Paul Lindner

Found in some email archives..

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Spotty ambient song recognition on this mashup set.

Impressed that it got the Eminem song with the Imperial March overlay though

Humans still do it better.:)

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And a reminder of what people used in corp before we had Gmail.

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25th Anniversary
Movie

Wow

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Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 15:33:00 -0800
Subject: Firebase - Looking to hire Engineer #5 for our Core Development team

I just came across your LinkedIn profile and thought I'd reach out to you because of your impressive experience at Google.

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The things you find when cleaning out your inbox...

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

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(At a exhibition of 1st Avenue, the music venue)

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This post below is a copy of a Sep 17, 2014 post from the internal Google+ Team community.

I'm reposting it because today I published an Obituary site that includes some of these https://www.julieslife.com/more/email discussed here. What I wrote today is just as import
ant today as it was back then.

Mediating and initiating local and human connections are needed now more than ever.

[I'd also say that we need preservation too, I'm fortunate to be able to relive these memories, compared to MySpace or Snapchat users.]

Anyway, here it is after 5 years....

Subject: Local Grungy People?

...and the importance of serendipity, locals and shared interests.

warning longish philosophical post ahead...

I thought the pre-TGIF Social Presentation was weak, but it did contain one very important quote there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. If I were presenting I'd dump almost all of the mechanics about how we suck at onboarding and just tell a story about that.

Tell a story about how we go from sharing an interest to sharing your entire life together. Tell a story about how we're going to help users with this basic need to connect, and how Google can use technology to mediate this. Tell us how Google can provide just the right amount of serendipity that helps people connect on a personal level. (and then provide the rest of the infrastructure to do the private/personal thing too.)

Because that's my story. It's how a shared interest became love and a wonderful life spent together, due to mailing list: GRUNGE-L

Back then there were no profiles, but there were .signatures. So serendipitously I found myself discussing bands with someone a few miles away. Until one day I made the personal connection and sent the following email.

The rest, as they say, is history

Date: Wed, 8 Jan 92 13:04:43 CST
To: [email protected]
Subject: Local Grungy people

Hey, are there any other people from Minnesota besides you and myself
on the wonderful grunge-l mailing list?

I'm always interested in putting a face onto an e-mail address. I'll
probably be at the Babes in Toyland Show saturday, and the Local Band
showcase on Monday.

Interested?

--
| Paul Lindner | [email protected] | "You have to Spit
| | Computer & Information Services | to See the Shine" --
| Gopher Dude | University of Minnesota | Babes in Toyland
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NESF4NCanpg

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I wanted to use the Richard Brautigan poem I posted last week, so I sought out the rights-holder to get permission. Turns out it's his daughter Ianthe. We've been exchanging emails. What a fabulous person.

If you don't know about Richard Brautigan he was a popular SF writer. If you haven't already please scroll down and read his 1967 poem All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. It's over fifty years later and it still resonates, especially as we enter the realm of automation, AI and a completely technology-mediated world.

This poem is one of the first uses of a copyleft license. You can copy it, but only if you give it away for free.. More info at Wikipedia

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

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Location Kaiser Oakland

Caption: Large white great Pyrenees with a hospital bed in the background.

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A reminder that the thing with two arrows is TAB.

Oh and this is an EKG, so yeah, nothing life-or-death about confusing software.

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Hey fellow commoners. Ostrom in meme form has arrived.

If you start thinking of many of our ecosystems as commons you can also consider using these principles as a diagnostic tool. There's also our own workplace commons too....

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A few days late but Happy Ada Lovelace Day to one and all.

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A few hiccups but finally have something that's stable..

Power Sources:
- Battery: B Class with 36kWh battery and 400W Inverter
- Sun: Solar with up to 1500W
- UPS: 1500W, 900Wh APC

Devices
- Refrigerator ~100-150W while running 250W peak
- Internet: 15W ONT+Router
- Electric Blanket 60W
- LED Lamps ~15W
- Laptop w/85W or 45W charger
- cords, lots of cords

I charge the car battery @1000W during the day with other loads. Using Inverter at night.

The APC UPS was supposed to provide stability, but it kind of sucks:
- slow trickle charge
- Can't charge off the inverter most of the time.
- Has a bad odor.

For now I just use it for the fridge when I have to run errands

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Does our ads matching algorithm do substring matching? Or does YSL have an eau-de-napalm? (As in smells like freedom...)

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"In case you missed it..."

(Seen in discover feed today)

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There's an episode of Columbo where the villain uses a photo of a face and a speed camera to establish an alibi.

Columbo enlarges the photos and finds that the shadows are inconsistent. He is able to do this because the photos are ordered by time on a single a roll.

Parallels to blockchains are pretty obvious. Each photo is directly linked to the previous/next photo and there are timestamps involved...

Images from http://columboscreenshots.blogspot.com/2014/03/columbo-58-columbo-and-murder-of-rock.html

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Unintended consequences of Google Image Search.

THE VCE exam body has been left red faced after a doctored artwork depicting a huge robot helping socialist revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution was accidentally included in this year’s year 12 history exam taken by 5700 students.

https://www.theage.com.au/education/history-transformed-in-vce-exam-20121114-29ce7.html

You heard about Young Karl Marx, but have you heard of VI Lenin Evangelion ?

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Great Pyrenees and Maremma chilling at Flour and Water Pizzeria.

Gus is a #doogler but you'll have to see him in SF on Valencia Ave on Saturdays. Too big to sneak onto BART :)

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Only 50ish versions behind on this public terminal at the vet...

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...then Google said "Let there be iGoogle"; and there was iGoogle. And Google saw that the javascript was good and separated the gadgets from the container origins....

Fast forward over 10 years and this serving system is still the underlying force keeping light from darkness. After a good run in Social it was exiled to an uncertain fate with the ever faithful +111756696344385606909 and other true believers keeping it alive.

Exiting the wilderness between PAs it finally found a new home with +109533200203018540387 and +111563624442337972165 into a reliability reset fueled future.

But Gapi needs your help. Please help it find an L5 so it can grow and thrive as it fully migrates to new infrastructure

https://grow.googleplex.com/jobs/b9f41ecb-c6c5-4129-af30-2e1181d645c9

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I'm curious if anyone has mapped the reliability crisis with a System Dynamics Lens. Some of the proposed actions hit some of the archetypes on the nose....

For example a one-size fits all release shepherding process takes resources away from efforts that to address the underlying reliability problem. (Fixes that Fail)

Reliability metrics operate on a delay so you get oscillation of investment and failure (shifting the burden)

If anyone would like to workshop a systems diagram for reliability I'd be interested in workout out the feedback loops.

I highly recommend the book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-systems and the image below come from this pdf of https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Systems-Archetypes-I-TRSA01_pk.pdf.

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In honor of the recently departed Google+ community/page here's a recent squirrel eating a strawberry from my neighbor in Montclair Oakland.

They expertly trolled the folks there with the subject "Who's stealing my strawberries!"

cc David Bresbis who I remember being a fan...

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At first I thought this was a menswear catalog and almost tossed it in the recycling bin....

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BRB ... bringing Enron style accounting to the resource economy...

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[actually it's the exploded wiring cabinet for my neighborhood that's transitioning to AT&T fiber...]

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Would be nice if all of our products supported Alt text as well as Mastodon does...

And if sharing with Louis Gray I'd say "Image of a rack mount server with long fsck times"

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Red Hat turns 20 so they asked former folks for their memories. Here's something I dug up that might be of interest to folks 'round these parts..

... I never got a response on this email; but that might be because Red Hat was always late paying Google Invoices..

Looks like Joan is still here. Ray does not show up in Epitaphs.

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Before we bury G+ it might be worthwhile to collect some memorabilia...

Marc Weber from the Computer History Museum asked if we wanted to contribute Google+ artifacts to CHM. They don't care about swag, but I could think of a few things that they might be interested in:

- The Obama + Dalai Lama framed print.
- The Buffalo? (Too big?)
- The Emerald Sea painting (did anyone save it?)

Open to suggestions....

[Too bad the Apiary whiteboard is long gone....]

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CW: health, cancer, stuff like that.

So yeah, I've spent the past 5 days living at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland. I spent my waking hours caring for my wife's basic needs as she recovers from an infection and progression of bone mets that caused much pain and suffering. We have a plan forward and are headed home today.

But that's neither here nor there. I don't want sympathy or anything like that; I post these updates to normalize and make visible the caretaker role that we all assume. Please use your sick leave, vacation, vacation donation time and finally short-term/long-term disability to care for your loved ones. You've earned it (and in the case of disability you're even paying premiums for it.)

I'll have a few more stories to share later on once I get caught-up. But for now behold the disco-light aesthetic of the Stanley Healthcare Bed-Check®. (It's basically a bed sensor and an alarm used to prevent people from falling). I highly doubt that it uses a cloud based TensorFlow prediction model.

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Tired: Wipeout
Wired: Confidential Waste

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The human body is more varied and complex than even the largest metro cell.

This Philips IntelliVue MP50 has graphs that are butterfly smooth, multi layer alerts, trending, color coded heads up display and much more. Whatever is the latest replacement for BorgMon would do well to learn from this adjacent field ..

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#lol

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Removed a New Tab Page Extension and some other junk. Which led to a bad set of search results that led to this modal that blocked the entire browser..

- Force Quit, restart Chrome
- Remove shitty extensions
- Install uBlock Origin
- Add site to custom blocklist
- Restore Tabs
- Cry a little.

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To the top of the reading/study list...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08916

This paper describes something I've known in my gut, especially as someone that can remember the pre-internet analog world, and wonders if we've though through the knock-on effects of the technology we are creating....

Businesses also optimize: a business as a whole optimizes marginal revenue, data science finds best-fit models, and websites iteratively improve
click counts by random A/B testing. Unfortunately, optimizing a business
goal often involves sculpting customer perceptions and behaviors, thereby
reducing the entropy of human behavior, choice, and autonomy. In short,
to calibrate our brains, we need autonomy; to submit it to organized optimization, we must forgo it.

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Okay... Who's adding Snark to the training data?

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Add in G+ logo choice and you can probably identify when the last refresh was..

(As seen on ticketfly.com)

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I've kept a Webvan pen in my bag as a reminder to never get too comfortable. And a reminder to never pay Bechtel a billion dollars to build warehouse infrastructure...

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Though I prefer ntpm/s. (nano tentpole moments / second)

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View from the 37th floor of SFO-1MST

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320 pages that say "spam address books"

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Move into new office space -- find DoubleClick Posters that go against YSW training...

[see official logo in the lower right corner]

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Zero Rating comes to payment platforms...

https://www.apple.com/apple-pay/sf/

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Gave a talk about Perkeep at the Decentralized Web conference this week. Very happy that I was finally able to re-use my "confused developer" slide from OpenSocial in a new way...

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r3hENcuI4E5uR3kFOh4eKAlm91g75sthatOZrgp2c3c/edit?usp=sharing

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Had a Slacker Shuttle May Day treat.

Here's a Google Shuttle Bus patiently waiting for the ILWU Drill Team and Parade to proceed from the docks to downtown Oakland.

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At my desk you can read the paper version of "The Best of Creative Computing" v1/v2. What's really eye-opening is the large amount of privacy related articles that were published in the mid 70s, post Watergate era.

Here's one about logs processing. Maybe we can use this for the next BYCTWD...

Stop by or you can read volume 1 here:

https://archive.org/details/Best_of_Creative_Computing_Vol_1_1978_Creative_Computing_Press

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This.. this is good stuff.

One guest, after spending time at Dynamicland, held up his smartphone and shouted, “This thing is a prison!”

https://dynamicland.org/

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