There was once an article about Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, in which he recognizes the recipe of his success. The trick, it seems, was to make Garfield as inoffensive as possible. No matter what you believe, no matter how delicate your sensitivities are, you can always read Garfield without feeling hurt or offended. Comedians might object that a lot of humor boils down to ridiculing something, so it's worth asking: if Garfield does not offend anyone, how does it manage to keep being funny? The answer should be obvious to Garfield's readers: it doesn't. Because Garfield is not funny.

The reasoning is pretty interesting: Jim Davis' goal was not to be the next greatest American cartoonist, nor to push the boundaries of comic strips as an art form (that would be Bill Watterson). His goal was to make money, and boy did he succeed at that. By being a recognizable, bland, perfectly formulaic icon, Garfield can be adopted by any company or product willing to pay for it. The key, said Davis in this interview, was to make the strip as plain and predictable as possible. "Oh, look,", says the reader, "Garfield is mad because it's Monday". Cue the sound of crickets.

The same, I'm afraid, has happened to Dilbert some time ago. And while it pained me to stop reading after so many years, I've read enough to understand that the Dilbert I liked is gone, replaced by that which he was intended to criticize. Including the archives, I read about 27 years worth of strips, so it was not a decision I took lightly. That was about 4 years ago, and I haven't regretted the decision.

For those who might feel like me, and as a service to the community, I give you the one and only strip you will ever need from now on. It is the culmination of years of Dilbert, and nothing you read in the actual strip will be better than this in the foreseeable future.

Now, in all fairness, congratulations to Scott Adams: he has managed to secure Dilbert in the mind of the public, and he made a lot of money out of it. It was sad to see the old Dilbert go away, but then again, I don't have an animated series nor an (forever in production) upcoming movie to my credit. Having said that, I can only wonder how much more he could have produced if he hadn't rested on his laurels: his Wikipedia achievements have almost entirely peaked around 2010, and he seems to spend most of his time nowadays writing about what an amazing president Donald Trump is. While this is speculation on my part, I believe this might be why his blog is no longer featured on the Dilbert homepage.

I can see why he doesn't need to come with new ideas for Dilbert strips. After all, he has enough money to do whatever he wants. I just wish "make Dilbert funny again" was one of those things he cared about.

I received today the type of e-mail that we all know one day will arrive: an e-mail where someone is trying to locate a file that doesn't exist anymore.

The problem is very simple: friends of mine are trying to download code from https://bit.ly/2jIu1Vm to replicate results from an earlier paper, but the link redirects to https://bitbucket.org/villalbamartin/refexp-toolset/src/default/. You may recognize that URL: it belongs to Bitbucket, the company that infamously dropped their support for Mercurial a couple months ago despite being one of the largest Mercurial repositories on the internet.

This is the story of how I searched for that code, and even managed to recover some of it.

Offline backup

Unlike typical stories, several backup copies of this code existed. Like most stories, however, they all suffered terrible fates:

• There was a migration of most of our code to Github, but this specific repo was missed because it belongs to our University group (everyone in that group had access to it) but it was not created under the group account.
• Three physical copies of this code existed. One lived in a hard drive that died, one lived in a hard drive that may be lost, and the third one lives in my hard drive... but it may be missing a couple commits, because I was not part of that project at that time.

At this point my copy is the better one, and it doesn't seem to be that outdated. But could we do better?

Online repositories

My next step was figuring out whether a copy of this repo still exists on the internet - it is well known that everything online is being mirrored all the time, and it was only a question of figuring out who was more likely to have a copy.

My first stop was Archive Team, from the people behind the Internet Archive. This team famously downloaded 245K public repos from Bitbucket, and therefore they were my first choice when checking whether someone still had a copy of our code.

The experience yielded mixed results: accessing the repository with my browser is impossible because the page throws a large number of errors related to Content Security Policy, missing resources, and deprecated attributes. I imagine no one has looked at it in quite some time, as it is to be expected when dealing with historical content. On the command line, however, it mostly works: I can download the content of my repo with a single command:

hg clone --stream https://web.archive.org/web/2id_/https://bitbucket.org/villalbamartin/refexp-toolset

I say "mostly works" because my repo has a problem: it uses sub-repositories, which apparently Archive Team failed to archive. I can download the root directory of my code, but important subdirectories are missing.

My second stop was the Software Heritage archive, an initiative focused on collecting, preserving, and sharing software code in a universal software storage archive. They partnered up with the Mercurial hosting platform Octobus and produced a second mirror of Bitbucket projects, most of which can be nicely accessed via their properly-working web interface. For reasons I don't entirely get this web interface does not show my repo, but luckily for us the website also provides a second, more comprehensive list of archived repositories where I did find a copy.

As expected, this copy suffers from the same sub-repo problem as the other one. But if you are looking for any of the remaining 99% of code that doesn't use subrepos, you can probably stop reading here.

Deeper into the rabbit hole

At this point, we need to bring out the big guns. Seeing as the SH/Octobus repo is already providing me with the raw files they have, I don't think I can get more out of them than what I currently do. The Internet Archive, on the other hand, could still have something of use: if they crawled the entire interface with a web crawler, I may be able to recover my code from there.

The surprisingly-long process goes like this: first, you go to the Wayback Machine, give them the repository address, and find the date when the repository was crawled (you can see it in their calendar view). Then go to the Kicking the bucket project page, and search for a date that kind of matches that. In my case the repository was crawled on July 6, but the raw files I was looking for where stored in a file titled 20200707003620_2361f623. In order to identify this file I simply went through all files created on or after July 6, downloaded their index (in my case, the one named ITEM CDX INDEX) and used zgrep to check whether the string refexp-toolset (the key part of the repo's name) was contained in any of them. Once I identified the proper file, downloading the raw 28.9 Gb WEB ARCHIVE ZST file took about a day.

Once you downloaded this file, you need to decompress it. This file is compressed with ZST, meaning that you probably need to install the zstd tool or similar (this one worked in Devuan, so it's probably available in Ubuntu and Debian too). But we are not done! See, the ZST standard allows you to use an external dictionary without which you cannot open the WARC file (you get an Decoding error (36) : Dictionary mismatch error). The list of all dictionaries is available at the bottom of this list. How to identify the correct one? In my case, the file I want to decrypt is called bitbucket_20200707003620_2361f623.1592864269.megawarc.warc.zst, so the correct dictionary is the one called archiveteam_bitbucket_dictionary_1592864269.zstdict.zst. This file has a .zst extension, so don't forget to extract it too!

Once you have extracted the dictionaries, found the correct one, and extracted the contents of your warc.zst file (unzstd -D <dictionary> <file>) it is now time to access the file. The Webrecorder Player didn't work too well because the dump is too big, but the warctools package was helpful enough to realize... that the files I need are not in this dump either.

So that was a waste of time. On the plus side, if you ever need to extract files from the Internet Archive, you now know how.

Final thoughts

So far I seem to have exhausted all possibilities. I imagine that someone somewhere has a copy of Bitbucket's raw data, but I haven't managed to track it down yet. I have opened an issue regarding sub-repo cloning, but I don't expect it to be picked up anytime soon.

The main lesson to take away from here is: backups! I'm not saying you need 24/7 NAS mirroring, but you need something. If we had four copies and three of them failed, that should tell you all you need to know about the fragility of your data.

Second, my hat goes off both to the Internet Archive team and to the collaboration between the Software Heritage archive and Octobus. I personally like the later more because their interface is a lot nicer (and functional) than the Internet Archive, but I also appreciate the possibility of downloading everything and sorting it myself.

And finally, I want to suggest that you avoid Atlassian if you can. Atlassian has the type of business mentality that would warm Oracle's heart if they had one. Yes, I know they bought Trello and it's hard to find a better Kanban board, but remember that Atlassian is the company that, in no particular order,

• regularly inflicts Jira on developers worldwide,
• bought Bitbucket and then gutted it, and
• sold everyone on the promise of local hosting and then discontinued it last week for everyone but their wealthiest clients, forcing everyone else to move to the cloud. Did you know that Australia has legally-mandated encryption backdoors? And do you want to take a guess on where Atlassian's headquarters are? Just saying.

Note: I wrote this article in August, but I didn't realize it wasn't published until October. I kept the published date as it was, but if you didn't see it before well, that's why.

Are you familiar with a small streaming company called "Netflix"? If so, you might recognize their opening sound. And even if you don't, you might have seen one of their multiple recent press campaigns regarding this topic. From a recent episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast on all the sound choices that go into their logo to their announcement that Hans Zimmer has worked on making it longer for cinema productions.

What none of those articles are saying is that this sound is also the sound of Kevin Spacey hitting a desk at the end of Season 2 of House of Cards. Yes, that House of Cards, the critically-acclaimed series that made Netflix' stock jump a 70 percent even before it started and put Netflix on the map. If I were a Netflix executive back then, I would be proud of having the series as part of my corporate identity.

If I were an executive today, however, I would be terrified of people forever remembering that my company's official sound, the one that plays before every show, was first heard in a scene with an actor that has been very publicly accused of sexual assault in 2017. So I can understand why someone would feel that a change is needed, and I'm all for it. No one is blaming Netflix (as far as I know) for not running background checks on their actors.

Having said that, it seems that Netflix has gone all the way to completely erase that any of this ever happened, in what has to be the most pointless history rewrites in some time. In the above-mentioned podcast, a sound engineer talks about all the sounds that came together to compose the current Netflix sound, from a ring on a cabinet to the sound of an anvil, with no mention whatsoever of Kevin Spacey hitting any desks.

Suffice to say, I was confused by this omission, so I dug a bit more and found a Facebook post from August 2019 from the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast official account, where they posted:

"I'm convinced the @netflix sonic logo was originally built from Frank Underwood banging on the desk at the end of House of Cards Season 2. BUT, I'm dying to know who enhanced it! I can't find anything online! (...)".

I can only conclude that the "it's a ring on a cabinet" story is technically true and a sound engineer has actually used it to enhance Kevin Spacey's desk banging sound, but they conveniently "forgot" to mention the relation between these two facts. One of the answers to this Quora question mentions that "The tapping on the table with his (Kevin Spacey) ring is associated with completing a mission or one of his plans being accomplished", which sheds even more light into why they were banging rings on furniture to begin with. And let's pray that the hand wearing the ring wasn't Kevin Spacey's...

None of this is mentioned in the podcast. As for the longer version composed by Hans Zimmer, it does not include the original soundbite at all. I believe that Netflix is going on a PR campaign to rewrite their history, has convinced the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast people to just go with it, and have so far been very successful.

And yet, I have to ask... why? Was it so difficult to come out and say "we don't want to be associated with this sound anymore, and therefore we are releasing a new one"? I honestly don't care about Netflix nor House of Cards (which I have not seen), but I am kind of annoyed at such a transparent attempt to hide their history behind a PR campaign. Or even worse, that they seem to have gotten away with it.

I remember seeing two main camps in the old debate on whether a hot-dog is a sandwich: those that argued "it's meat between two pieces of bread, therefore it's a sandwich" and those that counterargued "if I asked whether you wanted a sandwich and then gave you a hot-dog, you would be surprised". And both sides are right! That said, one of them is more right from a language-theoretical point of view, and that's the point of today's post.

(Spoiler: the "not a sandwich" camp is right. Sorry, pro-sandwichers!)

According to Herbert Clark a dialogue is a cooperative activity. It is a joint activity in which both speakers try to accomplish a common objective, ranging from something as formal as "make me understand where the train station is" to as vague an objective as "let's kill some time". And because it is cooperative, we do not expect the other person to be deliberately obtuse. If I ask "Can I get you something to drink?" and someone replies "I don't know, can you?", nobody would assume that this person has a genuine interest in my capacity for carrying drinks. Instead, we would immediately see this for what it is: that this person is not cooperating, that any reasonable person would have understood what I meant, and that this person stopped cooperating on purpose. Whether he did it to make a joke or because he's a jerk, that's a topic for a future discussion.

There is also a principle called the "maxim of quantity" (one of Grice's four maxims) according to which a person will always give as much information as possible, but not so much that it breaks the dialogue. If someone asks me where I come from, my answer can be as precise as a specific neighborhood or as vague as "somewhere near the border with Brazil". My answer will depend on how familiar I believe the other person to be with South-American geography, because I don't want to give them excessive information that they cannot handle. Again, I'm cooperating.

Which brings us to the hot-dog debate. From a taxonomic point of view, a hot-dog is a sandwich: it is composed of two pieces of processed meat between two pieces of bread, which is as clear as it gets. But this is only half the story.

The definition of sandwich came long after the sandwich itself. It is an artificial construct designed to model and understand a set of real-life language usages. Spoken language, on the other hand, is the real deal. Language rules and word definitions model how we speak, and not the other way around. All definitions are artificial and, therefore, may not always reflect the way we actually use those words.

Bringing this all together, I would only use the word "sandwich" to describe a hot-dog if I had a reason to believe the other person doesn't know what a hot-dog is. If you know what a hot-dog is and I know you know what a hot-dog is, using the word "sandwich" to speak about a hot-dog is neither maximally informative (I am giving you less information than I could) nor cooperative (I know which word would help us the most, but I'm not using it). "Sandwich" is a catch-all word that can only be used when no better word exists.

Even worse: you know we both know what a hot-dog is. By choosing "sandwich", I am actively leading you to believe that I want to offer something that can be described as a "sandwich" but not as a "hot-dog". Fans of malicious compliance will argue that this is not technically untrue, but you and I both know that there's little practical difference between "I told you a lie" and "I told you something that any sane person in the world would understand in a certain way while secretly using a different, opposite interpretation that I kept to myself".

So there you have it. A hot-dog is a sandwich if you stick to rigid categories created by researchers with a tenuous grasp of the real world at best (you know, people like me), but you are only allowed to use it if you talk to people who never heard about hot-dogs before. Using the word "sandwich" for a hot-dog in any other context is uncooperative, mildly dishonest, and kind of a jerk move. People do not use the word "sandwich" like that and, since spoken language is where "true" language usage lies, they are the ones who are using it right.

As so many immigrants expats around the world, I like to follow the news regarding what's happening back in my home country. But getting complete, reliable information has been getting more and more difficult every year, and 2020 is the year in which I finally ran out of news sources.

Unlike my parent's generation, I don't consider newspapers a reasonable source of reliable information. The problem is that, following the example set by Fox News, the largest newspapers at home have substituted fact for opinions, extremely biased articles, and outrage has replaced objectivity as the main selling point. All of this seasoned with local celebrity gossip, of course.

If despite my best judgment I decide to check what's going on based on newspapers, I currently start with the biggest newspaper (which is very right-leaning) and then compensate with their main opposition (which is, as expected, very left-leaning). I then figure out which news are common to both, and decide which version is more likely to be true - one newspaper's fair trial is the other newspaper's witch hunt, and one newspaper's smart move is the other newspaper's national betrayal. Finally, I check which news have been mentioned in only one of them, and decide on a reasonable narrative for why only one of them is talking about it. Suffice to say, doing this in the morning on my phone takes a lot of effort.

In my case, this was one problem (probably the only one) solved by the news aggregator Reddit. The sub-reddit for my country used to be relatively good at highlighting the main issues in the public conscience, and reading the main posts used to be enough to get a good, updated picture. But not anymore: extremely lax moderation and general apathy have turned the forum into a meme-laden wasteland where all information has been replaced by bad jokes, political outrage, and the occasional "kill all poors" post. So I quit it for good, and haven't looked back.

Which leads me to today. I have not yet found any source of news that I can trust to inform me. Sure, I can easily get distracted, entertained, outraged, tricked, and lied to, but informed? Good luck with that. I have remained uninformed for a couple months now, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Being a programmer who has spent a bit of time toying around with NLP, I have been working on a solution - a small news aggregator where I can get a proper sense of what's going on. But it hasn't been easy: news agencies no longer offer RSS feeds, important data is locked behind proprietary formats made intentionally hard to read, and there is barely any corpora around in Spanish that I could use to train models.

I don't have a deeper point. I can't promise that my solution will work, because it's entirely possible that it never makes it out of vaporware. I don't have a website to recommend, because websites are getting bad faster than good ones are propping up. And I'm not going to talk about the cesspool that are unmoderated forums because we all know about that already.

I just wanted to say: I am very unhappy with this situation.