Married, Finally!

Susan and I had our civil ceremony last week.

Heat

There's a heat wave in San Francisco this week. Waking up this morning in the warm house with the windows open and a breeze blowing instantly transported me back to Susan and I's apartment in Manhattan. On summer mornings just like these, we'd wake up late and walk languidly together to union square for iced coffee and a waffle at 71, trying to absorb as much of the warmth and the company as possible before splitting up to our respective startups.

Thanks New York, you taught me how to live and introduced me to a great friend. Thanks San Francisco, for reminding me.

Ad-hoc solutions to systemic problems do not scale (or: "stop bitching and get back to work")

Today at work, for the hundredth time since I've been there, somebody complained about how they have to log in over and over again to various internal services, and asked if there was any known solution. And for the hundredth time since I've worked there, people suggested various workarounds, including Greasemonkey scripts, bookmarklets, and third-party software.

For the hundredth time, people pondered why authentication (especially web authentication) sucks so bad, and wondered why biometrics hadn't taken off yet. The people who worked on the software in question heard their cue, and like clockwork, chimed in to defend why it really was necessary and useful to type your passwords twelve times at the beginning of each day.

The bit flipped, the algorithm advanced, and self-appointed security nazis popped out of the woodwork to yell at people for wanting to save their passwords and shave a few seconds off their morning routine.

The thing is, real security experts never chime in on mailing lists telling people what to do. Real security experts know that talking to people one-by-one is pointless: next month there will be a new n00b asking the exact same question, doing the exact same retarded thing.

Instead, real security experts -- people who want to achieve change in general -- work silently behind the scenes to change the system so that the players are automatically guided down better paths.

I see this pattern all over the place, not just in software, and it drives me crazy. Think of all the effort expended trying to save the planet by changing peoples' behavior one-by-one. If the planet needs saving, we are screwed because running commercials encouraging people to turn their thermostats down isn't going to make any difference at all. If the planet needs saving, we're going to need a concerted effort to find a systematic solution to a systemic problem, not people keying each others' SUVs and touchy-feely TV commercials.

Working on mass market software has taught me that you can't educate everyone. Even if you could reach them all, people are mostly lazy, dumb, and preoccupied. If you really want to make a change in this world, you need to change the system, not the people.

Love, Paraphrased

Her: So sad. After Katrina, peopled died just waiting for emergency response to get water to them.

Me: Wow... One thing I can guarantee: you'll never die of thirst in a hurricane aftermath. I'd go steal some or something.

Her: I know.

More on the gay marriage thing

I got a couple responses to this post taking issue with my description of marriage as a basic human right. I agree that is an overstatement; I was just being lazy with words.

I want to clarify, because I think this is actually a really interesting (and tragic) issue.

Equality is the basic human right at issue here. The government should not give preferential services or benefits to people based on their sexual orientation. I hope we can all agree on that much.

The problem is that civil unions are not, and probably will not ever be, equal to marriage. The reason is that the term 'marriage' is used throughout the legal system and is defined to be a man and a woman. Thousands of laws have been written referring to the term 'marriage' with that definition, and it would be incredibly costly to update all those old laws.

In programming terms, what we have is a legacy system problem. The old system was written to assume that the concept of 'Marriage' in the religious sense and 'Marriage' in the legal sense were the same thing. Ideally, we would just rewrite the old system to work correctly and be done with it.

Unfortunately things are not so easy. Rewriting and passing all those laws would be a gigantic undertaking, and would not be a wise use of legislative resources given the other problems we are facing.

So the practical thing to do is redefine the term 'Marriage'. This would be a quick fix to update all those old laws to have the correct new behavior.

The thing that frustrates me is that I think most people would be in favor of this if the issues were clearly presented to them. It isn't complicated, and I really believe the number of people who actually want to restrict other people's rights is small.