I find it strangely satisfying...

I find it strangely satisfying ... to find that I still can do some challenging programming.  I've been working for about 50 days now, part time, on some blogging software.  This is a blog server with some specialized features that pander to my own desires, and also that can run several blogs ('cause one blog can't possibly be enough, can it?).

Today I just finished the first user interface component (a sign-in screen).  To make that work, a lot of server infrastructure had to work correctly.  And it did!  For those of you who aren't programmers, user interfaces are fiddly, picky things – and in addition, web user interfaces (which is what I'm doing) are full of quirks and bizarreness.  It's challenging even for the experts, and I am not expert on user interfaces.  So it's very satisfying to prove to myself that I can still do this, even with my vacuum tube nurtured ancient technology brain...

One of these fine days – at least a couple months off yet – I will be hosting all of my blogs on my new self-written server, running from a virtual machine in Amazon's cloud!

Troubling...

Troubling ... this sort of thing is.  But what could be done about it?  Other than shining light on the issue (as Claire Berlinski does in the post linked there), this is a sort of corruption that stays hidden.  You might suspect someone of benefiting from dishonest writings, but how could you possibly know?  And even if you did, what could you do about it?  So far as I know, there's nothing illegal about it...

When I think about...

When I think about ... how political outcomes might be manipulated, these days I consider this the most dangerous – far more so than voting machine manipulation, outright corruption, and so on.  Why?  Because (a) the capability already exists, and (b) it's detectable only through a massive effort, and who would fund that?

I'd be surprised if this isn't already happening.  Not necessarily with Google, but with any influential web site.  It's definitely already happening on sites where it's obvious there's political bias (consider NPR, the New York Times, HotAir, Fox News, etc.).  Where it's dangerous is where you don't think there's bias...