Notes on China
Last month, I spent 2 weeks in China – I visited Beijing, Chengdu, Emeishan, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. I have no illusions about “understanding” China. I’ve only spent 2 weeks there. This trip is a beginning, not a capstone, of my curiosity about China. And I hope to share what I learn with you via […]
Toronto man creates tiny mobile homes to help unhoused people escape the cold
CBC News | Posted: December 28, 2024 10:23 PM | Last Updated: 20 hours ago Homes are attached to bicycles; include heat, electricity and safety features Image | ryan donais tiny homes Caption: Ryan Donais build his first tiny mobile home this summer, and has now built three homes — one of which is pictured […]
I Was Wrong about the Ethics Crisis (Moshe Vardi, CACM)
The ethics crisis in computing was “launched” in 2018. In March of that year, The Boston Globe asserted, “Computer science faces an ethics crisis. The Cambridge Analytica scandal proves it!” This was in response to the Techlash,a where Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan described Silicon Valley executives as “moral Martians who operate on some weird […]
BSD kqueue is a mountain of technical debt
A side effect of the whole freenode kerfluffle is that I’ve been looking at IRCD again. IRC, is of course a very weird and interesting place, and the smaller community of people who run IRCDs are largely weirder and even more interesting. However, in that community of IRCD administrators there happens to be a few […]
China turns members of its diaspora into spies
AMONG EXILED Chinese dissidents, Tang Yuanjun was well known. He had participated in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and landed in prison as a result. He later defected to Taiwan, swimming to one of its outlying islands from a fishing boat. America granted him asylum and he settled in New York, becoming the leader […]
4.5M Suspected Fake Stars in GitHub
Abstract:GitHub, the de-facto platform for open-source software development, provides a set of social-media-like features to signal high-quality repositories. Among them, the star count is the most widely used popularity signal, but it is also at risk of being artificially inflated (i.e., faked), decreasing its value as a decision-making signal and posing a security risk to […]
Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU?
A new change in Iceland’s government means that joining the EU is back on the cards for Iceland. Polling shows that the Icelandic public are keener on it than ever before, with more Icelanders wanting to join the EU than stay out. The turnaround happened with Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine in Feb 2022, but […]
I don’t do Domain Driven Design
Why I don’t do Domain Driven Design Posted on 1st March 2018 by Tony Marston Amended on 27th July 2024 Introduction A standard design process Features of my personal approach DDD “advice” which I ignore My implementation – Dealing with the differences My implementation – Dealing with the similarities Conclusion References Amendment History Comments What […]
Trying to use Bluesky without getting burned again
I see a lot of individuals and communities in my network moving their primary social media presence over to BlueSky in the last few weeks. I’ve decided to give BlueSky a shot myself, and thought I’d share some of my rationale for why, and how I’m approaching it. Don’t build castles in other people’s kingdoms¶ […]
ASCII porn predates the Internet but it’s still everywhere (2019)
For as long as humans have used characters to represent language, we’ve made art with them. And where there are people making anything, there will be people making hornier, more erotic versions of that thing—like drawing a pair of breasts and a giant dick using only the characters available on a keyboard. Pronounced “ass-kee,” ASCII […]