Dear NRA leadership: are you out of your fucking minds? Supporting a ban on bump stocks in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre is a terrible idea, for all the usual reasons that there has never been any case in the history of the known universe in which supporting a ban on firearms or… Continue reading NRA loses the plot
Author: esr
The Torchship Trilogy
New SF author Karl Gallagher dropped me a note last week that offered me copies of his first work, a novel sequence: Torchship, Torchship Pilot, and Torchship Captain. He explained that the ideas I expressed in The Deep Norms of SF helped form his ideas about writing. Since that is part of the effect I… Continue reading The Torchship Trilogy
Unlearning history
In some circles there’s lately a vogue for vandalizing or pulling down Confederate statues. The people doing it think (or say they think) that they’re striking a blow against racism. I think they’re, at best, engaged in a dangerous reopening of old wounds. At worst they’re threatening to inflict serious new ones. I’m a Yankee… Continue reading Unlearning history
The brain is a Peirce engine
There comes from Scott Alexander’s blog news of a new unified theory of neural cognition called the “predictive processing model”. Read his review of the book “Surfing Uncertainty” before proceeding further. This model seems to solve a whole raft of longstanding problems about how the brain does what it does, offer insight into how various… Continue reading The brain is a Peirce engine
Please give generously to James Damore’s fundraiser
I just gave $100 to James Damore’s official fundraiser. Damore, for any of you who have been hiding under a rock, is the guy who wrote a completely sane and reasonable memorandum, objecting on principled and scientific grounds to the assumptions behind “diversity”. He’s been fired and is, of course, the target of a full-blown… Continue reading Please give generously to James Damore’s fundraiser
Hey, Democrats! We still need you to get your act together!
Six months ago, I wrote Hey, Democrats! We need you to get your act together!, a plea to the opposition to get its act together. A month ago, a Democratic activist attempting a mass political assassination shot Steve Scalise through the hip. Today, Gallup’s job creation index at +37 in July—a record high. In my… Continue reading Hey, Democrats! We still need you to get your act together!
Three easy pieces
I’m back from vacation – World Boardgaming Championships, where this year I earned laurels in Ticket To Ride and Terra Mystica.. Catching up on some releases I needed to do: * Open Adventure 1.3: Only minor bugfixes in this one, it’s pretty stable now. We gave 100% coverage in the test suite now, an achievement… Continue reading Three easy pieces
The slow birth of distributed software collaboration
This might become a new major section in Things Every Hacker Once Knew, but before I merge it I’m putting it out for comment and criticism.
A teaching story
The craft of programming is not a thing easily taught. It’s not so much that the low level details like language syntaxes are difficult to convey, it’s more that (as I’ve written before) “the way of the hacker is a posture of mind”. The posture of mind is more essential than the details. I only… Continue reading A teaching story
Fuzzbombing: abort() calls for great justice!
The Colossal Cave Adventure restoration is pretty much done now. One thing we’re still working on is getting test coverage of the last few corners in the code. Because when you’re up to 99.7% the temptation to push for that last 0.3% is really strong even if the attempt is objectively fairly pointless. What’s more… Continue reading Fuzzbombing: abort() calls for great justice!
Managing modafinil
For the last year or so I have been deliberately experimenting with a psychoactive, nootropic drug. You have to know me personally (much better than most of my blog audience does) to realize what a surprising admission this is. I’ve been a non-smoking teetotaller since I was old enough to form the decision. I went… Continue reading Managing modafinil
Gift vs. reputation in hacker culture
A G+ follower pointed me at Note on Homesteading the Noosphere by Martin Sústrik. He concludes saying this: In short: Labeling open source communities as gift cultures is not helpful. It just muddles the understanding of what’s actually going on. However, given that they are not exchange economies either, they probably deserve a name of… Continue reading Gift vs. reputation in hacker culture
Open Adventure 1.1, and some thoughts on software preservation
Open Adventure 1.1 has shipped. There are a lot more changes under the hood than are readily apparent. In fact there have been no changes in gameplay at all, and only minor changes to the UI (reversible with the -o oldstyle switch). We (Jason Ninneman, Per Vorpaev, Aaron Traas, Peje Nilsson and I) could have… Continue reading Open Adventure 1.1, and some thoughts on software preservation
Open Adventure ships
Colossal Cave Adventure, that venerable classic, is back and better than ever! The page for downloads is here. The game is fully playable. It would be astonishing if it were otherwise, since it has been stable since 1995. One minor cosmetic change a lot of people used to the non-mainline variants will appreciate is that… Continue reading Open Adventure ships
Request for WordPress help
I need a bit of hands-on time with someone who knows how to troubleshoot WordPress installations. I recently had to upgrade my WordPress installation due to an exploit that inserted a malicious URL in one of my widgets. Since then, my spam filter has not been operating correctly. I am not sure whether Akismet is… Continue reading Request for WordPress help
Correction to: “Set the WABAC machine…”
Henry Spencer, upon reading my previous post, had this to say by email: I won’t argue with Eric about the significance of that little event, but I do have to interject a few corrections about the historical details. For this, I’ve got a couple of advantages over him. First, being somewhat of a packrat, I… Continue reading Correction to: “Set the WABAC machine…”
Set the WABAC to 1984: Henry Spencer getopt, and the roots of open source
I excavated a bit of hacker history from old memories today. Not dead history either, but an important beginning of some large good things.
The Adventure begins again
Colossal Cave Adventure was the origin of many things; the text adventure game, the dungeon-crawling D&D (computer) game, the MOO, the roguelike genre. Computer gaming as we know it would not exist without ADVENT (as it was known in its original PDP-10 incarnation).
The advent of ADVENT
A marvellous thing has just occurred. Colossal Cave Adventure, the original progenitor of the D&D-like dungeon-crawling game genre from 1977 and fondly remembered as ADVENT by those of us who played it on PDP-10s, is one of the major artifacts of hacker history. The earliest version by Crowther and Woods (sometimes known as 350-point Adenture)… Continue reading The advent of ADVENT
Your identity is not your choice
There’s been a lot of public talk about “identity” lately, stimulated by high-profile cases of transsexuality (notably the athlete now named Caitlyn Jenner) and transracialism (Rachel Dolezal). It needs to be said: most of the talk, on all sides of these disputes, has been obvious nonsense – utter drivel that should not have survived five… Continue reading Your identity is not your choice