On World Building
Something I came across (and which would be lost, but for the Wayback Machine): Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for…
On machines that interpret speech
Found this in a book review from the 1970s ("Computer Power and Human Reason", incidentally written by the guy who also wrote Eliza)…
Monthly Recap: May 2016
Eating, sleeping, playing, running, meeting friends, a few trips to the Farmer’s Market downtown, etc. I saw a couple of episodes of Midsomer Murders and mourned the passing of Book Buyers from Mount…
The Parabolic Fabulist
About ten years ago I had this idea of a half-poetry, half-prose piece of surreal fiction, that stayed locked in my head and grew rusty over time. A few months ago (starting with NaNoWriMo 2015, but…
Personal Media Summary: April 2016
A random selection of stuff I found on the web last month (or is there a theme to this? I can’t tell …) * First, a few things that sound like the kind of crazy nonsense found on the back alleys of t…
Monthly Recap: April 2016
Nothing out of the ordinary this month, a bunch of steady plodding stuff: we got Tara her first set of blocks (”Mega Blocks”), and a “learning tower” (see this YouTube video for an exaggerated use cas…
Personal Media Summary: March 2016
Some interesting stuff I read/saw this month: * I knew the Daily Show was over when Jon Stewart left, some people1 just took longer to realize that * I’ve been a fan of ASMR for a while, I’m happy…
Personal Media Summary: February 2016
(Image credit: The New York Times) (Meta: Delayed by a couple of weeks because I was on vacation! That’s also why there isn’t much here or in next month’s post) So, miscellanous finds last month:…
Monthly recap: March 2016
The month was a blur, mostly because three whole weeks was vacation time! Tara had her longest travel ever (yet), with a seven-hour flight followed by a ten-hour flight to get from San Francisco to Ne…
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Most programmers are still locked into the idea of making a program out of a large pile of tiny files containing pieces of programs Tim Daly, “Clojure In Small Pieces”…
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The idea of “mostly functional programming” is unfeasible. It is impossible to make imperative programming languages safer by only partially removing implicit side effects. Leaving one kind of effect…
Be careful what you click for ...
This from an article in Verge on how the App Store is "more like a lottery" now, though an observation in the comments section shows the focus on apps is really too narrow, it's all of m…