Unification is formal methods speak for solving equations. The most common form of unification discussed is first order syntactic unification. When it succeeds, it solves a pile of equations no matter what the actual functions represent. [exists ?X ?Y] foo(bar(?X)) … Read more
Imagine you are a company with a lot of remote employees, and they all hate the local Internet service providers (ISPs). Videoconferences are the worst: People cannot hear each other, they randomly start sounding like Darth Vader, and they occasionally … Read more
a tragedy of the public emergency system commons… At 4.50am local time today, this statewide emergency alert was sent out to every cellphone in Texas: I don’t know who Seth Altman is, nor do I care. Why? Because Seth Altman’s … Read more
In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard. For instance, last week Twitch introduced a new “Boost” program … Read more
Vanessa Saba for ProPublica If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or be in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Early one morning in February 2023, before the sun rose over … Read more
(This essay is late because I came home from worldcon with a wonderful prize–COVID19. It was a very mild dose and I’m better now but it put everything on hold for about a week.) In the past I’ve blogged about … Read more
Not hard enough, according to Eduard, who has fashioned himself into a one-man media juggernaut for traditional values. His assessment of what ails us does not extend beyond well-trodden cliché, as old as modernity itself: “We live in a crazy … Read more
Update: Another approach suggested by the inimitable Ben Johnson has been added to the end of the post. Update 2: Discussion about fsync() added to the end of the post. It’s an idiom that quickly becomes rote to Go programmers: … Read more
Staying in a role builds valuable, company-specific domain knowledge. Leaving often results in a payday—so, why aren’t tech companies paying more for their engineers to stay? This article was originally published to Marker. Why don’t companies pay engineers more? When … Read more
Borland’s Turbo Pascal was one of the most successful programming tools of all time. It introduced development techniques, such as integrated source-level debugging, that we take for granted today; but which were radical at the time. TP 7, also known … Read more