eponeponepon

On the other hand, this is often enough cover for not knowing where to go.

Listen to the original recording of "How Could I" by Cynic - it fades just as an absolute shredfest gets going.

Then listen to the remaster from 2008(?) - the fade is removed, revealing that actually the band just kept on going until they gradually gave up one by one...

I'm fairly sure that '@' is a character that's wandered around keyboards and character sets over the years - could it be that the command is a different character these days?

I'm not sure it would've been mentioned quite so often if these guys had also been a barbershop quartet in their spare time.

I'm not sure what makes you think commercial endeavours are less susceptible to human frailty than government.

The problem here is not which type of organisation holds the data; it's the fact that individual humans are involved in using it.

You won't be buying any cars in future...

> 90% of the time I just have to sleep more

I don't know about a lot of the rest of your post, but this bit is key. If you aren't getting enough sleep, nothing will help. The legends of politicians and executives who sleep 3 hours a day are either outliers for whom 3 hours genuinely is enough, or speed-freaks, or often enough both.

A shameful secret: I firmly believe that the moment I became a programmer was when I discovered Debug.Print in VBA in some elderly version of Excel (97, probably) while bodging pretty charts together for someone to print and fax to someone else.

I'm willing to bet that I am not alone.

Don't be too hard on Excel - some of today's clueless spreadsheet monkeys will be real bona-fide developers in fifteen years.

Definitely - the Museum of London is sadly under-known in my opinion. I suspect it's mainly to do with being located off the usual tourist track - and even when one gets there it doesn't exactly measure up to the Kensington museums to look at...

I tried using TiddlyWiki some years back but never really reached the stage where I felt I could definitely trust my use of it to result in it saving my notes properly. The real utility of it, I'm sure, comes with a large corpus - but I never got there.

At the time though, my only option was keeping it as a local file on a single machine - these days my home infrastructure is much more developed, and I think I might have more luck running it on a proper http server. Maybe I'll give it another shot.

Sadly, I would still read and think on all three of those articles.

I can't answer your question authoritatively, but there are plenty of organised criminal enterprises in the world with state-level resources.

Anecdotally, I heard of a toy radio control quadcopter belonging to western military personnel in Afghanistan that turned out to be trying to phone home to ${badguy} when they plugged it into a laptop to charge. This stuff is everywhere, and has been for years.

Do you do this incrementally? Or just grab everything every time? If the former, I'd be interested to hear how you go about it :-)

edit: actually, scratch the 'if', I'd be interested to hear the rough shape of your script anyway!

Man I miss Usenet. Last time I used a news client was 2006, working at a firm that had an internal NNTP server for announcements, general chatter, for sale ads etc.

I don't think anyone under 30 would have a clue what to do with newsgroups these days.

Seems to be the fashion these days. I do not applaud it.

You're conflating the act of building a product with the act of writing code. Even in the most expressive of languages, there are objectively good and bad ways of instructing your hardware to perform a particular calculation or set of calculations - and in the more rigid languages there is often a flat-out right and wrong way.

Design your product with as much free thought and creativity as you please, but never let yourself believe your actual code is art. That - among many other outcomes - is how your platform gets compromised and your customers' identities stolen - not to mention how the successors to your job end up cursing your name and wasting time and money replacing your code wholesale.

Interesting! What really intrigues me is how very familiar, at a very very hindbrain level, this layout is to me. If someone asked me to sketch a generic kitchen, I would certainly draw something recognisably similar. Sets me wondering how much else that fades into the scenery day-to-day in the modern world has its origin in someone's deliberate design.

Seems to me we'd do better to shut the Cincinnati Zoo...

All they actually care about is "Wikipedia - Canada". Which is right there on the page.

I believe the expectation regarding carbon nanotubes in the sphere of space elevators is that they would be woven and layered into a sheet of human scale; these sheets would be used to construct a curved ribbon for the gondola to climb.

You could apply the same principle and weave a bootlace from them, but the limits of current technology would render that an exceedingly expensive bootlace.

Let them do it themselves.

I'm unsure about this class of problem. On the one hand, it most definitely is a problem (the quote about 'engines of personalisation' being engines of radicalisation was particularly resonant here).

But on the other hand, I don't know that it's a problem to be fixed in-platform. Society has dealt with unsourced or decontextualised information in the form of gossip for millennia, and it's done that by building up an immune system of sorts, in that people (mostly) grow up knowing to take stories they hear in the pub (or wherever) with a healthy pinch of salt.

What we haven't done is start giving people chatting in pubs "citation needed" tickets. Maybe that's a bad thing - I don't know - but it seems like the real solutions to these problems all involve instilling healthy scepticism in the populace at large, and a habit of treating online interactions just the same as offline, rather than altering the medium.

How does the parser distinguish between in-p and in-em to substitute in the corresponding entities? It seems to me that when it reaches the second asterisk it's not going to be able to know whether to open or close the em element.

Is this one of those pieces of occult witchery that SGML excels at..?

Possible? Sure, anything is possible - but apply your argument the other way round. People contain molecules, molecules contain atoms, atoms electrons and so on - does it then seem reasonable to ask whether that goes on forever? And if not, why should it be reasonable if you go upwards in the scale?

There's some genuine gold in Netflix's library, if you go looking. An awful lot of dross too, to be sure, but there really is quality tucked away in amongst the mediocrity.

That's one of the reasons I find this particular essay exasperating - there is a measurable amount of serious work being distributed on Netflix, clearly made with care and passion, both in fiction and non-fiction. Yet Stallman's stance says to deplore those artists' work for their distributor's business practices. It's literally shooting the messenger.

He does himself no favours with his compulsion to rename things - "media services" becoming "media dis-services", "Goober" for "Uber" and so forth.

Many of his arguments are strong and worthy of discussion, even if his overall stance is not always so - but the way he expresses them can border into childishness sometimes. It's a pity; it gives his detractors (of whom I am not one, to be clear) an excuse to dismiss him.

But when the people who hold the pursestrings are looking no further ahead than their next election, "useful for decades" means nothing at all to them.

The two are one and the same thing, I'd wager. The act of translating abstract thought processes into physical action (whether that's speaking or just pointing) forces you to examine it in a different way, just in order to make it concrete enough to express.

The washable aspect is key - they will have to take steps to work on that too. As a foreigner, when I'm in India, I know that I have to pay attention to (for example) which chai sellers the locals know to wash their cups properly, and to make sure that I see bottles of water are properly sealed before I drink from them. Water in particular will be a problem for foreigners if people start selling or serving it in jugs.

> This comment would have been better with a whiteboard.

Actually, I think you nailed it. I'm no physicist, but you made the mechanism behind it very clear and intuitive :)