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When

When
Daniel H. Pink
Time
Text Publishing Company
2018
256
★★★★☆

Whilst Daniel Pink’s “When” might have suffered a bit from the scientific replication crisis that plagues books of this era, I think it makes an interesting if slightly obvious point — work out what time of day you do your best work, and then work out how to ensure that time is when you do work. I think that perhaps the general trend towards working from home makes this a bit more possible than it would otherwise be, but it’s certainly true that employers of even remote employees do love to impose a schedule based largely on ideas from a different century. Ironically, I say this as someone who naturally gets up early and is pretty smashed by about 9pm. That is, the traditional work day works quite well for me.

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Beacon 23

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This is a science fiction novel set in the cramped confines of a navigational beacon in interstellar space. The solo operator of the beacon is a bit... messed up by his military service and needs to think some stuff through. The book could be depressing, but it is not. Its funny and serious and an entertaining read all at once. I enjoyed it. It was also quite different from the TV show that is based on it by the way.

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Robot Dreams (again)

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I think its interesting how my perspective on these older science fiction books changes a bit each time I read them. Last time I read this book I was annoyed by how few were robot stories, whereas this time I really dug The Martian Way, because I think the premise feels much more possible that it did a few years ago -- let alone in 2008! I enjoyed this book, again.

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Michael’s unifying theories: when you grew up seems to really affect your attitude towards information

When I was a teenager one of my favorite series of books was Inside Macintosh. Sure I liked lots of fiction stuff as well, but in terms of technical books that really changed how I thought about things in high school, this was it. The design of the early Macintoshes was elegant, whilst also having to deal with limitations of the time — the library routines for much of the operating system were baked into ROM for example, but there was a method to cowboy patch them as required. The books were comprehensive, readable to a mildly talented hobbyist, and best of all were sitting on the shelf of my local library.

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On resistance to change in computer science

Irving Ziller, one of the original members of the FORTRAN team, describing the resistance of early programmers to the introduction of a compiler: "And in the background was the scepticism, the entrenchment of many of the people who did programming in this way at that time; what was called 'hand-to-hand combat' with the machine." From https://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res41.htm

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Stuff the British Stole

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Stuff the British Stole Book Cover Stuff the British Stole
Marc Fennell
Penguin Random House NZ
★★★☆☆

This book is interesting and easy to read, but I can’t help but feel like sometimes it lacks depth of analysis. It certainly lacks any form of supporting references, which I have come to expect in books of this type.

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Michael’s unifying theories: the way an organization thinks of itself really matters

A few times now I have worked for organizations that are basically IT shops — that is, their core business now depends on being very good at doing Computer Things. However, many of these places were pretty terrible at computers. Let’s keep picking on Telstra, because its an easier example.

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Ok fine, where can I get me one of these “security harnesses” you speak of?

Ok, so in a recent post I summarized some reading I had recently done about security harnesses. When I say “security harness” think “thingie which orchestrates many many LLM sessions to turn tokens and environmental stability into zero day vulnerabilities and dopamine”. That is, as Claude Code is to code generation, a security harness is to vulnerability hunting.

The next obvious step is to try one of these things and see if it does what it says it does on the tin. That is, do I get the dopamines? The problem of course is finding one.

A harness is the orchestration layer around an LLM. It controls the inputs, tools, prompts, models, state, validation gates and outputs for each stage of work. — ZephrSec

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Michael’s unifying theories: all signs exist for a reason

All signs exist for a reason.

Making a sign (or a policy) takes work. Therefore, this work is only done when some incident has caused someone somewhere to decide that the correct response is to expend effort ensuring this thing does not happen again. Now, one issue with this is that it is also a lot of effort largely in the form of risk acceptance to remove a policy or sign. So these things tend to accrue. It is rare for someone to ask if the number of mandatory training courses is still reasonable for example, because they don’t want to be the one to remove one and then eventually have to explain that in a lawsuit or coronial inquest.

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