The best encapsulation of my emotional relationship to technology during the pandemic comes from a Russian novel published in 1991. Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra opens with the titular Omon recalling his youth, when he was obsessed with space. On playgrounds, … Read more
Join me in a thought experiment. Imagine you are imprisoned in a room by a despotic regime and allowed contact with the outside world only through a primitive computer. Called a text-only terminal, the computer lets you send and receive … Read more
As working programmers, you need to keep learning all the time. You check out tutorials, documentation, Stack Overflow questions, anything you can find that will help you write code and keep your skills current. But how often do you find … Read more
1. Jaiswal, S. et al. Ocular and visual discomfort associated with smartphones, tablets and computers: What we do and do not know. Clin. Exp. Optom. 102, 463–477. https://doi.org/10.1111/cxo.12851 (2019). Article PubMed Google Scholar 2. Golebiowski, B. et al. Smartphone use … Read more
My current employer does a lot of really cool systems work that’s covered by NDAs. I recently did some work to integrate a cool open source tool into our workflow. Felt it deserved a blog post. NFS Testing Requires Parallelism. … Read more
We spend hours consuming news because we want to be informed. The problem is news doesn’t make us informed. In fact, the more news we consume the more misinformed we become. News is, by definition, something that doesn’t last. It … Read more
Reading Hayek in HollandPhoto by Peter Furth During a working vacation in the Netherlands, I had the dissonant experience of reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in one of the most comprehensively planned environments on earth. Hayek’s thesis is … Read more
Quick Stats: DJIA: 68.63 (Today: 35,208) Shiller PE Ratio: 5.2 (Today: 38.5) Federal Reserve Bank of NY Discount Rate: 5.5% (Today: 0.25%) GBPUSD: $3.65 (Today: $1.39) Price of The Wall Street Journal: $0.07 (Today: $4.00) Market-Moving Themes: Dog days of … Read more
This newsletter is strong stuff, more Wages of Destruction than regular Chartbook fare. Some of the material is disturbing. The battle of Stalingrad raged between 23 August 1942 and 2 February 1943 when the last of the German 6th Army … Read more
January 24, 2021 The trick to AGPLv3 is diffing it with GPLv3 and drilling down from there. The crux is the first paragraph of section 13. But even those two sentences make hardly any sense without broader context. It’s not you, … Read more