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Battle of the racial alternate reality fiction concepts:

Amazon's Making Its Own Post-Civil War Series Called 'Black America'

A couple weeks ago, HBO announced that the guys behind Game of Thrones—no, not George R. R. Martin, but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—are working on a new series about an alternate history where the Confederate South won the Civil War and seceded from the union. The show, titled Confederate, caused a big stir online from people who thought that, well, maybe a pair of white dudes best known for making a fantasy show about dragons and zombies and incest aren't the best people to tactfully address modern-day slavery.

In the wake of the controversy, Amazon took the opportunity to announce that it had also been working on a similar alternate history show over the past year—but with a few key differences, Deadline reports.

First, Amazon's show, called Black America, will be the brainchild of Boondocks genius Aaron McGruder and producer Will Packer, who did Straight Outta Compton and, more recently, Girls Trip. Also, instead of Confederate's faux-history about a split United States where slavery still lives on, Black America is set in a world where freed African Americans were given a trio of Southern states after the Civil War as reparations. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are fused to form a new nation, called New Colonia, and the series tackles its tenuous relationship with the original US of A.

Confederate reminds me of the fun but low-budget mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. Black America reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' article The Case for Reparations. He is also involved in entertainment; he wrote the new Black Panther comics for Marvel last year, which have been cited as an influence for the upcoming movie.

Amid HBO’s “Confederate” fallout, Amazon introduces alt-history show “Black America”

The African-American community has long made the case for reparations from the United States government. Ta-Nehisi Coates convincingly argued in 2014 that the freedom given to slaves after the Civil War was not enough — that black people in America had suffered through institutionalized racism long after slavery had been abolished.

Packer told Deadline that the controversy surrounding “Confederate” pressured him to divulge the upcoming project. The show itself is not a reaction to “Confederate,” as reports say it has been in development for over a year.

Coca-Cola Revamps Coke Zero

Coca-Cola to replace Coke Zero in U.S.

Coca-Cola is killing Coke Zero as we know it — and people are freaking out

What, no stevia?

I would submit this, but like, nah.

I always wanted to look into writing a CS paper that's a formal study of unit testing and test-driven development. Basically, set up a study with two groups performing development and comparing TDD vs legacy-style. I guess you could use a set of CS majors as your test subjects.

So you'd have a control group that just does development, and then a test group that does TDD. The experiment would be designed as follows:

Create a codebase for each individual to work on. The code would be something like this:

main() {
    val = calculateAreaOfSomeComplexShape()
}

calculateAreaOfSomeComplexShape() {
    cube1 = calculateAreaOfCube(length=5)
    cube2 = calculateAreaOfCube(length=4)
    cylinder1 = calculateAreaOfCylinder(radius=5,height=4)
    cylinder2 = calculateAreaOfCylinder(radius=4,height=6)
    sphere1 = calculateAreaOfSphere(radius=2)
}

calculateAreaOfCube(length) {
   return cubeANumber(length)
}

squareANumber(in) {
    return in*in
}

cubeANumber(in) {
    return in*in*in
}

calculateAreaOfCylinder(radius,height) {
    step1 = areaCircle(radius)
    return multiply(step1,height)
}

areaCircle(radius) {
    return 2 * pi * radius
}

multiply(a,b) {
    return a * b
}

calculateAreaOfSphere(radius) {
    step1 = squareANumber(pi)
    step2 = multiply(4,step1)
    return multiply(step2,radius)
}

(yes, there's a bug in the code above)

Control group just gets the code, gets the known good answer, and is told "go debug this!". Time how long it takes to fix it.

Test group gets the code, but is told "write unit tests for each method". Then fixes any problems and see if it gives the known good answer. Time how long it takes to fix it.

So interestingly, my hypothesis is that the control group might actually fix the problem more quickly because they don't have to write unit tests.

But then, give the 2 groups another set of code:

main() {
    val = calculateAreaOfSomeComplexShape()
}

calculateAreaOfSomeComplexShape() {
    cube1 = calculateAreaOfCube(length=5)
    cube2 = calculateAreaOfCube(length=4)
    cylinder1 = calculateAreaOfCylinder(radius=5,height=4)
    cylinder2 = calculateAreaOfCylinder(radius=4,height=6)
    sphere1 = calculateAreaOfSphere(radius=2)
}

calculateAreaOfCube(length) {
   return cubeANumber(length)
}

squareANumber(in) {
    return in*in
}

cubeANumber(in) {
    return in*in
}

calculateAreaOfCylinder(radius,height) {
    step1 = areaCircle(radius)
    return multiply(step1,height)
}

areaCircle(radius) {
    return 2 * pi * radius
}

multiply(a,b) {
    return a * b
}

calculateAreaOfSphere(radius) {
    step1 = squareANumber(pi)
    step2 = multiply(4,step1)
    return multiply(step2,radius)
}

(its a different bug this time)

Control and test group, same task. But now the test group can run their unit tests right away and spot the error. Time how long it takes them to fix vs how long it takes the control group to debug the whole thing again.

I think you could make the sample code even more complex. Figure out ways to make the call tree deeper and wider.

I'm honestly curious what the results would be. Does the unit testing group show a significant improvement the first or second time?

No, it's not Ethanol-Fueled. But it is relevant to Ethanol-Fueled.

Prosthetic penis sex attacker Gayle Newland jailed

I understand Gayle Newland’s impulse to catfish – I posed as a man online for sex

Continuation of Doctor Who freakout:

Two former Doctors clash over Jodie Whittaker casting

Bad Western cultural influence excised from China:

Justin Bieber banned from China for 'bad behaviour'

Japan's First Lady trolls God Emperor Trumpu-jiichan?

BBC, LA Times, Newsweek, and The Guardian.

How OJ Simpson paved the way for Donald Trump

Parole board votes to release O.J. Simpson from prison in October

Also at BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, Vice, and CNN. Wikipedia.

The OJ Simpson trials: Where are they now?

One thing to note is that despite a $33.5 million civil judgment against O.J., retirement income is protected under federal law.

Don't forget O.J.'s greatest gift to mankind. One national treasure begets another.

Woman In Saudi Arabia Arrested For Wearing Skirt, Crop Top In Video

5 Injured In Series Of Acid Attacks In London

The Evening Standard newspaper reports that nearly 1,500 acid attacks were reported in London in the past six years.

Hong Kong's High Court Expels Pro-Democracy Lawmakers

Man-Repelling Flamethrowers Are Being Marketed to Women in China

Although it's unclear if women in China are actually using these mini flamethrowers, they're not the most bizarre product aimed at keeping aggressive men away. That honor goes to the "anti-pervert" leggings that apparently give women's legs a hairier look and made the rounds on Chinese blogs in 2013.

That could attract a worse variety of pervert.

Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation (archive.is)

Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”

But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election campaign.

Emphasis mine.

So almost everyone agrees that testing and stuff is good. Automated testing? Even better.

And in a lot of progressive software shops, we've got fully automated build pipelines that continuously run unit tests, prettifiers, security scans, and things like that against code that is being checked in by developers. In my opinion, this is amazing and fantastic. It greatly improves code quality and also greatly enhances productivity. Combined with something like ChatOps/Slack, now you've got almost-real-time feedback on the state of your software projects. As a developer I love it.

Some people that this even a step further. They trust their automated QC/verification processes so much, that if the processes give a thumbs up then the code can be deployed automatically and immediately to production.

In my opinion: Game Changer! I still believe

Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration

(--John Boyd) so anything that increases velocity is a step in the right direction.

(disclaimer: obviously this doesn't count if you're writing code for a nuclear power plant or the space shuttle. But if all you're doing is a silly little webapp...)

So, since my company is in a constant state of flux (as are all, I believe), in our inexorable march to DevOps I've migrated from mostly writing code for our customer-facing products that we actually build, to working with the systems and ops folks in the management of the environment. Since we are now like 80% in the Cloud (tm)(c)(r) our new internal buzzword is Software Defined Data Center. The entire cloud datacenter is built via code (or at least code-like text, such as raw JSON). The goal was for the sysad team to start operating like a software team.

I can't tell if this is good or not.

My current biggest challenge is trying to figure out how (and even *if*) you could apply CI/CD and automated testing principles to this type of environment. Again, if you Google around the ol' blogosphere you'll find plenty of articles, whitepapers, blogs, essays, and writeups from people who all state that Testing is Good, Automated Testing is Better, and indeed the infrastructure-side of your teams should indeed be doing all these things. But what I've found interesting is...I can't find anyone who actually provides concrete examples of implementation and mechanics. Its easy to find examples and tutorials for software products, but not infrastructure.

Here's what I mean. Say you have a Ruby on Rails app as your customer facing product. Its pretty straightforward nowadays to have an automated test suite, which upon commit/push to your repo automatically spins up a container, deploys the code, and runs all the unit tests. Upon success, again its pretty easy to use some orchestrator, CI pipeline, or configManagement tool (i.e. jenkins, ansible, puppet, chef, bamboo, gitlabCI, etc etc etc ad nauseam) to push all this nifty code to production.

So let's say I'm managing.....let's say an OpenLDAP server. How can you CI something like that? Deploy to a container? There's nothing to really unit test. The biggest test I want to do is, say I'm deploying 3 or 4 of them, making sure replication is flowing between them. Its trivial to write a script that does this test, but where's the orchestration? Upon commit/push, do you have your CM tool deploy an entire new cluster and run these tests? Who acts as the observer/controller for this non-trivial event? It seems really super heavyweight.

It really sort of turns into a "who watches the watchers?" scenario. Automated unit testing via CI works because your code product can be completely contained, observed, and controlled via a test harness. Well how do you test harness something like an Active Directory Domain Controller? Or your Jira server?

In short, it sounds like a good idea to do "automated testing" for automated deployments of enterprise systems, but actually doing it? Its a lot harder than it seems.

Quentin Tarantino Met With Margot Robbie For Sharon Tate: Sources

Word has gotten out that Quentin Tarantino’s next film will be a drama revolving around the Manson Family murders. Deadline has heard that Tarantino met with Margot Robbie to potentially play Sharon Tate, the actress wife of director Roman Polanski who was slain in 1969 in a brutal murder whose savagery shocked the country.

How Kim Kardashian’s Lesser Siblings Are Sullying Her Brand

Every Kardashian is a snowflake: beautiful, unique, and with her own distinctive brand of merchandise. Kim is the sexy one and the famous one. Khloé is the funny one. Kourtney is the healthy one/the super mom. Rob is the boy. As soon as they graduated from puberty/fake high school, Kendall and Kylie Jenner took on their own roles in the family business, garnishing their half-siblings’ reality TV show empire with their own special flair (aka black fashion trends they found on Instagram). Kylie had big lips and a rapper boyfriend, and Kendall was a real model. Kylie wore long acrylic nails and Kendall had sleep paralysis. Kylie realized lots of things and Kendall appeared to realize absolutely nothing. With the addition of the Jenner sisters, the Kardashian brand became stronger and more inescapable than ever. This updated cast promised an era of Kardashian success and stasis: sisters and half-sisters prattling on over grilled chicken salads season after season, getting married, giving birth, growing older, customizing and re-customizing their Mercedes just to feel something.

And then 2017 hit Calabasas like a meteor, leaving a trail of escalating controversies and some abandoned Dash merchandise in its wake.

To put things into perspective, just last summer the Kardashians were celebrating the demise of family nemesis Taylor Swift, who was effectively outed for her serpentine tendencies on Kim Kardashian’s Snapchat. Following Kim’s Pulitzer-worthy work, Swift was relegated to her own ninth circle of hell: anonymity. Swift was squad-less and single and Kim Kardashian was more famous than ever, essentially dancing on her enemy’s grave in a pair of priceless custom Yeezys. Now, less than a year later, the entire Kardashian family appears to be teetering on the brink of overexposure, just like TayTay. This is the way the Kardashian world ends: not with a bang, but a potent combination of cultural appropriation scandals, Instagram revenge porn, a really bad Pepsi ad, and desecrating the memory of Tupac Shakur.

It’s hard to say if the Kardashians have been sabotaged by their lesser siblings, or are merely reaping the rewards of their own shitty seeds. After all, the main gripe that socially conscious consumers appear to have with the Kardashians is their cultural appropriation—and while these accusations have certainly escalated, taking trend cues from women of color has always been an integral part of the Kardashian brand. When Kim Kardashian was, incorrectly and ahistorically, heralded for singlehandedly making hips and butts sexy, she arguably set her family on the path to their own destruction. Ever since, the Kardashians have consistently co-opted black trends, aesthetics, and styles—everything from cornrows to, allegedly, the n-word. Sure, there’s a difference between braiding your hair a certain way because you saw a black woman doing it on Tumblr and putting your face on top of Biggie Smalls’. Then again, when you build an entire brand off of your ability to spot and repackage trends, the line between curation and harmful co-option is predictably thin. And when you’re Kylie Jenner, a 19-year-old who has repeatedly been accused of stealing things she likes without permission, the line is apparently non-existent.

Vatican outlaws gluten-free bread for Holy Communion

Transubstantiation is serious business.