I talked some smack about @CadeMetz earlier on CH, so I'll go ahead & summarize that publicly because I am not a baby & we ain't playing bean-bag, here. I probably should've left it alone, but I don't want ppl thinking I'll say stuff in a closed CH that I won't say in public.
So, Metz came to WIRED while I was there running this blog called Cloudline, which was about cloud computing. It was nerdy, & not very popular. I was trying to do an Ars-style deep dive thing, but with "cloud", & kinda flailing but also it just wasn't catching on.
I had left Ars after our sale for various reasons, was burnt out on media but afraid to try anything else. So I jumped to WIRED for a bit, but I was struggling. Running around Sand Hill Road, trying to get ppl to talk to me about the nerdy guts of cloud stuff. Results were meh.
Well, Metz comes in, & he just immediately starts crushing it. He's doing some stuff that's adjacent to me, & he's tearing it up in terms of traffic. I'm over there in the corner of the bullpen, picking Cheetos out of my neckbeard & flailing, & dude is wailing on my beat.
So I read his articles, & too often I'm like "eh, this isn't quite correct. It's really sensational, but not at all careful." Ultimately, I think, "I am never going to do that kind of work. I think this is my cue to bail on this business. Godspeed to this dude & those like him."
I kept my mouth shut, because what would be the point? Sour grapes of an auteur is what it would sound like (probably still does). Lord knows I got enough of that same energy from some of the CPU neckbeards back when I was at Ars. Neckbeards are notoriously down on popularizers.
I ended up leaving media mostly for a few years, doing a lot of coding, & while there were many factors that went into that hiatus, the experience of seeing Metz come into the newsroom & just crush it w/ work that I had problems with was part of what nudged me out the door.
So as a technical person, that was my sense of his output in an area where I knew the geeky details -- it was "Hollywood based on a true story" type of stuff. I'll give a small example that sticks out in my mind, which is from after I left WIRED. wired.com/2015/09/whatsa…
The conceit of this article is that the Erlang VM was the secret sauce that allowed WhatsApp serve half a billion users with a team of 35 engineers. But that conceit is pretty silly for a lot of reasons. Programmers will recognize this paragraph, for instance, as utter nonsense.
Erlang's VM is really amazing for serving a high volume of users on minimal hardware, but that's where the efficiency is -- it's at the infrastructure layer. Claiming a massive boost in coder productivity is some language enthusiast wankery at best, & reportorial license at worst
And then this stuff about the zero downtime deploys.... whatever with that. Web-scale apps go down when you have to do something to the database, not when you have to push code. Anyway...
Ultimately, this is a really tight, well-constructed story with a juicy hook, & I'm sure it did really well on the traffic leaderboards. I also think there's probably a good story to be written about Erlang at WhatsApp. But Metz just massively oversells it, here.
Anyway, this isn't intended as a slam on WIRED. I still write there occasionally (tho maybe not after this LOL). My point is that you have to be into enough of the details to really know where Metz has gone wrong with his stories, & in that respect they're kinda classic, right?
Isn't this always the criticism of news articles since time immemorial -- the people closest to the thing being reported on usually find the news story to be sexed up, sensationalized, & completely unrecognizable. Metz is a practitioner of an old craft.
The politics of his SSC story are pure post-Trump NYT all-the-woke-things. But the errors in craft -- the one-sidedness, sloppiness with details, sensationalism, the sheer unrecognizability of his treatment to fans of SSC -- this is all classic reporting.
It has ever been thus with every news story about a specific, out-of-the-way community or field. That's as old as the papers, themselves.
TL;DR, I think Metz is not a careful reporter, & never has been. He's a chaser of big stories in the classic magazine writer mold. The politics of his SSC story are very 2020/21 Big Media, but the sins against fact & fairness are quite old.

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More from @jonst0kes

13 Feb
I was thinking of a good way to make this same point, following on this earlier tweet of mine:

I think that fussing over why the NYT has done this, & how we can fix it, etc. is pointless, now. Don't mend it; work to end it.
This is where I'm essentially on the same page as @balajis, who was quoted (out of context) in the hit piece. The game has changed. We're in a cultural knife fight in a phone booth. Reduce your attack surface, & go on the offense when you can. Don't let them play by special rules
There are some folks at the NYT I really like, but as an institution, those of us who don't sing from the Brooklyn Hymnal have to recognize that we have an enemy in the institution itself -- regardless of what we think of certain writers. And we have to treat it as a threat.
Read 11 tweets
13 Feb
Per his suggestion, I looked it up in urban dictionary. It appears he has paid me a compliment! Either that or it's something about anime.
Ah, I finally figured it out! The answer is in a book on Pentecostalism written by my old grad school advisor, the late Harvey Cox. I KNEW I remembered this word from somewhere. This man is calling me an angry, vengeful spirit form Korea!
Read 7 tweets
13 Feb
Played a 5 player game of Nemesis with my three kids and a friend, and it was the most fun I’ve had gaming since high school D&D. Incredible game, and the kids loved it, too. “It’s like being in a movie” said the 9yo.
There are a lot of rules, so I basically ran the game as a kind of DM. But the kids grasped the mechanics really well. The only rough spot was at the end, when the 9yo & I thought we’d competed out objectives & were safely in hybersleep for the jump to warp...
Only to find that the 13yo had sabotaged
an engine early on in the game, causing the ship to explode & kill us at the end. It was ice cold, man. She and the 7yo got away safely in an escape pod.
Read 10 tweets
13 Feb
This article is really interesting, not for what's in it but for what isn't. Specifically, the author doesn't elaborate on what would happen if the other party consented to the cannibalism. The characterization of cannibalism as "illegal" (vs. immoral) is a tell.
There is no language of morality in the piece that isn't rooted in consent. No notion that what a pair of consenting adults do can be objectively wrong by some standard other than consent. But surely cannibalism is such an objective wrong? The piece won't touch it, tho.
The clear thrust of this piece is that the problem with a cannibalism fetish is "consent" and not the cannibalism itself. But again, what about someone consenting to being eaten? The author, deliberately I think, leaves no ground for drawing that line. It's weird and bad.
Read 4 tweets
11 Feb
This humane, appropriate response from hilzoy is the entrance to a little rabbit hole of hate and sociopathy. We're headed no place good, I think.
Soldiers from every era who kill enemies who would've killed them given the chance, can nonetheless recognize the loss & feel something about it. What you're seeing in the feed of that person she's quoting is either legit antisocial or antisocial cosplay. Either way, it's dark.
I have seen this internet armchair commando behavior on the right for years. It is a shame to see the left adopting their own version of it. This lefty manifestation is even weirdly jingoistic in affect, just like its righty counterpart, which surprises me a bit.
Read 5 tweets
18 Jan
Oh god yes bring it. Your terror at people having conversations you can't control gives me life. spectator.co.uk/article/the-to…
I plan to cover this "rapid flow of brains, resources, and attention" to all things encrypted and decentralized, and watch the would-be censors get rekt.
Can you imagine trying to introduce the original telephone system in 2021?

"My god, people will TALK to one another & we cannot control it. There are even these 'party lines' you can dial into & talk to strangers. Dangerous ideas will spread like wildfire! We must stop it."
Read 4 tweets

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