A Meditation on the Art of Not Trying is worth a read. If you take nothing else from that article, believe this: wu-wei – effortlessness – is one of the secrets of effective truth-telling. It is an essential skill if you want to be a truly game-changing public advocate.
“Riding the Red Horse” is out
Step right up for my first SF sale, the lead story in Riding The Red Horse. That’s the Amazon link; it’s also available as DRM-free epub direct from Castalia. Also included, my nonfiction analysis of the effect of battlefield lasers on military airpower, a development likely to transform warfare in the coming century as radically… Continue reading “Riding the Red Horse” is out
Progress towards the extinction of CVS
The Great Beast, designed for converting large CVS repos, is now in full production. It hasn’t killed off any specimens in the wild yet (and I’ll explain why in a bit), but it’s doing spectacularly well on our test repositories. As a representative large example, the entire Emacs CVS history, 1985-2009, 113309 CVS commits, lifts… Continue reading Progress towards the extinction of CVS
Another step on the martial path
Cathy and I passed our Level 6 test in kuntao last night. That’s the hybrid martial art we study, part traditional wing chun and part Philippine kali. The empty hand stuff is mostly wing chun, a South Chinese close-fighting style which … OK, if you don’t know much about martial arts just imagine the fights… Continue reading Another step on the martial path
The Great Beast is here!
The good folks from TekSyndicate showed up yesterday with a pile of parts and did final assembly of the Beast in my dining room. A&D regular John Bell remoted in last night to finish the setup. I’m actually blogging on it now as the last of my work environment transfers over from the old snark.… Continue reading The Great Beast is here!
Worse than racism
Recently, in New York City, a man named Eric Garner was strangled to death on the street by police. It was all caught on video. It was a nightmare sequence that made me think of George Orwell’s description of the future in 1984: a boot stamping on a human face, forever. Eric Garner was black.… Continue reading Worse than racism
Me and Less Wrong
I’ve gotten questions from a couple of different quarters recently about my relationship to the the rationalist community around Less Wrong and related blogs. The one sentence answer is that I consider myself a fellow-traveler and ally of that culture, but not really part of it nor particularly wishing to be. The rest of this… Continue reading Me and Less Wrong
How To Learn Hacking: Version 1.2
How To Learn Hacking: Version 1.2, with a new section on being original. Incorporates more feedback from here and G++ For those of you who wondered why this didn’t just become a major section in How To Become A Hacker, it’s because I think it might become long enough to make that document too bulky… Continue reading How To Learn Hacking: Version 1.2
Why labor unions have lost their moxie
A lot of U.S. economic policy is distorted by the belief that manufacturing jobs are a magic bullet against declining incomes. Manufacturing’s false promise of a decent payday punctures that illusion. One of the dumb, predictable responses to articles like this is “We need a stronger union movement”. Sorry, but no. Declining manufacturing wages aren’t… Continue reading Why labor unions have lost their moxie
Like a football player, head down
OK, this is interesting: From some tabloid, we have the following quote: The unidentified witness wrote that the 18-year-old Brown “has his arms out with attitude,” while “The cop just stood there.” The witness added, “Dang if that kid didn’t start running right at the cop like a football player. Head down.” This is exactly… Continue reading Like a football player, head down
How To Learn Hacking: Version 1.1
I had meant to blog-announce version 1.0 of How To Learn Hacking but got distracted at a crucial moment. So it went out on G+, where I got some useful feedback. This version is revised and very slightly expanded. Enjoy and critique.
SRC 0.9: Ready for the less adventurous now
I just shipped SRC 0.9, and you no longer need to be adventurous to try it. It has a regression-test suite and real users. Remarkably, SRC has had real users since 0.3, two days after it was born. Even more remarkably, the count of crash reports and botched operations from those users is zero. Zero.… Continue reading SRC 0.9: Ready for the less adventurous now
Emacs git conversion is done
Finally. After ten months of work, it’s done. Emacs is fully converted to git. You can clone from git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git and if you have commit rights you can push to it and the changes will stick. The bzr repo is still up but only as an archive.
SRC FAQ
A&D regular Mike Swanson did such a nice job on this that I want you all to see it.
SRC 0.3 – ready for the adventurous
My low-power, low-overhead version control system, SRC, is no longer just a stake in the ground. It is still a determinedly file-oriented wrapper around RCS (and will stay that way) but every major feature except branching is implemented and it has probably crossed the border into being useful for production. shkafyi The adventurous can and… Continue reading SRC 0.3 – ready for the adventurous
I wrote a version-control system today
I wrote a version-control system today. Yes, an entire VCS. Took me 14 hours. Yeah, you’re looking at me like I’m crazy. “Why,” you ask, quite reasonably, “would you want to do a thing like that? We’re not short of powerful VCSes these days. That is true. But I got to thinking, early this morning,… Continue reading I wrote a version-control system today
Chipping away at CVS
I’ve just shipped a new version of cvs-fast-export, 1.26. It speeds the tool up more, more, more – cranking through 25 years and 113300 commits of Emacs CVS history, for example in 2:48. That’s 672 commits a second, for those of you in the cheap seats. But the real news this time is a Python… Continue reading Chipping away at CVS
Cognitive disinhibition: not the whole story of genius
Here’s an interesting article with a stupid and misleading title on the role of what the author calls “cognitive disinhibition” – a fancy term for “allowing oneself to notice what others miss” – in enabling creative genius. While in many ways I could be a poster child for Simonton’s thesis (and I’ll get to those)… Continue reading Cognitive disinhibition: not the whole story of genius
When hackers grow old
Lately I’ve been wrestling with various members of an ancient and venerable open-source development group which I am not going to name, though people who regularly follow my adventures will probably guess which one it is by the time I’m done venting. Why it so freaking hard to drag some people into the 21st century?… Continue reading When hackers grow old
Moving the NetBSD repository
Some people on the NetBSD tech-repository list have wondered why I’ve been working on a full NetBSD repository conversion without a formal request from NetBSD’s maintainers that I do so. It’s a fair question. An answer to it involves both historical contingency and some general issues about moving and mirroring large repositories. Because of the… Continue reading Moving the NetBSD repository