dcminter

Ah, you're assuming distributed, which I wasn't. We are not at home to partition tolerance :)

Makes sense in the context of the original post though.

Is there a reason why two-phase commit can't work with a DB and a message queue? DB2 and MQ Series used to support this (though they called it "XA" transactions and you had to compile support into the drivers which felt a bit sketchy - late 90s I think). Should I have been suspicious of this?

I think my favourite aspect of the tale (at least as Harris tells it) is that Kujau was such a bad forger, and the recipients wanted it all to be true so badly that they skipped several opportunities to actually check!

I shall see if I can find Schtonk! with subtitles, sounds up my alley.

Why not both?

But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don't fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philosophy and literature snatched (almost literally) from the flames of history.

Now, why should I be more interested in the mesopotamian tablets? (Not sarcasm, I'm interested)

Any time something of popular historical interest like this pops up I think about that.

If you've not read it then Robert Harris's (factual) book about the affair is entertaining, not least because such a broad sweep of dislikeable characters were undone by greed and folly!

Indeed. So far as I recall I had a greyscale monitor that couldn't do more than 800x600. I think it was a 486sx and I probably still had a 32GB MFM hard disk at that point so it was a very underwhelming machine.

I think 1MB of RAM in a simm was about £100 at that point, but it's been a while!

You could run X11 in 4Mb at one point, although I rather wished I didn't.

The City of London, aka "The City", aka "The Square Mile" is not the same thing as Greater London or even what's usually called "Central London." I don't think "Central London" has an agreed exact definition, but it's likely what you thought the parent post meant.

The City is a specific area, more or less covering the same area as the original Roman city. It's the original financial district - though a lot of that moved to Docklands at the tail end of the 1900s.

It's much more built up than even adjacent Westminster ("The City of Westminster") and definitely has far fewer trees.

The UK does, or used to, and yes, it was on the plastic wrappers on sliced bread.

Sweden has a wire encased in plastic thing that crimps the opening shut instead.

Both types are re-usable at least for the expected lifetime of a loaf of bread.

The "signature verification" in the fix being CRC32 is pretty hilariously clueless.

Have you ever encountered the atheist version IRL? Not just in internet bickering?

Maybe it was regional - I wouldn't know which region they were from off the cuff.

My family is mostly C of E and I don't recall any of them ever bringing up religious topics with third parties unprompted, so it did strike me as pretty weird.

You’re just hand waving over the question of “How did god just happen?” God just magically appeared?

See? It's a crap argument.

From the excellent "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (by the late Peter H. Salus):

Heidi would bring her dog with her to class and to her office. He was a very friendly dog, and a lot of the students enjoyed throwing a ball for him down the corridor to fetch. He even had his picture on the bulletin board with the graduate students: the legend read that he was working on his Ph.Dog. John decided to name the program after the dog: Biff. According to Heidi, John and Bill Joy then spent a lot of time trying to compose an explanation for biff - they came up with "Be notified if mail arrived." Biff, who died in August 1993, at 15, once got a B in a compiler class. According to Heidi, the story of Biff barking at the mailman is a scurrilous canard.

One of my favourite bits of trivia from that excellent book, but hardly anyone I bump into these days knows anything about that kind of multi-user Unix experience/environment these days. I barely caught any of it myself.

Why is "God did it" a better answer than "it just happened" ? If you prefer the "God did it" you then have to account for where God came from and end up with a set of answers that could just as easily be applied to the universe itself. Believe what you want, but this isn't some kind of gotcha.

I do see, mostly from Americans, self introductions of the form "I'm so and so... and I love Jesus" in contexts that have nothing to do with religion. I've never had anyone bring up their atheism or agnosticism in that way in a non-religious context.

For me at least the post wasn't loading on mobile (Firefox on Android) and looks like others had the same issue. Skimming the article just now on the laptop (Firefox on Linux) I see in the images that the author is using a trackpoint on their keyboard, but it's not mentioned in the text anywhere!

Edit: Ohhhh... I see that big box at the bottom that I just dismissed without reading as one of those "continue reading my other articles" chumbox inspired things, is actually a continuation of the article via multiple options. I guess that might be what upset my mobile browser too.

I'm still not spotting any discussion of the trackpoint though...

Fair, although I used to prefer the old chonky Thinkpad keyboards to anything else. There was (is?) a Model M style buckle spring keyboard with a trackpoint, but it had the numeric pad, so no good to you.

I guess one could do a project-keyboard and add a trackpoint to it. I don't know if you'd have to macgyver it up, or if there's something you can buy as a package for the trackpoint. That would be fun. One could even do a 40% version with it and damn the RSI :)

You're likely thinking of trigraphs - alternatives to some characters: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1234582/purpose-of-trigr...

You know the Lenovo Thinkpad Trackpoint Keyboard II is a thing, right? It would seem to meet that requirement. What's missing?

Edit: Oh, they're pricey - so that, I guess?

Occasionally it scrolls me over to a different continent...

Years ago I used to read his blog on Django and found it quite interesting despite being neither a Django nor even a python user - this must have been at least 10 years ago and perhaps more.

When he resurfaced in my feeds as an AI commentator it took me quite a long while to join the dots that he was the same person!

> The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap.

Sure, but if you're going to posit a philosophical zombie, don't posit one that has a rich inner life, experiences qualia, and is ridden with self-doubt FFS.

Pre-internet the commercial phone book was actually fairly useful. The "problem" was that most people didn't need it updating as often as the phone book company would have liked.

> can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it?

The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition.

We all (presumably, although I might wonder about the author) know that consciousness is a thing, we don't have anything like a rigid definition of it. Perhaps we never will, but this kind of hot air is unlikely to ever get us closer to understanding it.

Tiresome article by someone just being contrary for the sake of having something to say.

Ha! This is so delightful. I vaguely remember chipping in some paltry sum on some early plea for donations for this, and getting a random manual duplicate in the post as a perk. Since then I've occasionally wondered how it's going, but never quite got around to looking it up properly. Somehow ten years passed.

Amazing work.

Yes, we stayed at one near ORF a few weeks ago. We thought the staff were weirdly enthusiastic about a not very good mass produced cookie actually. Might stay there again, but not because of the gimmick.

I don't think this is a good principle to apply comprehensively. The "if you’re often over-committed or too scattered" qualifier is very important. Sometimes you need to get out of your comfort zone, which absolutely means saying a timid "yes" to something when you would much rather say "no."

Kafkaesque, a wire-protocol compatible Kafka mocking service.

https://github.com/dcminter/kafkaesque

Worth kicking the wheels if you're currently using embedded or dockerised Kafka in your tests.

I look forward to today's Money Stuff!

I hoped as much! Delightful.