Tales from the jar side: JCrete unconference, YouTube videos, Social Media Wars, Passive aggression in song lyrics, and Tweets / Toots / Skeets / Whatever they're called on Threads

I tried to come up with a carpentry pun that woodwork. I think I nailed it, but nobody saw it (multiple rimshots)

Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 2 - 9, 2023. This week I attended the JCrete unconference in Chania, Crete. I got home late last night.

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JCrete

I’ve never been to an unconference before. The idea is, you get a bunch of bright people together, start each day by proposing a bunch of topics to discuss, and let them talk about whatever occurs to them.

It worked better than I expected. I was concerned there would be too many people who liked to hear themselves talk, and there was some of that, but not too much. I’ve certainly never been a room where there was more deep knowledge about the Java language, compiler, and libraries, to the point where I had no idea what they were talking about. :)

I met several great people and learned a lot. I didn’t enjoy the travel getting there and back, but for that I mostly blame Heathrow airport and their security theater, which for all I know they based on our disastrous system.

I think I’ll be processing this one for a while, but first I have to get over the jet lag. Expect more details in future newsletters. I was going to include a picture or two, but the fact is, I’m just not a good picture taker. I’ll round up some for next week’s newsletter.

YouTube Activity

Live Stream with Bruno Souza

One good result of attending JCrete was I got to hang out and do a Live Stream with Bruno Souza (sorry about spelling his name wrong in the thumbnail above). This one was really fun. Bruno has a large following of his own, and he’s way better at marketing than I am. Best of all, he’s a fan of my Help Your Boss Help You book, so we spent a lot of time talking about ways to build a relationship with your manager that gets you what you want in your career.

While I’ve known about Bruno for many years, I’d never really had a chance to sit down and talk with him for an extended time. If you’re curious about him, he’s brjavaman on virtually every social media site, like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more.

We both really got going, giving this stream a lot more energy than I normally can sustain. I hope you like it.

YouTube Short on the Elon/Zuck Cage Match

In last week’s newsletter, I expressed my contempt for the whole idea of the idea of an actual, physical “fight” between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. After I published the newsletter video on Monday, I extracted that bit into a YouTube Short:

I made it partly for those people who don’t watch the whole newsletter, and partly to keep playing around with Descript. Feel free to take a look if you’re interested, but if not, that’s fine too.

In fact, one of the most remarkable events of the week is that Elon has done such a horrible job with Twitter that people are actually rooting for an amoral robot like Zuck with his Threads app. More on that below.

AI Assistant Fail

I also extracted the adventure I described in last week’s newsletter about how the new AI Assistant in IntelliJ floundered when I asked it to help me use a Java text block inside a JUnit parameterized test. That one was too long for a short (ha!), so it’s the first time I’ve extracted a separate actual video from the newsletter video. It did reasonably well, I think, with a decent retention rate. Given that I didn’t have to spent much effort making it (since it was extracted from the newsletter video), I’m counting that as a win.

This week and next are incredibly busy, so I’m not sure how many videos I’ll have a chance to add. I’m glad to see sometimes the process of extracting a video from the newsletter recording works reasonably well.

As a channel, I’m up to 460 subscribers, so that’s progress. Still a long way to go.

The Social Media Wars Heat Up

As I mentioned, Meta/Facebook/Instagram released Threads this week, to great fanfare and adoption. It’s app-only, which is rather odd, and it’s directly tied to your Instagram account, assuming you have one. People noticed that if you try to disable it or remove your account, you also to the same to your Instagram account.

I joined, because I typically do. I’m kenkousen over there, the same name I am pretty much everywhere. There’s nothing to see yet from me — I haven’t posted anything.

So far my impression is that the app looks clean and well done, but (1) there’s no chronological feed, (2) you can’t restrict your feed to just people you want to follow, and (3) the posts are full of garbage. I spent a little time on it, but until they fix those first two issues I doubt I’ll spend much more time there.

I did find it amusing that Musk threatened to sue Meta over vague accusations of things that aren’t even illegal, which you know people at Meta are very happy to see because that means they’re getting to him. The last statistics I saw suggested the app was installed 70 million times by Friday (after it launched on Wednesday) and is rapidly approaching 100 million users. Those are numbers Twitter can’t even dream about. I wonder, however, how many people will still be using Threads a week after they install it.

Just for the record, here’s where you can find me on social media:

• Twitter, though I’ve really cut back and may leave soon. All I need is one more major screw up from Elon, which ought to happen any day now.

• LinkedIn. I welcome connections from jarheads, of course. My normal policy is to accept connections from anyone who isn’t obviously a recruiter or trying to sell me consulting or coding services or whatever. I’ve been quite surprised at how many YouTube viewers I get from there, and the site itself has been more useful than I expected.

• Threads, as I mentioned.

• Substack. Of course, that’s where this newsletter is hosted. I’m sure they would like me to use their Notes feature more often, but I don’t see much value out of it.

• Mastodon. I’m enjoying the community there, though my number of followers is much lower than what I had on Twitter. I think Mastodon has been quite successful and will continue to grow. It’s fascinating how the media completely misunderstands it, mostly because it’s not about profits. That just doesn’t figure into their world view, so they don’t know what to say about it or how to measure its success. In case you’re interested, my Android app for Mastodon is called Tusky, and is an open source project.

• Bluesky. It’s okay, basically. Again, I’m not terribly active there and don’t plan to be, though I’m keeping an eye on it. I don’t trust Jack Dorsey any more than any other tech bro billionaire, and it’s strange that the site is still invitation only. (I still have one invite code if you need it.) The site is also a reminder that from a business perspective, Twitter was badly run long before Elon arrived to run it into the ground.

• Facebook, though that’s mostly just for family and a few acquaintances. Honestly, if my wife wasn’t there I’d probably never go. On the other hand, I use StreamYard for my live streams, which allows me to simultaneously broadcast on three sites, and this week I chose FB as one of them for my Kousen IT page. Again, I don’t do much there other than post the newsletter every week, but if you’re there and say hi I’ll probably wave back.

• Medium, which is where my blog posts go, largely because that’s where the Pragmatic Programmers publication resides. The quality of posts I see over there varies wildly, from utter dreck to really good stuff.

• YouTube, naturally. I spent way more time there than any of the others, though I’m more fond of Nebula.

Like the number of rats included in the strawberry tart in Monty Python’s Dead Bishop sketch (“rather a lot, really”), that’s arguably too many. I’m not sure how that will evolve over time, but I’ll let you know what I notice as they evolve.

Passive Aggression FTL

Sometimes my music service plays very old songs. Of course, I’m very old, so maybe that’s not unexpected. Recently it played Diary, by Bread. Here’s a YouTube link if you’re feeling suicidal.

Bread was nearly the ultimate depressing easy listening band from the 70s, and this is one of their classics. In case you don’t recognize it from the title, the lyrics start:

I found her diary underneath a tree
And started reading about me
The words she'd written took me by surprise
You'd never read them in her eyes

They said that she had found
The love she'd waited for
Wouldn't you know it?
She wouldn't show it

Spoiler alert for a 50-year-old pop song: the diary entry is not about him, and he cries and lets her go. Let’s be clear — it’s an extremely well-constructed song with an effective gut punch. But with the benefit of age and hindsight, I can’t help thinking the guy was set up. There’s no way he just “found” her diary. That was a staggering move of passive aggression. Sure, he’s clueless, but she didn’t have the guts to actually talk to him, preferring to have him “accidentally” discover (sure, right) that she’d fallen in love with someone else.

Blech. Given her lack of communication skills, I’m skeptical her newly formed relationship had much of a future, either, but the lyrics don’t address that.

The Wikipedia page says the song only made it up to #15 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, though apparently it made it to #3 on the Easy Listening charts. I seem to recall it doing better than that, but I was just a kid at the time. I also felt bad for the guy, but he was no doubt much better off without her.

Thank you for tolerating yet another installment of Looking Back and Taking Seriously Songs Never Intended For That Purpose, an irregular series from Tales from the jar side. Maybe next time we’ll look at the Harry Chapin song Taxi and how questionable it was for the singer to finish off a six-pack and get stoned while driving his taxi.

Tweets and Toots and Skeets and Whatever They’re Called on Threads

Are posts on Threads just called threads? Or maybe tweets, in order to annoy Elon? That would be both funny and appropriate.

In a nutshell

I certainly felt that way recently, but I’ve cut way back on Twitter and it’s remarkable how quickly I’m getting over it. Not a good sign for Musk and Co, that someone as addicted to Twitter as me can so easily live without it.

I’m out of here

A bit oversimplified, but there’s something to that.

I am become Death, in my Dream House

It appears that the technical term for the Barbie movie / Oppenheimer double feature is Barbieheimer. My thought was Barbenheimer, but that’s not as clear, I guess.

Yeah, kid, you win

Oof. Yeah, that’s a win. And a loss.

If you know, you know

Four seems low. It would be ironic if there were five, of course.

In case you don’t get the reference, it’s from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Chain of Command (part 2). Here’s an article about it.

Sticking with that theme:

Worf in Jorts is…

Yup, Jorf. I mean, what else?

Yet another social media take

AIMA?

My wife and son have become way too fond of those Am I The Asshole? posts, so here’s a good one for them.

No, Frodo, you’re good, but I think you have bigger problems than that.

I could explain it, but…

Sorry about that, but the truth hurts sometimes.

Says it all, really

My own attempt at humor

Now try to get that song out of your head for the next hour or so.

Heavenly bodies

That one is from Bluesky. Simon Verhoeven (hi Simon!) sent me this link, which lets me filter my Bluesky feed to find the posts I liked. That link is probably more valuable than half this newsletter.

Finally, I’d like to point out the obvious

Or is that too obvious?

Have a great week everybody!

The video version of this newsletter will be on the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel tomorrow.

Last week:

• JCrete

This week:

• Introduction to Groovy, private class on India time (yawns already)

• Deep Dive Into Spring, an NFJS Virtual Workshop

• Gradle Tips and Tricks, ditto

• Getting Started with Spring, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform