TIL: Vibecession

Many years (and a couple of jobs) ago, I was part of a weird corporate experiment that was referred to as “swim teams.” I’m not sure this was a thing except at my one company, but there is a business concept called “swimlanes” that I think might be related.  But, anyhow, what it was, was this: All the employees who were considered “squeaky wheels” were gathered up in a single room (and let me tell you, we were all looking around like, uh-oh), and were told that we were going to get assigned to one or two “swim teams,” and each team was going to work on one thing to make the business better.  That is, don’t just complain about the problems: participate in coming up with solutions.  And this was lovely, and a nice idea, and obviously it didn’t work at all.

You can probably guess why, but I’ll drill down a bit further.  One of my “swim teams” (I really can’t even type that without the air quotes) was called “employee engagement,” and it was one of the only ones—maybe the only one—where our actual CEO was on the team.  And, as she put it, the point of the team was to figure out how to get employees to treat the company as if it were their own, and not just a paycheck.  Our team came up with a number of good ideas, none of which were ever implemented.  One example: I proposed implementing financial transparency (long-time readers will recall this as cornerstone #1 of the Barefoot Philosophy).  The CEO was scandalized: let all the employees have all that sensitive financial data?  They can’t be trusted with that!  Then, a couple of weeks later, I was forced to listen to her rant on about how “employees these days” feel like they’re entitled to a job but they don’t want to work very hard for it.  And I thought to myself—very quietly, because there was no point in getting fired over a zinger—wait, you think you deserve employee engagement, but you won’t take any action that would earn that?  Who exactly is the party feeling entitled here?

But I tell you that story so I can tell you this one: I recently learned what ”vibecession” means.  It’s a topic of great interest in this political climate, with many high-level Democrats seeming to complain that people just aren’t understanding how good they’ve got it.  Unemployment is low! wages are up! the stock market is booming! interest rates on things like savings accounts are higher than they’ve been in most people’s entire lifetimes!  So why are people still complaining?  These silly consumers just need to understand what’s really going on so that they can understand how awesome the Biden presidency has been.  Hopefully they all wake up by the time the election rolls around.

But, you see, this attitude is exactly like my old CEO.  Faced with two contradictory situations—the status quo of economic indicators vs the attitudes of the common people—then obviously the status quo must be right and the people must be wrong (and also ungrateful).  I keep hearing so-called experts trying to work out how to spin the economic numbers so people will finally “get it.” What I don’t hear is anyone questioning whether it makes sense to keep using the same old numbers when they obviously don’t reflect how ordinary, non-academics are being impacted in the current economy.

They should maybe try that.  I don’t think they will, but they should probably try.  Just one man’s opinion.

Hot Potato

My grandmother used to make potato soup.

Well, that’s what she called it anyhow.  I thought it was closer to liquid mashed potatoes.  Which, considering how she made mashed potatoes (and how any leftovers inevitably became potato soup), was probably not all that inaccurate.

I’ve talked before about my two grandmothers and their widely varying styles of cooking.  At that time, I said that mashed potatoes was one of the things they came to make the same way, and that I could no longer remember which one changed to match the other.  Well, I must have been having a heavy duty brain fart that day, because it seems pretty clear to me now.  My working class, North-Carolina-raised farmgirl grandmother, with her muscular arms, used a potato masher, because that’s how it’s done.  My social climbing, mountains-of-Virginia-far-in-the-rearview, slightly supercilious grandmother thought that was far too much effort.  She used a stand mixer.  Making mashed potatoes was just like making cake batter, as far as she was concerned.  My other grandmother (on the paternal side) didn’t think of this as cheating, per se, I don’t believe ... but certainly she thought it was unnecessarily fancy.  The regular old masher and regular old puttin’-yer-back-into-it had been good enough for her mother—and, no doubt, her own grandmother, and great-grandmother, and so on all the way back to whichever of her ancestors arrived with John Smith in Jamestown¹—so it was obviously good enough for her.  Just a masher, a few pats of butter, and some salt: that was literally all you needed.  If she ever even added milk (before she started trying to please me, that is), I don’t recall it.  Whereas my other grandmother (on the maternal side) added enough milk—or even, sometimes, cream—that it became almost the consistency of pudding.  After a while of turning up my nose and/or begging, my paternal grandmother gave in and started using the mixer and the milk too.

And this is what I prefer for my mashed potatoes: they should be smooth, and creamy, and buttery, and salty.  I don’t need sour cream, per se (though it’s okay if you want to add that in), or any other fancy-schmancy spices, and I certainly don’t need gravy.  Like ketchup for fries, you only need gravy for mashed potatoes if they’re particularly crappy mashed potatoes (like you’d get from most fast food places²).  The mashed potatoes my paternal grandmother used to make (before I cajoled her into using the mixer) were lumpy, and more mushy than creamy, and definitely not smooth.  And some people like that sort of thing.  But it was not for me.

But, if you take creamy mashed potatoes and just add more milk to it, I’m not sure you get to call that “potato soup.” I suppose I might be misremembering and there was more to it than that, but I do recall not thinking that much of it.  It was only years and years later that I had some potato leek soup from a decent restaurant that I realized that potato soup might be a pretty cool thing after all.  Another popular restaurant version of potato soup is sort of the soup version of a baked potato: it’s usually served with bacon, and cheese, and often chives.  Now, potato leek soup is a pretty lovely dish, and (baked) potato soup is just fine, but at some point a few years back I decided I wanted to try combine the best of both versions.  I’m not sure what got into me, but I ended up making something that has become a family favorite: my youngest, in particular, asks for it quite regularly, and soon she’ll be able to make it even better than I can.

I started by scouring the Internet for recipes.  I was looking to see how other people were making it so I could figure out what elements I wanted to keep and which I wanted to toss out.  Now, in my view, the primary thing to get right in potato soup is the consistency: my grandmother’s was too thin for my taste, but obviously you don’t want it as thick as actual mashed potatoes.  And the way that the vast majority of recipes online achieve the proper consistency is the same way you get thickness in gravy: flour.  Now, at the time, I was either doing a Whole 30 or just fresh off one, and I certainly was looking to avoid grains.³  Surely there were better options than regular old flour!  And, I resarched that, I discovered a curious thing: one of the big alternatives to flour is ... potato starch.

And, I thought, well, you know what has lots of potato starch? Potatoes!

So essentially my recipe contains about twice as many actual potatoes as most recipes you can find on the web.  But I think it’s all the better for it.  Certainly the consistency can’t be beat.  Instead of leeks or chives, I use yellow onions and celery, and I retain the thyme common in the potato-leek varieties, and the cheese common in the baked-potato-adjacent varieties.  It makes for a thick, creamy potato soup with a lot of flavor, but still tastes enough like good old mashed potatoes to qualify as comfort food.  My family⁴ really seems to love it too.  So here it is, for your perusal, and (possibly) enjoyment.  Bon appétit.

Potato Soup

Ingredients

• 1 large yellow onion
• 6 – 8 stalks of celery
• 8 large potatoes(*), either Russets or Yukon golds, or a mix of the two
• 1 – 2 tbsp of ghee
• 4 – 5 large pinches salt
• 15 grinds black pepper
• 2 cups milk
• 1 carton chicken broth (about 32 oz)
• a “large amount” of thyme
• a “small amount” of garlic powder
• 1 – 2 handfuls of “pizza cheese”

(*) When you buy a bag of potatoes, of course, you don’t get any say in the size, and I’ve never seen a Yukon gold that I would classify as “large” in any event.  My rough ratio is that 3 medium potatoes count as 2 larges, and 2 small potatoes count as 1 large.  Just err on the side of too many rather than not enough and you should be fine.

Hardware

• a good chopping knife
• a good potato peeler
• a large pot (what my grandmothers would call a “stewpot”), preferably with a lid
• a stick blender (a.k.a. “immersion blender”)
• a spoon for stirring (I like wood, but you do you)
• a ladle for serving

Directions

This one is actually pretty simple.  Rough chop the onion and the celery; peel and rough chop the potatoes.  The cutting board we use has a tray (a little like a Tefal, only a bit larger), and basically a large, rough-chopped onion fills that tray; the celery should work out to roughly the same amount, and the potatoes should be about four times that amount.

Honestly, peeling the potatoes is the only pain in the ass part of the whole procedure.  I often make the other family members help with this part.  We also sometimes use an electric potato peeler, but it’s a bit fiddly, and it also seems to waste a bunch of the actual potato, so I’m not saying I’d actually recommend that.

Anyhow, parallel to that, melt the ghee in the pot.  You can peel and chop everything first, and then do the ghee, but what I like to do is start with this step: turn the heat on just long enough to melt the ghee, then turn it off again while I chop everything.  That way I can just dump everything straight into the pot.  The ghee should be enough to cover the bottom of the pot with a slightly thick layer.

The veggies, salt, and pepper all go into the pot, and you’re going to cook it, covered, at medium to medium-high heat, for about 5 minutes.  Stir it every now and again to keep it from burning on the bottom, or, if you have a tightly fitting lid, just do what I do: hold the lid on and just shake it up and down a bit every minute-and-a-half or so.  We’re basically just trying to give the veggies a head start and sort of pre-soften them up a bit.

Once your 5-minute timer goes off, pour in your milk and chicken broth.  Now add the thyme and the garlic powder.  I never bother measuring it; I just use a system very similar to what I do for spaghetti and meatballs: cover the surface with with a thin layer of thyme (that’s a “large amount”), then add anywhere from ¼ to ½ as much of that amount of garlic powder, depending on how much you love garlic (that’s the “small amount”).  Stir it up, cover the pot, crank up the heat, and bring it to a boil.  Now lower the heat and simmer it for about 15 minutes, stirring perhaps every 5 minutes or so.

When that time goes off, turn off the heat entirely (trust me, it’ll be plenty hot) and hit it with the stick blender.  I like to move the blender up and down a bit to get everything really really smooth, but I also like to be a little haphazard so that every once in a while you get a surprise chunk in your bowl.  Once you’ve got the consistency like you want it, gradually stir in the shredded cheese.  In our house we favor a 3-cheese blend that we refer to as “pizza cheese” (because it’s great on pizza, natch): it’s always cheddar, mozzarella, and one other white cheese (if you’re using the Trader Joe’s version, that’s Monterey Jack; other versions may substitute provolone).  But you can use a Mexican cheese blend, or straight cheddar, or whatever floats your boat.  Just stir it in bit by bit until it essentially disappears: you’ll never see it in the soup, but it adds another layer of creaminess that’s tough to beat.  I like about two handsful in mine, but adjust to taste.  Or sprinkle a bit more on your bowl when serving.  Or both.

And that’s it!  Ladle it up and enjoy.  But be careful: it’s hot.  (Our youngest always puts a big bowlful in the freezer for a couple of minutes so she doesn’t burn her tongue.)  But, honestly, it’s so good I usually don’t mind burning my tongue a bit.  On a cold winter day, it’s the perfect warm-you-up meal, and it’s full of those comfort food vibes that warm your soul as well.  Tough to beat.

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1 Note: I don’t know for sure that my grandmother’s ancestors came over with the Virginia colonists, but I can say that all the ancestors I was able to trace were never more than 100 miles away from that landing spot.

2 The only “fast food” place I would eat ungravied mashed potatoes from is Boston Market.

3 This is less of a gluten thing than a general carb thing, at least for me.

4 Except for our picky middle child, who won’t eat much of anything that we cook.

GPT FTW

This week I’ve been fighting my computer curse again.  Still, despite the fact that the computer gods still really hate me, I’ve managed to accomplish a few things.  I’ve managed to get the version history from my Syncthing replicating to my Backblaze B2 account, I’ve updated the OS and a bunch of packages on my Synology NAS, fixed a long-standing annoyance with my use of NoMachine, and I started building my first custom GPT.  And all that was made much easier with the use of ChatGPT.

Perhaps this deserves a longer post—and perhaps that’ll be what I put up next week—but I’m still seeing a lot of AI skepticism out there.  Last night I saw an interview with a tech reporter who agreed that, yeah, AI might be useful for helping developers with their coding, but beyond it wasn’t good for much.  And, hey: it’s true that trying to make it useful for searching the Internet is tough (though not impossible), and trying to make it work for handling things like customer service is just a horrifyingly bad idea.  But that doesn’t make it useless.  In point of fact, for things like helping you integrate different software packages together, configure your hardware, or design a solution to an ongoing problem, things like ChatGPT are actually pretty useful.  And I think it’s only going to get more useful as time goes on.  Once they figure out how to integrate ChatGPT (or one of its competitors) into something like Alexa or “Hey Google” (as it’s called in our house), the utility of “smart devices” is going to go way up.  Because our smart devices are actually kinda stupid right now, so they could really use that AI boost.

Anyhow, I don’t think I want to turn this blog into an AI evangelism vehicle or anything, but ... damn, ChatGPT shore is useful.

That’s all I really wanted to say.

Discordia, discordiae [f.]: A Misunderstanding

I don’t understand the appeal of Discord.

Oh, sure: I understand it for things like gaming.  The few times that I’ve run D&D games with remote participants, I happily used Discord, and found it to be excellent for that purpose.  Nowadays, there are fancier platforms for such purposes—Alchemy, Owlbear Rodeo, or even things like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, which have been around so long they’re starting to show their age—but honestly I might just stick to something like Discord for its simplicity.

The thing I don’t understand is that it seems to have become the flavor of the decade for hosting online communities.  Web forums are considered passé nowadays: downright old-fashioned, some would even say.  How many times have I heard lately “if you have a question, just pop into our Discord”?  People are actually using it for product support, and it just makes no sense to me.

Now, on the one hand, you might say: well, that makes perfect sense—Discord is primarily popular among Zoomers, while you are very old.  And, sure, I can’t argue the first part, and while I might protest the second one a bit—I’m not a freakin’ Boomer (I am in fact, an elder Gen-Xer, if one believes in those sorts of things^*)—I’m not going to deny that it’s a fair observation.  But I have one foolproof argument that absolutely proves that this has nothing to do with my age: IRC.

Because, in exactly the same way that Reddit is just Usenet reborn, Discord is 100% just the second coming of IRC.  And IRC was invented in 1988, and by the time I was in the age range that Zoomers occupy now—the upper age range, granted, but still: within the range—it was the way that cool tech people communicated.  And I didn’t understand the appeal of it then either.

See, Discord (just like IRC before it) has several fundamental problems that make it really bad for online support in particular, and long-lived online communities in general.  And please don’t think I’m trying to bring back webforums here: I always thought they were pretty awful too, at least compared to the interface of something like Usenet.  But it’s pretty easy to look good when you’re put up against something as terrible as Discord.  And, as much as I’ve always hated webforums, I’ve had some experience with them: I’ve been the moderator a popular Heroscape website for coming up on two decades now.  Of course, most of the younger fans (such as they are for a game that’s been discontinued for years now^**) have moved to YouTube and, I suppose, Discord, but please don’t imagine that I’m upset about that.  Being a moderator of a forum whose traffic is declining means I have less work to do, so I’m all for everyone moving on to other venues.  But my point is, I have a bit of experience not only participating, but even managing, a long-running online community.  So I’m not just talking out of my ass here.

So, what can a webforum do that Discord can’t?  Well, first off, the organization is just better.  A webforum has forums, which have threads.  The vast majority of them also have dedicated areas for file uploads, and often a separate one for images.  Many have blogs or something similar attached to them.  Threads can be moved to another forum when they’re posted in the wrong place by a clueless user, or split apart when they get too crowded, or merged when people are trying to have the same conversation in multiple places at once.  Discord has ... channels.  That’s pretty much it.  There are a couple of different types of channels, but (as near as I can tell, in any event) that has more to do with the method of communication than anything else (e.g. text channels, voice channels, video channels, etc).  So, channels are the only way to organize things, so everything is sort of forced uncomfortably into that model.

A bigger problem, which Discord shares with IRC, is that it’s all real-time.  If I show up on a webforum, I can post a question, then sign off and check back in a few hours (or the next day) for an answer.  On Discord, I post a question, and if someone is there who can answer the question, I get the answer instantly, which is certainly nice.  But if there isn’t anyone there at that exact moment, I just don’t get an answer at all.  I guess some people do go back in time to read all the messages that came in since the last time they were online, but that’s not easy to do, and it might be way too many messages anyway, if the community is large, and even if the person sees the question and knows the answer, they’re probably not going to post it because the conversation has moved on since then so now their answer has no context, and even if the person makes it through all that and actually posts the answer, then I very well might not be online to receive it.  It is quite possibly the worst possible model for customer support that could be imagined in this reality or any other.

But the biggest problem with Discord is that it’s very difficult to search.  At least IRC had logging: most IRC chats were saved and posted to web pages, where you could do minimal, primitive, Ctrl-F-type searches.  A webforum, on the other hand, typically has sophisticated searching: I can find all threads in a certain group of forums that have posts from a given user that contain 2 or more words, not necessarily adjacent.  Not to mention I can use Google to search instead if that’s somehow advantageous.  Meanwhile, searching in Discord is a miserable affair, and can only be done on Discord.  I can set up my own Discord server, but I can’t log those messages to a separate location, because it’s not really my server: it’s just a virtual server controlled by Discord.  And the inability to locate old messages easily means that people just ask the same questions over and over, and people have to spew out the same answers over and over, which everyone no doubt gets sick of doing, and I can tell you from experience that everyone definitely gets sick of reading them.  Lack of easy and versatile search means that the community has no history ... no memory.  And a community with no memory is cursed to just do the same things over and over, not even expecting a different result: just expecting no result whatsoever.  Which is exactly what it gets.

So I don’t see the appeal of Discord, just as I didn’t see the appeal of IRC.  Personally, I was happy to see the latter fade in popularity, though of course there are still corners of the Internet where you can still find IRC communities, presumably inhabited by gray-bearded programmers of COBOL and Ada reminscing about the good ol’ days of JCL and PDP-11s.  But everything that fades comes around again.  AIM is gone, but now we have WhatsApp.  Usenet is (mostly) gone, but now we have Reddit.  And here’s Discord, with the exact same interface that didn’t work with IRC, trying to make it work again.  Honestly, Reddit has the best user interface, I think: subreddits are like forums, threads are threads, and the conversations are displayed heirarchically, so that a response to a given message goes with that message rather than just being tacked on at the end (as they would be in a webforum thread).  This is exactly how Usenet worked (and Slashdot, for that matter), and I still think it’s the superior way to display and store community conversations.  But Reddit has its own issues, which are eerily similar to Usenet’s: it has a reputation for being a cesspool, which certain parts of it deserve, and it often makes it easy for misinformation to thrive and multiply.  Perhaps that’s because the moderation tools for webforums are better ...

Or perhaps it’s because each webforum was run by its own community.  They owned the servers and they set the rules.  Usenet and IRC were like that too: very decentralized, with each community having near complete autonomy.  But Reddit is a company, as is Discord; in fact, it’s very rare these days for a comunity of any type to set up its own servers and run its own software.  You set up virtual servers at Amazon or Microsoft, web sites at Squarespace and WordPress, you put your photos on Instagram and your blogs on Tumblr.  Well, assuming you even bother with blogs at all: these days, it’s more common to just tweet, which of course means you’re using Elon Musk’s personal dumpster fire.  Each one is its own company, with its own goals, and none of those goals are to help your online community thrive, unless of course your thriving can line their pockets in the process.  And obviously the un-decentralization of the Internet is a much broader topic than this meager blog post can address, but I do think Discord is symptomatic of that issue.

So I continue not to “get” Discord, even though I occasionally use it, because often there just isn’t another option.  But it’s always an option of last resort.  Unless, as I noted initially, I’m gaming online.  It’s still pretty good at what it was originally intended for.  I just feel like, somewhere along the way, they got a bit lost trying to be everything to all people.  That hardly ever works.

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* And one mostly shouldn’t.  Personally, while I think it is bullshit to imagine you know what any given person is going to do or say based on an arbitrary “generation” label assigned by the Pew Research Center, I do think it’s okay to use the labels as a convenient shorthand for talking about demographic differences between age groups, which are absolutely a thing that exists.

** But is now officially making a comeback, for what it’s worth.