Hi, I’m Joe Biden. I’m the perfect apparatchik – no principles, no convictions, and no plan. I’m senile, and I have a problem with groping children. But vote for me anyway because orange man bad. Hi, I’m Kamala Harris. My white ancestors owned slaves, but I use the melanin I got from my Indian ancestors… Continue reading How the D candidates would introduce themselves at the next debate if they were honest
Author: esr
Contra Gelernter on Darwin
David Gelernter recently wrote an essay on Giving Up Darwin that is not obviously stupid. Dr. Gelernter, in many ways an astute thinker, does not commit obvious stupidities – but I have had to call him out before for allowing himself to be blinded by a hunger for epistemic gaps that fit the shape of… Continue reading Contra Gelernter on Darwin
The Rectification of Names
The sage Confucius was once asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. He understood what General Semantics teaches; if your linguistic map is sufficiently confused, you will misunderstand the territory. And be readily outmaneuvered by those who are less… Continue reading The Rectification of Names
Loadsharers has a logo
Nobody stepped up to design a Loadsharers logo, so I did it myself. Here it is: Yeah, I’m not much of a graphic artist, but I can do a semi-competent job of whacking together a simple logo when I need to. If you’re an actual pro and think you can fix this or do better,… Continue reading Loadsharers has a logo
A libertarian rethinks immigration
Instapundit recently linked to an article at the libertarian Reason magazine with a premise I found – considering the authors and the magazine – surprisingly dimwitted. No, a border wall is not necessarily morally equivalent to the Berlin Wall, or anywhere near it. Consider Hadrian’s Wall, or the Great Wall of China. Sometimes there are… Continue reading A libertarian rethinks immigration
Segfaults and Twitter monkeys: a tale of pointlessness
For a few years in the 1990s, when PNG was just getting established as a Web image format, I was a developer on the libpng team. One reason I got involved is that the compression patent on GIFs was a big deal at the time. I had been the maintainer of GIFLIB since 1989; it… Continue reading Segfaults and Twitter monkeys: a tale of pointlessness
While I was making other plans, teil vier
I can walk again. Wearing a joint-immobilizing boot brace, so I lurch around with a gait even more graceless than my usual palsied semi-stumble, but I can walk. And shower. And make my own breakfast. Hallelujah! Better news: my prognosis is good. The joint had osteoarthritic damage that may be trouble down the road, but… Continue reading While I was making other plans, teil vier
Sharing the load effectively
At the end of my last post I said I was wandering off to think about scalable, low-overhead recommendation systems. It’s funny how preconceptions work. I know, I think better than most people, how often decentralizing systems to avoid single points of failure is good engineering. Yet I had to really struggle with myself to… Continue reading Sharing the load effectively
Load-Bearing Internet People
I just finished giving a talk – by remote video – at South East Linux Fest, about the Load-Bearing Internet Person problem. An LBIP is a person who maintains the software for a critical Internet service or library, and has to do it without organizational support or a budget backing him up. That second part… Continue reading Load-Bearing Internet People
In a blatant attempt to attract more Institutional supporters…
Anybody who has visited my Patreon page should know that I have two special support tiers. At Bronze ($20 per month) level, you get included in the credits of the project pages for all my solo stuff. Here’s a recent example. Today I’m announcing two new perks for Institutional ($100 permonth) supporters. This tier is… Continue reading In a blatant attempt to attract more Institutional supporters…
Fear of COMITment
I shipped the first release of another retro-language revival today: COMIT. Dating from 1957 (coincidentally the year I was born) this was the first string-processing language, ancestral to SNOBOL and sed and ed and Unix shell. One of the notational conventions invented in COMIT, the use of $0, $1…etc. as substitution variables, survives in all… Continue reading Fear of COMITment
While I was making other plans, pars tres
A day or so after the not-so-thrilling last installment of my medical troubles (previous post), I get my hands on a knee scooter. Rented from a local pharmacy. This is a big improvement over the wheelchair. I’m more mobile on it, and can pee standing up. If you think that last bit doesn’t matter, pray… Continue reading While I was making other plans, pars tres
While I was making other plans, part deux
Thanks to everyone who joined my Patreon feed or upped their contributions. I’m still worried, but a little less so now. Some good news. The post-op pain has stabilized at a level where the occasional Tylenol will handle it nicely. If Dr. Wilson the anesthesiologist is listening, damn! You are good at your job. The… Continue reading While I was making other plans, part deux
While I was making other plans
Today I had to – literally – crawl from my wife’s car to my house. Because I couldn’t walk. Life is what happens while you were making other plans. About six months ago I sprained my right ankle in kung fu class. It gave me occasional pain, mostly in cold weather, but I thought it… Continue reading While I was making other plans
The dangerous folly of “Software as a Service”
Comes the word that Saleforce.com has announced a ban on its customers selling “military-style rifles”. The reason this ban has teeth is that the company provides “software as a service”; that is, the software you run is a client for servers that the provider owns and operates. If the provider decides it doesn’t want your… Continue reading The dangerous folly of “Software as a Service”
The low-down on home routers – how to buy, what to avoid
Ever had the experience of not realizing you’re a subject-matter-expert until someone brings up a topic on a mailing list and you find yourself uttering a pretty comprehensive brain dump about it? This happened to me about home and SOHO routers recently. So I’m repeating the brain dump here. I expect I’ll get some corrections,… Continue reading The low-down on home routers – how to buy, what to avoid
Friends of Armed & Dangerous 2019
Once again I will be at Penguicon and hosting a party for all friends of this blog. This coming Friday evening, room number not yet known, it will be posted at the con. Those of you who participated in the design of the Great Beast may be interested to know that I expect to receive… Continue reading Friends of Armed & Dangerous 2019
Spotting the wild Fascist
The term “fascist” gets thrown around a lot by people who have no actual clue what Fascism was about. I know what it was about because when I was about 11 or 12 I read Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of of the Third Reich and became fascinated by the question which has driven my… Continue reading Spotting the wild Fascist
Gun voodoo and intentionality
There’s a recent article about gun violence in Haiti that features the following quotes: But the anthropological lesson from Haiti is that the truth is more complex. It isn’t just the technological lethality of guns that makes them dangerous: They also exert a power on human agency. They change us. It is both the technology… Continue reading Gun voodoo and intentionality
My microblogging has moved to MeWe
I should have announced this here sooner. Following the demise of G+, my microblogging has moved to MeWe. Find me at https://mewe.com/profile/5a66494451ee975004c3cdf8 Why MeWe? Technically I would have preferred a Federation platform, but MeWe had an importer for my G+ content. It lost the video links, alas, but text and still links from G+ are… Continue reading My microblogging has moved to MeWe