I had been thinking about posting about immigration recently, because some facts on the ground have caused me to move away from a pure laissez-faire position on it. A few minutes ago I wrote a long comment on G+ that I realized says a lot of what I wanted to. This is a slightly revised… Continue reading How elites are blind about immigration
Month: February 2018
If you blow up the Constitution, you’ll regret it
Predictably, the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting has triggered some talk on the left – and in the mainstream media, but I repeat myself – of repealing the Second Amendment. I am therefore resharing a blog post I wrote some time back on why repealing 2A would not abolish the right to bear arms, only… Continue reading If you blow up the Constitution, you’ll regret it
In the face of uncertainty, buy options.
Yesterday I posted about how the streetlight effect pulls us towards bad choices in systems engineering. Today I’m going to discuss a different angle on the same class of challenges, one which focuses less on cognitive bias and more on game theory and risk management. In the face of uncertainty, buy options. This is a… Continue reading In the face of uncertainty, buy options.
System engineering for dummies
I’ve been getting a lot of suggestions about the brand new UPSide project recently. One of them nudged me into bringing a piece of implicit knowledge to the surface of my mind. Having made it conscious, I can now share it. I’ve said before that, on the unusual occasions I get to do it, I… Continue reading System engineering for dummies
Announcing: The UPSide project
A week ago I argued that UPSes suck and need to be disrupted. The response to that post was astonishing. Apparently I tapped into a deep vein of private discontents – people who had been frustrated and pissed off with UPS gear for years or decades but never quite realized it wasn’t only their problem.… Continue reading Announcing: The UPSide project
“The Lost Art of C Structure Packing” now covers Go and Rust
I have issued a new version, 1.19, of The Lost Art of C Structure Packing. The document now covers Go and Rust as well as C, reflecting their increasing prominence as systems-programming languages competing with C and being deployed in contexts where structure-size optimizations can be of some importance. TL;DR: C alignment and packing rules… Continue reading “The Lost Art of C Structure Packing” now covers Go and Rust
UPSes suck and need to be disrupted
Warning: this is a rant. I use a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to protect the Great Beast of Malvern from power outages and lightning strikes. Every once in a while I have to buy a replacement UPS and am reminded of how horribly this entire product category sucks. Consumer-grade UPSes suck, SOHO UPSs suck, and… Continue reading UPSes suck and need to be disrupted
How “open source” was coined
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the promulgation of the term “open source”. Three days before that, Christine Peterson published How I coined the term ‘open source’ which apparently she hd written on 2006 but been sitting on since. This is my addition to the history; I tried to leave an earlier version as a… Continue reading How “open source” was coined
The Roche motel
One of the staples of SF art is images of alien worlds with satellites or planetary twins hanging low and huge in the daylight sky. This blog post brings he trope home by simulating what the Earth’s Moon would look like if it orbited the Earth at the distance of the International Space Station. The… Continue reading The Roche motel
Rethinking housecat ethology
There’s a common folk model of how housecats relate to humans that says their relationships with us recruit instincts originally for maternal bonding – that is, your cat relates to you as though you’re its mother or (sometimes) its kitten that needs protecting. I don’t think this account is entirely wrong; it is a fact… Continue reading Rethinking housecat ethology