Hacker culture and the politics of process defense

In my last two blog posts, on the attempted hijack of the Lerna license and speech suppression in the Python documentation, I have both urged the hacker culture to stay out of political issues and urged what some people will interpret as “political” stance with regard to political correctness and “diversity”-driven speech demands. The expected… Continue reading Hacker culture and the politics of process defense

Slaves to speech suppression are masters of nothing

Comes the news that the Python project has merged a request to partially eliminate the terms “master” and “slave” from its documentation on “diversity” grounds. Sensibly, Guido van Rossum at least refused to sever the project from uses of those terms in documentation of the underlying Unix APIs. I wish Guido had gone further and… Continue reading Slaves to speech suppression are masters of nothing

Non-discrimination is a core value of open source

Today I learned that something called the Lerna project has added a codicil to its MIT license denying the use of its software to a long list of organizations because it disagrees with a political choice those organizations have made. Speaking as one of the original co-authors of the

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Unix != open source

Yesterday a well-meaning hacker sent me a newly-recovered koan of Master Foo in which an angry antagonist berated Master Foo for promoting an ethic of open-source software at the expense of programmers’ livelihoods. Alas, I knew at once that he had been misled by a forgery, or perhaps some dreadful chain of copying errors, at… Continue reading Unix != open source

How to get a reliable home router/WiFi box in 2018

My apprentice and A&D regular Ian Bruene had bad experiences with a cheap home router/WiFi recently, and ranted about it on a channel where I and several other comparatively expert people hang out. He wanted to know how to get a replacement solid enough to leave with non-techie relatives. The ensuing conversation was very productive,… Continue reading How to get a reliable home router/WiFi box in 2018

The return of the servant problem

I think we all better hope we get germ-line genetic engineering and really effective nootropics real soon now. Because I think I have seen what the future looks like without these technologies, and it sucks.

A Century of Findings on Intellectual Precocity: some highlights

The paper From Terman to Today: A Century of Findings on Intellectual Precocity does a lot of mythbusting. The recently popular notion that IQ > 120 has little incremental utility is dead false. Even small differences in IQ predict significant differences in creative output and odds of having a top-tier income. Gifted children (and adults)… Continue reading A Century of Findings on Intellectual Precocity: some highlights

Survival mode

I spent 20 minutes under general anesthesia this morning, and had an odd memory afterwards. It was nothing serious – my first screening colonoscopy, things looked OK, come back in five years – but I hadn’t been under general anesthesia in 40 years (since having molars removed as a teen) and I was self-monitoring carefully.… Continue reading Survival mode

How to make The Breakfast

I wouldn’t have posted this if the comment thread on “The sad truth about toasters” hadn’t extended to an almost ridiculous length, but… I dearly love classic American breakfast food. I delight in the kind of cheap hot breakfast you get at humble roadside diners. I think it’s one of the glories of our folk… Continue reading How to make The Breakfast

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The sad truth about toasters

I bought a toaster today. I didn’t want to buy a toaster today. About ten years ago I paid $60 for what appeared to be a rather high-end Krups model in accordance with my normal strategy of “pay for quality so you won’t have to replace for a good long time”, an upper-middle-class heuristic that… Continue reading The sad truth about toasters

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Respect can be hard

I had a good sword class today. There was much sparring with many different weapons. At one point, Sensei Varady and I faced off, him with paired shortsword simulants, me with a longsword simulant. It went pretty well for me; sensei is bigger, faster, at least 20 years younger, and more skilled than I am… Continue reading Respect can be hard

The critical fraction

I’ve seen analyses of the long odds the U.S. government would face if it ever attempted to confiscate civilian firearms before. The Mathematics of Countering Tyranny seems like a particularly well done example. The authors compute that under very generous assumptions there are about 83000 door-knockers available to perform confiscation raids. Dividing that into the… Continue reading The critical fraction

Defect attractors

There’s a phrase I’ve used on this blog more than once that I had reason to Google just now and found that (to my surprise) the top hits are mostly my writings. It is “defect attractor”. In this post I’m going to explain why I think this is an important concept that needs to be… Continue reading Defect attractors

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Categorized as Software

A touch in the night

Occasionally I have dreams that seem to be trying to assemble into the plot of an SF novel – weird and fractured as dreams are, but with something like a long-form narrative struggling to develop. Occasionally I have nightmares. I don’t know how it goes for anybody else – and one reason I’m posting this… Continue reading A touch in the night

Review: The Fractal Man

The Fractal Man (written by J.Neil Schulman, soon to be available on Amazon) is a very, very funny book – if you share enough subcultural history with the author to get the in-jokes. If you don’t – and in particular if you never met Samuel Edward Konkin – the man known as known as “SEKIII”… Continue reading Review: The Fractal Man

Draining the manual-page swamp

One of my long-term projects is cleaning up the Unix manual-page corpus so it will render nicely in HTML. The world is divided into two kinds of people. One kind hears that, just nods and says “That’s nice,” having no idea what it entails. The other kind sputters coffee onto his or her monitor and… Continue reading Draining the manual-page swamp

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Embrace the SICK

There’s a very interesting article just out, C Is Not a Low-level Language;. in which David Chisnall punctures the comforting illusion that C is really a “close-to-the-metal” language and relates this illusion to the high costs of Spectre and other processor-level bugs. Those of us who think seriously about language design have long been aware… Continue reading Embrace the SICK