Torvalds: You can avoid Rust as a C maintainer, but you can’t interfere with it
“Put another way: the ‘nobody is forced to deal with Rust’ does not imply ‘everybody is allowed to veto any Rust code.’” Maintainers might also find space in the middle, being aware of Rust bindings and working with Rust developers, but not actively involved, Torvalds writes. “Why wouldn’t we do this?” In an earlier response […]
Florida insurers steered money to investors while claiming losses, study says
TALLAHASSEE — While Florida insurers claimed to be losing money in the wake of hurricanes Irma and Michael, their parent companies and affiliates were making billions of dollars, according to a study obtained by the Times/Herald. The start of the state’s insurance market meltdown came on the heels of those two storms between 2017 and […]
DOGE’s Only Public Ledger Is Riddled with Mistakes
The figures from Elon Musk’s team of outsiders represent billions in government cuts. They are also full of accounting errors, outdated data and other miscalculations. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency say they have saved the federal government $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and a long list of terminated contracts published […]
Binned staff, slashed stock options. What’s next? Ah yes, bigger C-suite bonuses
After another round of mass layoffs and reports of slashed stock options for remaining employees, Meta has like clockwork opted to reward its top executives with a substantial bonus increase. The Facebook giant revealed in a government filing that its Compensation, Nominating and Governance Committee (CNGC) approved a target annual bonus increase for its top […]
Just Write
I encourage you to start publishing your thoughts on a regular basis. Don’t overthink it. Start small. Just pick an existing platform and start writing short posts. If it helps, get drunk, choose a pseudonym, and post anonymously. That’s what I’m trying to do with this short piece. I wasted so much time on overthinking […]
Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online (2019)
Kudos to the fans. One of the nominees for the Hugo Awards this year is Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction archive containing nearly 5 million fanworks—about the size of the English Wikipedia, and several years younger. It’s not just the fanfic, fanart, fanvids, and other fanworks, impressive as they are, that make Archive of […]
If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
One of Stanisław Lem’s stories, The Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, begins with a strange phenomenon that turns all written materials into dust. While this is science fiction, something similar happens in our digital world. If you publish something online, sooner or later, it will vanish.1 In the best-case scenario, a link changes during website […]
Why Clojure?
This is about a 17 minute read. Feel free to pause and come back to it later. Clojure is not one of the handful of “big” mainstream languages. This means that sometimes people are surprised that we are all in on Clojure. Why go against the grain? Why make it harder for yourself by building […]
‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised
Michael is in his late 50s and is among the millions of people in the UK who cannot or do not want to use mobile apps, and feels he is being penalised for his choice. He does own a smartphone – an Apple iPhone he bought secondhand about three years ago – but says: “I […]