Computing
- A sobering reality: “the world runs on Excel, Java 8, and Sharepoint”
- A trend toward the end of open source
- Something cool: Pharo and the “Glamorous Toolkit”
- Next, the “programmable browser”
- On Craftsmen and Scientists
- Some code challenges
- On how some REPLs are better than others
Programming languages
- Thoughts on Zig and Rust
- Discovered this wild and whacky language: “Pliant”
- In defense of C
- Chris Lattner on the future of programming languages,
The web
- A possible replacement for the web
- 90s internet!
People
- On breathing slowly
- You might be having a bad day, but at least the ground didn’t suddenly open under you, leaving you with broken bones and rats crawling over you
- Soviet research from prisons
- Lex Fridman interviews Peter Norvig
- On hauntology
The world
- Reflecting on Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address (“A world split apart”, from … a bit before I was born, in 1978)
- On Americans as builders
- On whether being associated with Trump or Osama Bin Laden, is worse, today
- Star Wars in Asciimation (!)
- Chris Hedges on “the politics of despair”
- Psilocybin ftw
Science
- Whales are old
- Gravity and cosmology
- On the crowded and busy life of cells
- A consistent yet unexplained pulsation in the earth
- Microscopes going sub-atomic
- Rendezvousing with an asteroid before a return mission
- Piggybacking on whales to the deep ocean
- First, I learnt about ogre-faced spiders. Then I learnt that they can hear wingbeats of insects a few feet away (and they hear this through their legs ?!)
Misc
- Hans Zimmer and the new Dune trailer
- I too have been enjoying Obsidian for a while now
- On that note, Mimix
- Making millions of early Usenet posts available to read
- A story about the woman who sued the fish and wildlife department of California for not acknowledging the existence of Bigfoot
Abacus Noir 
“For better or worse, the world l runs on Excel, Java 8, and Sharepoint, and I think it’s important for us as technology professionals to remember and be empathetic of that.”
(Groan) I know this is just a nit, but I’ve gotten tired of the word “empathetic.” It’s overused. Boykis could just say, “acknowledge that,” and be done with it. It’s not about sensitivity. It’s about, as some like myself used to say, not buying into the hype cycle. My guess? Fat chance that’s going to happen. If there’s one thing the technology press lives and breathes, it’s “the next new (old) thing,” which is to say old ideas with a new coat of paint.
Mimix sounds interesting, though. 🙂 For a moment, I misread the title, thinking it was about the educational OS, Minix, but I was glad to see the author looked to Vannevar Bush for inspiration.
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