Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
The Shirky principle is the adage that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. More broadly, it can also be characterized as the adage that “every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving”. For example, the Shirky principle means that a government agency that’s meant to address […]
A giant meteorite has been lost in the desert since 1916
Enlarge / Chinguetti slice at the National Museum of Natural History. A larger meteorite reported in 1916 hasn’t been spotted since. Claire H./CC BY-SA 2.0 In 1916, a French consular official reported finding a giant “iron hill” deep in the Sahara desert, roughly 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Chinguetti, Mauritania—purportedly a meteorite (technically a mesosiderite) […]
Microsoft Joins the MapLibre Sponsorship Program
Feb 20, 2024 · 1 minutes read Microsoft joins the MapLibre Sponsorship Program as a Silver Sponsor. The Silver tier donation of USD 80,000 will be used to 20 percent for development of new features and to 80 percent for general maintenance of the MapLibre codebases and project coordination. From the very beginning Microsoft was […]
Life Aboard a Nuclear Submarine
How the Navy prowls today’s uncertain seas—and prepares for possible superpower conflict tomorrow. By Adam Ciralsky Photography by Philip Montgomery February 15, 2024 In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the nuclear submarine Wyoming surfaces for a short time to take aboard a commander, who is scheduled to conduct a spot inspection.Photograph by Philip Montgomery. […]
Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened
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Neat Parallel Output in Python
February 22, 2024 Say you have a program that does some processing of a list (loosely based on a work-in-progress project): #!/usr/bin/env python3 def log(repo_name, *args): print(f”{repo_name}:”, *args) def randsleep(): import random import time time.sleep(random.randint(1, 5)) def func(repo_name): log(repo_name, “Starting”) randsleep() # Can be substituted for actual work log(repo_name, “Installing”) randsleep() log(repo_name, “Building”) randsleep() log(repo_name, […]
How to Not Die by a Thousand Cuts. Or How to Think About Software Quality (2022)
First off, what even is Quality? All things emerge, change, and die. I think Quality is the experience of the process. The idea of Good Quality essentially boils down to performing the process with grace, and leaving the place better than we found it. Further, the process of emergence and change—i.e. living—is also the process […]
A modest update to Qubes OS
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Herr Bischoff’s Spam Blocklists
Herr Bischoff’s Blocklists Feel free to use the following lists without restriction and without guarantees or warranties of any kind. I will do my best to keep it updated but that’s about it. They are refreshed at the given intervals, so fetching more often than that just wastes resources. Excessive queries will eventually get you […]
Contributing Scrutiny to Nixpkgs
Introduction # I’m quite overwhelmed by the number of people who read, and engaged with my last post on packaging Scrutiny for NixOS. I hadn’t intended on posting to this blog more than maybe once per month, but I decided to continue documenting the journey of landing Scrutiny upstream in nixpkgs. One of the things […]