…otherwise it's sparkling autocomplete.
It's only called AI if it comes from the AI region of France. Otherwise it's sparkling autocomplete. →
Bite-size thoughts about AI
By law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? →
Usenet Spam: a Slice of History
Spam on Usenet was a big deal beacuse of the way Usenet worked. It was a broadcast protocol where every message posted to Usenet got copied to every server that carried the newsgroup it was posted to. →
Political Discourse in the Early 21st Century
What happens when you debate what you think someone else believes, not what you believe. →
#FirstSevenLanguages (Director’s Commentary)
One day, my boss pulled me into his office and said “Do you know Microsoft Active Server Pages?” →
I don’t care. It’s not my problem.
The first priority of any software should be to do what the user is asking it to do. Don’t tell me that your time is worth more than mine. →
Genuine People Personalities
All the doors in this spacecraft have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done! →
Sithsplaining
Many things in Star Wars don’t make sense, but this one turns out to be pretty straightforward. Leia is badass. →
The Java Deserialization Bug
Arbitrary object deserialization (or marshalling, or un-pickling, whatever your language calls it) is inherently unsafe, and should never be performed on untrusted data. →
What the Facebook copyright hoax says about us
To members, these sites are vital means of maintaining contact with friends and loved ones, of not feeling left out of important parts of their lives. →
The Death of Blogging
Sure, the component parts of blogging are everywhere now. The Internet is drowning in self-publishing, link-sharing, articles scrolling by in reverse-chronological order. But somewhere along the way, the soul of blogging was lost. →
Deletionism
Once upon a time, I was dead-set against people deleting things from blogs. After ten years though, you find that parts of the site don’t smell so good… →
Fuck Game of Thrones
There are increasingly flimsy justifications for the horrors of Game of Thrones. They motivate character A. Or they open up space for character B. But in the end it's obvious that it's all about providing the now-mandated quota of shock. →
Why does it matter that Future is a monad?
Either and Promises/Futures are useful and I’ll use them next time they’re appropriate. But outside Haskell does their monad-ness matter? →
Simplicity isn't simple, a coda.
The weekend after I posted this article about the pitfalls hiding in a simple shell command-line, I had some free time and decided it might be fun to see what the same functionality would look like in Haskell. →
Simplicity isn't simple
The Unix pipe model is actually a great example of how a complex system can be made to look simple by pushing complexity downstream, and how doing so can give you a very narrowly defined kind of simplicity at the expense of reliability—the simplicity of a system that mostly does the right thing most of the time. →
Going Clear
From then on, contact from Scientology became a regular, but not overwhelmingly regular thing. Every few months I would get a letter here, a phone call there. On one memorable occasion they invited me to their Summer barbecue. →
“That’s the complaints department.”
I would like to reassure you that we consider it important to be good Internet citizens, and take complaints about our subscribers seriously. I would like to thank you for reporting this incident to us. →
Apple Watch Edition
The world contains a lot of people who want to express their wealth by buying a better version of the thing everyone else is buying, and the Edition speaks to those consumers. But in that case Apple is going to make _a whole lot more_ money from consumers who now unconsciously see the stainless steel Apple Watch as the middle choice. →
Vagrant-HOWTO
Use Google (or just search Github directly) to find the Vagrant recipe for the thing you want to install.… →
Selfies are fine. Get over it.
In a world where every generation in recorded history has pored over the habits of their successors looking for evidence that the human race is getting lazier, stupider and more vain, it seems obvious that taking photos of yourself in front of interesting things is going to end up being Exhibit A for the prosecution. →