msg

Their time is passing. But for how long? Times X billion dollars per year.

Reading this thread, it occurs to me once again how countercultural the Sermon on the Mount is, and how hard it is to seriously live it.

I wouldn't recommend this as a plan of action for somebody else's kid. Or for others, in a pluralist political context. Or for nations. Because hey, this goes down to a very basic belief about how to live rightly and wrongly in the world, and how to respond to violence and evil.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1887085

And this is the important point, I could do the same thing manually by visiting my friends' pages. So this is all about convenience for the customer, not about some crusading policy position.

If my friends don't want me to "mass export" "private" email addresses, they shouldn't leave them out where I can cut and paste them (and sell to 419 scammers, if I were the vengeful type). The same argument applies to all my friends' data.

The user could sell out their friends to a third party if they chose to (opt in). But Zynga would only get access if the user said so.

The reason Facebook won't do it is that it would commoditize the social graph and allow straight head to head competition on features. I think no one, even Facebook, knows how that would turn out...

Except for Google, who clearly decided to make it happen.

There is a divide between this task of explaining what is and proclaiming what should be. There is no way to make the leap with the tools of science (measuring, hypothesizing, testing, theorizing). Put another way, science does not have the meta makeup to look outside itself and say, "what is science good for?"

So when scientists make moral claims as scientists, they are dressing up a lay moral opinion in their lab jacket. Like Freud talking about linguistics or economists talking about love, we should only trust them as far as the limits of their expertise. And we should recognize that when scientists say that science proves an ought, they are committing a category error.

Meanwhile what fraction is underserved by IE9 not working on Windows XP?

I have no objection to your numbers as long as we also compare apples to apples and quantify the impact.

But before we laud them for moving away from yet another high-profile flop, why didn't it gain traction? Why was it wrong for the market? Because it failed to learn the lessons of the past. It is yet another not-invented-here, one-stack-to-rule-them-all product from Microsoft. It needed developer mindshare and it was going against an entrenched competitor in Flash.

Why was it even begun, amounting to a massive waste of developer time, money, and opportunity cost? That's the real problem at the core of Microsoft. Everybody's a dreamer, everybody's a star, failed projects pad manager resumes on 1 Microsoft Way.

Words are getting clipped.

I also did a second thing. When I loaned what little programming power we had to help in the early days of computing, I said, "We are not getting the recognition for our programmers that they deserve. When you publish a paper you will thank that programmer or you aren't getting any more help from me. That programmer is going to be thanked by name; she's worked hard." I waited a couple of years. I then went through a year of BSTJ articles and counted what fraction thanked some programmer. I took it into the boss and said, "That's the central role computing is playing in Bell Labs; if the BSTJ is important, that's how important computing is." He had to give in. You can educate your bosses. It's a hard job. In this talk I'm only viewing from the bottom up; I'm not viewing from the top down. But I am telling you how you can get what you want in spite of top management. You have to sell your ideas there also.

Right, midichlorians are in all living things of sufficient complexity.

Episode 1 was onto something?

Kill me quickly.

The performance review system causes corporate politics and backstabbing that beggar the imagination. MS has Darwinian competitions of very similar products that result in massive waste (see Kin that should have rolled in to Windows Phone). They do not manage dependencies well, leading to excruciating effort just to check in code. And they are basically headless.

In my mind, ParishNetwork.org was intended to be a place where you could meet other people who attended your parish. But a lot of the users expressed a desire to be able to interact with users from other parishes. I resisted accommodating that request because I really wanted ParishNetwork to be parish-centric, rather than one big meeting place for Catholics across the country.

You need to learn to pivot. Unless you are on a mission, listen to your customers and make something people want.

edit: I was going for Blues Brothers but I realized it sounded a little yucky.

I prefer to wake up with a goal that is too big for one lifetime.

Instead I ended up just wandering around the campus looking at the amazing art and soaking it in. There's a cast of a Rodin piece called The Gates of Hell that is unreal. I got to it just after sunset when the lights were starting to come on.

It was after dark when I left campus, and I took a wrong turn. Suddenly all the signs were in Spanish, and I was lost in California. I made it out alive though.

They offered me a job but I ended up in Colorado instead.

Why is there no net neutrality bill? The rich are overrepresented in our system for a reason. Sad but true.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/search?q=expand+URL+shortener...

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/22/michael-dell-teases-new-7...

For me it's the right interface for all kinds of pages that I would have to surf to, find the box, then enter some input. Instead, I just highlight text, ctrl space, type a word, and hit enter.

It turned out I couldn't live without Ubiquity. Still under development, although officially it's on hiatus.

The Add-On Compatibility Reporter, so I can run edge versions of extensions.

Firemacs (for sensible Emacs bindings)

TabKit (tabs on left side and tree style, with grouping and so on) and Ctrl-Tab (LRU tab switching, plus thumbnailed tab display and switch to tab by name-typing). All other tab organization systems pale in comparison.

And the rest: NoScript * Firebug * Web Developer Toolbar * Greasemonkey * IETab * Vacuum Places DB