist others and justify his illegal actions.

The key point here is that the President of the United States attempted to seize power for himself after losing an election that he knew full well was free and fair. Anybody who calls himself a patriot, who believes in the rule of law and the principles on which this country was founded, should be demanding that he stand trial and, if convicted, be imprisoned. Donald Trump, in his attempt to retain power after losing the election, acted like any other thug ruler in history. He does not deserve your, or anybody’s, support.

Posted in Politics | Tagged | Leave a comment

Initial thoughts on Trump indictment #3

Posted on August 2, 2023 by jmischel

I spent a large part of the day reading the latest indictment of Donald Trump, this one for his role in the fake electors scheme following the 2020 election, and then letting it marinate in my brain for a while. These are initial thoughts, subject to revision after another reading and more cogitation.

Donald Trump, while President of the United States, used his band of paid intimidators (Elite Strike Force Legal Team) in an attempt to convince or coerce ordinary citizens, state officials, state legislators, federal government officials, and even the Vice President of the United States to fraudulently overturn the results of an election. An election result that, by his own admission, he knew was legitimate. In almost every case, those whom he attempted to enlist in his fraudulent scheme refused, often incurring the President’s wrath. The President fired some and publicly called out others, resulting in many of them receiving death threats and other abuse from Trump’s supporters.

I find it quite interesting that the indictment focuses almost exclusively on Trump’s words: opinions he expressed. You can expect sympathetic individuals to latch onto that and make a big deal of it, especially in light of Monday’s court ruling that, read broadly, essentially says that the President’s words, even if they’re knowingly false statements intended to deceive, are protected by Presidential immunity. But the ruling does not assert blanket immunity. Judge Erdos, who issued the ruling, said:

Other legal proceedings may examine the propriety of his statements and actions while he was the President and whether, as the plaintiffs in this and other cases contend, it was this conduct which served as the actual threat to our democracy. But this case is not the proper place to do so. Here, Trump is entitled to Presidential immunity.

In my opinion, Jack Smith would not have issued the indictment on Tuesday if all he had was Donald Trump’s words. The almost complete absence in the indictment of evidence showing or even hinting at Trump explicitly directing his subordinates or hired thugs to break the law is a red herring. I suspect Jack Smith is holding that back for now and will dribble it out as necessary. I think if he didn’t have clear evidence of Donald Trump breaking the law or directing others to break the law, he would not have released this indictment.

In my mind, there are two separate issues here. The key issue, of course, and the only one relevant to the legal proceedings is whether Donald Trump broke the law. That’s something we won’t know until trial. The second issue, and the one that’s more important in my mind, is whether Donald Trump’s statements and behavior described in the indictment are true. A trial could very well reveal that, as the indictment alleges, Trump knowingly lied in order to retain his office. And yet the jury could find him not guilty of committing a crime.

Imagine that were to happen. Would people still support him? Despite knowing that Donald Trump is, as I have maintained, a liar, cheat, grifter, con man, etc. who consistently made false statements about non-existent election irregularities, made knowingly false accusations of misconduct against innocent Americans, tried to convince his subordinates and personal staff to fraudulently overturn an election result, ultimately culminating in a riot on January 6, 2021 by those who believed his lies. All while standing behind his alleged “immunity,” knowing that if his scheme failed, somebody else would take the fall for it.

I think every American, even those who would support Trump, should read that indictment and subject their beliefs to some serious consideration. I find it inconceivable that the breadth of evidence revealed in that indictment could be fabricated, that every witness who testified could be convinced to lie under oath. I hope that any honest thinking person, regardless of how dedicated they are to the fraud that is Donald J. Trump, would come away with some serious questions about the former president. Regardless of your political beliefs, is that really the kind of person you want at the head of our government?

Posted in Politics | Tagged | Leave a comment

Re-thinking the retry

Posted on July 25, 2023 by jmischel

(Originally posted October 30, 2018)

A common pattern used when communicating with external services is to retry a call that fails. Stripped of bells and whistles, the typical retry loop looks like this:

    result = makeServiceCall(parameters)
    numRetries = 0
    while !result.success && numRetries < MAX_RETRIES
        // insert delay before retry
        ++numRetries
        result = makeServiceCall(parameters)
    end while

    if (!result.success)
        // Raise error.

We can quibble about the specific implementation, but the general idea is the same: make multiple attempts to get a success response from the service, inserting a delay between calls. The delay can be a fixed amount of time, an exponential fallback with jitter, etc., and you can include all kinds of other logic to improve things, but it all boils down to essentially the same thing.

Under normal circumstances, of course, service calls don’t fail, and this logic works very well. But if the service call failure rate increases, some very bad things can happen.

Imagine a critical service for which you have a contract (a service level agreement, or SLA) that guarantees an average 10 ms response time for up to 1,000 transactions per second (TPS). Remember, though, that this is a shared service. There are many other clients who have similar contracts: 10 ms response time for X TPS. Your application calls that service perhaps 900 times per second, on average. There will be brief periods when your call rate will exceed 1,000 TPS, but that’s okay because the service is scaled to handle large amounts of traffic from many clients. Say the service can guarantee that 10 ms response time for a total of 1,000,000 TPS from all of its clients, combined. Short-term bursts of excess traffic from a few clients aren’t a problem.

Even if calls to the service exceed 1,000,000 TPS, the likely result at first will be increased response time: perhaps latency increases by 50% with a sustained traffic increase of 10%, and doubles when traffic is 20% above the configured maximum. The specific breaking point differs for every service, but in general latency increases non-linearly with the call rate.

Clients, of course, won’t wait forever for a response. They typically configure a timeout (often two or three times the SLA), and consider the call a failure if it takes longer than that. Not a problem with this retry logic: just delay a bit and try again.

As I said above, this kind of thing works fine under normal conditions. But in a large system, lots of things can go wrong.

Imagine what would happen if the service starts getting 1,500,000 requests per second: a sustained 50% increase in traffic. Or one of the service’s dependencies can’t meet its SLA. Or network congestion increases the error rate. Whatever the cause, the service’s failure rate increases, or latency increases beyond the timeout value set by clients. Whatever the cause of the service’s distress, your application blindly responds by sending another request. So if your MAX_RETRIES value is two, then you’ve effectively tripled the number of calls you make to the service.

The last thing a service under distress needs is more requests. Even if your application is not experiencing increased traffic, your retries still have a negative effect on the service.

Some argue that services should protect themselves from such traffic storms. And many do. But that protection isn’t free. There comes a point when the service is spending so much time telling clients to go away that it can’t spend any time clearing its queue. Not that clearing the queue is much help. Even after the initial problem is fixed, the service is swamped with requests from all those clients who keep blindly retrying. It’s a positive feedback loop that won’t clear until the clients stop calling.

The retry loop above might improve your application’s reliability in normal operation. I say “might” because most applications I’ve encountered don’t actually track the number of retries, so they have no idea if the retry logic even works. I’ve seen the following in production code:

  1. A retry loop that always made the maximum number of retries, even if the initial call succeeded.
  2. Retry logic that never retried. That code was in production for two years before anybody realized there was a problem. Why? Because the service had never failed before.
  3. Retry logic that actually did the retries but then returned the result of the first call.
  4. Infinite retry. When a non-critical service went down one day, the entire site became inoperable.

As bad as it is that many programmers apparently don’t test their retry logic, even fewer monitor it. In all the applications I’ve seen with retry logic, only a handful can tell me how effective it is. If you want to know whether your retry logic is working, you have to log:

  • The number of initial calls to the service.
  • The number of initial call failures.
  • The total number of calls to the service (including retries).
  • The number of call successes (including success after retry).

From those numbers, you can determine the effectiveness of the retry logic. In my experience, the percentage of initial call failures to any service under normal operation is less than 1%, and retry succeeds in fewer than 50% of those cases. When a service is under distress and the initial failure percentage gets above about 10%, retry is almost never successful. The reason, I think, is that whatever condition caused the outage hasn’t cleared before the last retry: service outages last longer than clients are willing to wait.

For the majority of applications I’ve encountered, retry is rarely worth the effort it takes to design, implement, debug, test, and monitor. Under normal circumstances it’s almost irrelevant, maybe making the difference between 99% and 99.5% success rate. In unusual circumstances, it increases the load on the underlying service, and almost never results in a successful call. It’s a small win where it doesn’t matter, and a huge liability when it does matter.

If you have existing retry logic in your code, I encourage you to monitor its effectiveness. If, like me, you discover that it rarely provides benefit, I suggest you remove it.

If you’re considering adding retry logic to your code, be sure to consider the potential consequences. And add the monitoring up front.

Posted in Software development | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Rock Me Baby, ’til My Feet Come Off

Posted on July 20, 2023 by jmischel

Very early in our relationship, Debra and I got silly one night and were making fun of country music. I don’t know what prompted it but at some point I came up with a song title: “Rock Me Baby, ’til My Feet Come Off.” We couldn’t stop laughing. I know, it was one of those, “you had to be there” moments.

That was 30 years ago and I still think that somebody should come up with lyrics. It could be a hit!

I’ve been poking at Microsoft’s Bing Chat (powered by ChatGPT) and Google’s Bard recently, so I thought I’d see what they can do with that title. My prompt to each one was ‘write lyrics for a country song called “Rock Me Baby, ’til My Feet Come Off“.

Bing Chat

Here’s a country song called “Rock Me Baby, ’til My Feet Come Off”:

Verse 1: I’ve been working all day long My feet are tired and my back is sore I need someone to take me home And rock me baby, ’til my feet come off

Chorus: Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off Hold me tight and never let me go Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off And I’ll love you more than you’ll ever know

Verse 2: I’ve been waiting for this moment To hold you close and feel your love I need someone to take me home And rock me baby, ’til my feet come off

Chorus: Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off Hold me tight and never let me go Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off And I’ll love you more than you’ll ever know

Bridge: I don’t need no fancy things Just your love is all I need So come on baby, take my hand And rock me baby, ’til my feet come off

Chorus: Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off Hold me tight and never let me go Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off And I’ll love you more than you’ll ever know

Outro: Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off.

Google Bard


(Verse 1) Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off
I’m so tired, I can’t stand no more
I’ve been working all day, and I’m beat
Just rock me baby, and make me feel complete

(Chorus) Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off
I’m so tired, I can’t sleep at night
I just lay there and toss and turn
And dream of being rocked in your arms

(Verse 2) Rock me baby, ’til my troubles are gone
I’m so worried, I can’t catch my breath
I’ve got a lot on my mind, and I don’t know what to do
Just rock me baby, and make all my troubles new

(Chorus) Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off
I’m so tired, I can’t sleep at night
I just lay there and toss and turn
And dream of being rocked in your arms

(Bridge) Rock me baby, ’til I can’t feel my bones
I’m so worn out, I’m just about gone
But I know that if you rock me long enough
I’ll be all better, and I’ll be able to go on

(Chorus) Rock me baby, ’til my feet come off
I’m so tired, I can’t sleep at night
I just lay there and toss and turn
And dream of being rocked in your arms

(Outro) Rock me baby, ’til the morning light
I’m so tired, I can’t see the night
Just rock me baby, and make me feel all right
I’ll be your baby, and you’ll be my knight

Well of course they’re terrible. But then, it’s country music.

I don’t think music writers have anything to worry about quite yet . . .

Posted in AI | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

No, AI won’t take your job

Posted on July 17, 2023 by jmischel

I can’t tell how serious writers and actors are about their concerns with AI. They’re asking for some unspecified safeguards on the use of AI, or regulations, or something. In general, some language to assure them that their jobs will not be taken over by “AI.”

I think it’s ridiculous, but perhaps I’m attributing to the writers and actors things that have been overblown by the media or by the general public’s hysterical reaction to anything that somebody calls “AI.” Or algorithms in general. As far as all too many people are concerned, any “algorithm” is automatically evil and out to do us harm.

I base my ridicule on three things. First, people have been protesting new technology since the dawn of new technology. Two hundred years ago, the original Luddites destroyed equipment in textile mills in protest of automation, but they weren’t the first to protest automation. Strangely enough, the machines didn’t put them out of work. And yet protests against automation were common throughout the industrial revolution and continue to this day. Computers, for example, were going to put armies of clerical workers out of a job. But now, 70 years into the computer revolution, there are more clerical jobs than ever. There are cases in which automation has made certain jobs irrelevant, but it doesn’t happen overnight. And there continues to be need of the replaced skill for some time.

Second, the idea of artificial intelligence replacing a journalist, screenwriter, actor, programmer, or any other skilled human is laughable. As I’ve mentioned before, ChatGPT (which I think is what has gotten everybody up in arms) and similar tools are just mimics: they rearrange words in a blender and spit them out semi-randomly, following rules that dictate the form, but with no regard to substance. And that’s just regurgitating stuff that’s already known. Attempts at AI creativity–having the computer create something novel–are comically terrible. The idea of a generative AI replacing a human writer just isn’t realistic. Certainly not within my lifetime, and likely not within the lifetime of anybody born today.

Third, if somebody does develop an AI that can produce objectively better news stories, movie scripts, novels, acting performances, computer programs, etc. than a human, then more power to them! As long as I’m informed or entertained, I don’t particularly care who or what created the article or the performance. We all benefit from better expression of ideas, and those whose skills are better performed by artificial intelligence will either find something else to do that is not yet AI-dominated, or will be able to peddle their skills in a smaller and often more lucrative market. For certain, any actor who’s pushed out of the big studios by this future fanciful AI will have plenty of opportunity in smaller studios that can’t afford or don’t want to use AI technologies.

Yes, there is some justifiable concern that studios will use currently available techniques, and new techniques going forward, to unscrupulously manipulate an actor’s voice, image, or performance to say things that the actor never intended or agreed to. We’ve all seen those agreements that allow the companies to use our likeness in any way, shape, or form, in perpetuity. Those types of clauses should have been eliminated from contracts decades ago, and I support those who are trying to address that situation now. But beyond that, the fears about AI replacing skilled workers, especially skilled creatives, are unfounded.

Posted in AI | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Credit scoring is a scam

Posted on July 11, 2023 by jmischel

I do a quick check of my credit score approximately on a monthly basis. I’m not sure exactly why I do that, considering that I’m comfortable financially, my life is pretty much the same it’s been for some time, and I don’t foresee any major changes.

I have one credit card, and a five year auto loan that has about a year and a half left. That is the extent of my outstanding credit. My monthly purchases on the credit card fall within a very narrow range and I pay it off every month. The auto loan is current and I’ve never been late with a payment.

Given the above, one would expect my credit score to remain the same, with a few minor fluctuations on a month-to-month basis depending on how much I charge on my credit card. And it does, mostly. But in the last month my credit score dropped 32 points (almost 4%), and I have no idea why. There have been no recent inquiries, no new accounts, no missed or late payments, and the outstanding credit card balance is within the normal range of what I charge on a monthly basis. In short, nothing has changed.

At least, nothing on my side of the equation has changed. Whether something has changed in the way the Vantage credit score is computed is an open question. It’s an open question because only the people computing the credit score know how it works. We’re being graded on hidden criteria. The scoring system is proprietary. Most of us who are affected by it have no way of knowing how our scores are computed or how our individual financial decisions will affect that score. And yet, credit score is a huge determining factor in one’s ability to get a good rate on a house or car loan–or to obtain a loan at all.

Sure, we know some general rules: don’t have “too much” available credit or use “too much” of it. Don’t have “too many” inquiries or open “too many” new accounts. But be sure to have “enough” available credit and be sure to use “the right percentage” of it to show that you know how to handle the responsibility. And be sure to have a first mortgage because that shows your ability and willingness to handle long-term credit commitments.

You paid off your home mortgage? Shame on you! We’re gonna subtract points because “you don’t have enough experience with a first mortgage.” That’s right, paying that 30-year loan off in 20 years is a bad thing.

There are general guidelines (Vantage, for example, says that I should have at least $50,000 in available credit and using up to 10% of it is “Excellent”, which is ridiculous), but there’s no hard detail that says exactly what the grading criteria are and how they interact. As far as consumers are concerned, a bunch of numbers go into a black box and the MagicScore™ comes out. We don’t get to know how it all works, and apparently we’re not even told if the innards change and suddenly we’re being graded completely differently.

In a just world, we’d at least know how the score used to decide whether we get a loan, and at what rate, is computed. I realize that credit score isn’t the only determining factor, but it can be a deal killer (i.e. everything else looks good, but the MagicScore™ is off).

I’ve long held that credit scoring, as currently practiced in the United States, is essentially arbitrary. Incidents like my score’s recent drop, with no indication of why it dropped, strengthens that perception. The companies that market the scoring systems (Vantage is a joint effort of the three major credit bureaus, FICO is a product of the Fair Isaac Corporation) and the financial institutions that use them, seem to have absolutely no desire or incentive to tell us how the scoring works. And consumers have nowhere else to go: buy into the credit score scam or go visit Guido.

Posted in Finance | Leave a comment

Good riddance to rubbish writing

Posted on June 27, 2023 by jmischel

In Gen Z never learned cursive. The effects of this are more widespread than you think (which references an October 2022 Atlantic article, Gen Z Never Learned To Read Cursive), the author describes the potential effects of discontinuing cursive writing instruction. In truth, the first article mentioned just expands a bit on one or two of the points made in the Atlantic article.

A note before I continue. Cursive is actually any form of connected writing. What most Americans refer to as “cursive” is the Palmer Method script that was introduced in the early 20th century, that most of us learned to fear and loathe, and many of us (myself included) can’t write legibly today. In the text below, I use “cursive” to mean that Palmer Method and its variants.

The Palmer Method, by the way, is a refinement of the Spencerian Method of writing that was introduced in the 1840s. Both are teaching a method of writing that’s optimized for 17th century pens. A primary consideration is keeping the pen on the paper because every time the pen was lifted and then placed back onto the paper, the ink tended to blot. These methods go to sometimes absurd lengths to keep the pen on the paper, even when doing so is less than optimum. The introduction of the inexpensive mass-produced ball point pen eliminated the ink blotting problem and thus the necessity to always keep the pen on the paper. But the script lives on.

The big complaint about no longer teaching cursive is that “the past is presented to us indirectly.” That is, because historical documents are written in script that students aren’t taught to read and write, they have to depend on transcription if they want to read the documents. There’s also some complaint that kids won’t be able to read letters from grandma.

And it’s true: without instruction and practice, cursive writing is difficult or impossible to read. Fortunately, it takes about a week to learn how to read it. Maybe a bit of practice after that, but if a child knows how to read block printing, learning to read the cursive script that’s been the mainstay of elementary writing instruction for a century is very easy.

In addition, the cursive script that’s been taught since the early 1900s isn’t even the same script that was used in our founding documents. The Declaration of Independence, perhaps the most oft-cited historical document cited in this argument, was written in Round hand, a script that originated in England in the 17th century. Learning to read modern cursive writing certainly helps in reading that document, but it still requires a bit more puzzling out.

Point is, the important historical documents all have been rendered in a typewritten font. There’s little or nothing to be gained for most people in reading the originals. There’s the incredibly weak argument that scholars will have to be taught cursive like they’re taught Elizabethan, Medieval, or ancient Cuneiform script. My response is, “duh.” Digging deeply into the past requires specialized skills. The ability to read cursive today is just a little bit more important than knowing how to hitch a horse to a buggy.

The “past is presented indirectly” argument for learning cursive writing just doesn’t fly. It’s as relevant to day-to-day life as the idiotic argument that those who can’t drive a car with manual transmission are somehow not “real” drivers. Ranks right up there with the, “when I was a boy, we had to trudge through three feet of snow, in the dark, uphill both ways to use the bathroom” stories we laugh about.

To be fair, there are benefits of learning cursive. First, it’s much faster than block printing, and there is that ability to read letters from grandma. It helps in developing fine motor skills, and studies show that students with dyslexia find learning cursive helps with the decoding process. However, people with dysgraphia are hindered by being forced to write in cursive.

Although I haven’t had to depend on my ability to write in cursive for at least 40 years, I do agree that many people must be able to write legibly and more quickly than they can with just block printing. But we should be teaching kids a different method. There are other connected writing systems that are easier to learn, faster, and easier to write legibly than the antiquated loopy Palmer Method that was designed 100 years ago for writing with a quill pen: a technology that was obsolete before the Palmer Method was introduced. (The ball point pen was invented in the 1880s.) For example, Getty-Dubay Italic, introduced in 1976, is much easier to read and write, and doesn’t require the loops and other forms that were necessary in older scripts to prevent the ink from blotting. There are other, similar, writing styles that are optimized for today’s writing instruments.

Whether those newer methods carry with them the benefits of developing fine motor skills and assistance to dyslexic students is an open question. I think it likely. I also suspect that it would have less of a negative impact on those with dysgraphia because the letter forms are so similar to the printed letter forms. As for letters from grandma, that’s becoming irrelevant, too. At 62, I’m older than a lot of grandmas and I’ll tell you from experience that a lot of them write cursive as well and as often as I do: illegibly and almost never. Letters from grandma that are written in cursive will pretty much cease to exist in my lifetime.

It’s true that trying to write those modern scripts using a 17th century quill pen would be as disastrous as taking a horse and buggy on an Interstate highway. Sometimes you have to discard old things and embrace the unquestionable benefits of new technology. Unless you like having to check for black widow spiders after trudging through the snow to the outhouse.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Translation difficulties

Posted on June 23, 2023 by jmischel

I get it: translation is hard. Heck, I’m a reasonably bright native English speaker and often have difficulty translating my own thoughts into understandable English.

This is a message that was posted in a woodcarving group:

“Hello, I am writing a message to help my father. And I see myself. Only on the American or Canadian woodcarving site and no response. It’s just for the books. And politeness. It’s when it’s repetitive that it’s not funny. But you how many millions to be connected. I find that very embarrassing. Administrators must take their jobs seriously. I have already reported them, I pass the imfermire contest as if I was going to sew up a person at any time, have a nice day everyone.”

The author’s native language is, I think, Italian. Or perhaps French. I suspect not an English speaker, although it’s possible that his grasp of English is better than my grasp of his native language. I cannot tell if the message is the result of automatic translation, or if the author did the translation himself with the help of a Italian-to-English dictionary. Either way, I cannot make any sense of it.

Which is weird. I’ve seen bad translations before. But usually I can get the gist of a message that’s been automatically translated: a “hook” that gives me a broad idea, and from there puzzle out a few details. For example, the word “imfermire” in the above text looked promising. It looks like a misspelling of the Italian word “infermiere,” meaning “nurse.” The best I can guess is that the author is having trouble getting some woodcarving books for his father. Not sure where the nurse comes in.

The author’s responses to comments provide no useful information. Which isn’t too much of a surprise. I imagine he has to translate the question, then write and translate a response. The combined errors inherent in that process aren’t conducive to understanding. Automatic translation software is especially bad at round-tripping because errors accumulate very quickly.

Can the technology that powers the new crop of generative AIs be put to good use in the automatic translation space? I imagine feeding an Italian-to-English translation to a tool that can leverage its knowledge of translation errors and spit out a short and meaningful summary. Is such a tool within our grasp?

Posted in AI | Tagged , | Leave a comment