My theory: kooky people have always existed, but kookiness was hard to spread, because kookiness is not conducive to reality-based survival.

But engagement-based media changed that. Kookiness became just another “personal interest” that the algorithm fed you more of. The path from well-adjusted person to full-time kook now had a digital Sherpa: the algorithm. Because the journey happened on a screen, the social cost of descending into kookdom was cheap; you could turn into a kook without anyone knowing. Along the way, con artists discovered that people on their way to kookdom were good marks. They created media specifically to be recommended to pilgrims on the road to kookdom. The more media they generated, the better paved the road became.

And finally, we have the political weaponization of kookiness. The GOP made being a kook part of the party’s identity. Not only was kookiness acceptable, it was a membership requirement. So yeah, it’s no surprise there are more kooks today than there were in the 80s.

Having said that, kookiness is still not conducive to reality-based survival, and having a mass of people being kooks reduces society’s chances of survival. GOP kooks (redundant, I know) in 2025 are getting away with their kooky beliefs because so much of the system remains based in reality, and works to protect them from the consequences of their kookiness. But the system can only withstand so much volume of kookiness in society before its safety margins are eroded.

Reality catches up to everyone, even kooks. Sooner or later, kooks will suffer the natural consequences of their decisions. Some of them will change their minds and abandon the kooky life, but many others will go even kookier by inventing rationales to explain away their suffering.

• #opinion

This post guides you through the installation of Deluge and Autobrr on a TrueNAS Scale storage appliance.

Motivation

Feel free to skip this section and go straight to the installation instructions.

My motivation for running these apps is to add another node to the swarm archiving the sciop.net scientific document collection. Since I have a TrueNAS appliance always connected to the Internet, I figured running a torrent agent on it will offer a low-maintenance way to use the attached storage to support this effort.

SciOP groups torrents into various collections, and each collection is published as an RSS feed. The use of RSS to feed BitTorrent clients is normally a tool for publishing episodic video. Because of that common use case, some RSS torrent clients (like Sonarr) require that the feed have publication dates, to filter and prioritize episodes to download. The SciOP feeds are static catalogs of documents without publication date fields, so such clients won’t work with them. Autobrr does.

The TrueNAS Scale OS offers certain ready-made Docker images in their “app store” that offer configuration interfaces that can be manipulated through their web UI. Both Deluge and Autobrr are available there, so I chose them for the simplest and most maintainable installation.

OK, on with the installation.

Read more…

• #howto

“Fairness” and “justice” are not the same thing.

Fairness has to do with playing according to the rules—someone wins a game “fair and square”—without considering whether the rules themselves are just.

Fairness in a game that is rigged is still unjust. Insisting on “fair admissions” for people whose families have vastly different histories of privilege or oppression is unjust. Insisting on “fair taxation” is meaningless without a larger, justice-driven goal of reducing wealth inequality. After all, it’s perfectly fair for a bilionaire to shield their wealth; they’re playing the game as written.

Striving for justice often initially upsets people who focus on fairness, because justice often demands breaking long-standing tradition. But justice is what moves societies toward enlightenment; fairness only keeps it firmly in the past.

• #opinion

Do not rush software development.

Not even when a deadline approaches. Especially not when a deadline approaches.

Strive for consistent, persistent progress, not bursts of emergency-driven coding. When a deadline looms ahead, let it wash over you. The time to deal with that deadline lies in the past, when you still had many levers to pull. The closer you get closer to GM day, the fewer choices you get, and the more you simply have to execute the plan, however poor it looks.

Whatever you decide to do to meet a deadline, do it in a calm, deliberate manner. Don’t rush, don’t scramble, don’t cut corners. If you have to take on technical debt to meet the date, discuss it with your team and ensure buy-in. If you have to work longer hours, do it knowing exactly how much extra you’re putting in, when you will stop doing it, and what you realistically expect to get from the exercise. The return on overwork is not as great as you think.

Hitting a deadline is a shared responsibility, but it’s not shared in equal proportion. Many signals are available to project managers and program managers along the way to understand the risks of a project. The team’s ability to not miss a deadline is greatest at the beginning of the project, and smallest near the end. Therefore, short of gross negligence or sabotage, the responsibility to deliver a project on time lies on those who define and manage it, not the people who actually implement the product.

Also, all deadlines are made up.

• #FridayDevAdvice

I think one of the most important axioms that one must internalize in order to navigate the world with thoughtfulness and rationality is that there is such a thing as a shared, objective truth.

The shared assumption that naturally occurring, observable, measurable, reportable, and verifiable facts actually exist and can be communally homed into despite one’s bias, perspective, or imperfect observation is the absolute bedrock of science; but it must also drive our civic discourse if rationality is to survive.

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• #opinion