(will follow-up with a post with details on each)
(a good month for viewing …)
I understand why people want all five — now. I want all five! But they involve trade-offs, which too few of us want to acknowledge or debate. In an energy war like the one we’re in now, you need to be clear about your goals and priorities. As a country, and as a Western alliance, we have no ladder of priorities on energy, just competing aspirations and magical thinking that we can have it all.
For all these reasons, I think it no longer makes sense to cling on to the GPL and copyleft. Let them go. Instead, I would encourage you to adopt a permissive license for your projects (e.g. MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0), and then focus your energies on the things that will really make a difference to software freedom: counteracting the monopolising effects of cloud software, developing sustainable business models that allow open source software to thrive, and pushing for regulation that prioritises the interests of software users over the interests of vendors.
The longer I am a software engineer the longer I begin to understand that the soft skills are much more important than all the technical skills. For me software engineering is much about dealing with my insecurities and coming to term with my weaknesses. I also feel that it is a lot about dealing with your ego and a lot with cooperating with colleagues and bosses. The longer I am a software engineer, the more I understand that developing software is not about writing code but communicating with people.
The second Elizabeth was born on April 21, 1926, and has reigned over Britain since 1952. She was six weeks older than Marilyn Monroe, three years older than Anne Frank, nine years older than Elvis Presley—all figures of the unreachable past. She was older than nylon, Scotch tape, and The Hobbit. She was old enough to have trained as an army driver and mechanic in the last months of the Second World War.
“The conception of monarchy as a way of life is not easy to explain to those who are unaccustomed to it,” Morrah wrote in 1958, just six years into Elizabeth II’s reign. “To peoples whose social system and patriotic tradition are founded upon revolt against a distant or authoritarian king—to the Americans and the French, for example—it is apt to seem a paradox. Such as these are inclined to suppose that the British people only continue to tolerate their ancient monarchy because its real content has been emptied out of it by political progress.” But this was not true, Morrah argued. The British monarchy is one of the few institutions in history to have voluntarily ceded power, whether it be Charles II accepting the existence of Parliament or Elizabeth II paying income tax.
The Queen is dead; long live the King. The world must now discover, after a reign that lasted seven decades, what England, and Britain, is without her.
Modernity has a strong apocalyptic feeling to it, in the biblical meaning of the word, which means “the unveiling”, the event when we see and know reality in all of its forms as it truly is. If we are in a stagnant period of history in which we are not having real technological progress but rather we just optimize screens to get people addicted to click ads, maybe the way out of this mess and to get actual innovation is to get on your knees and pray that God will illuminate you on how to build a warp drive.
Hilton Waikoloa’s art collection
In pursuit of that goal, Hemmeter traveled to China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and beyond. He spent at least a year traveling and shipping artwork back to Hawaii on barges where it would then be flown by helicopter to the hotel’s property.
But the best thing about the collection, besides its sheer size and diversity, is that viewing it costs nothing, and that holds true for both guests and members of the general public.
Displayed throughout the corridors and common spaces for all visitors to enjoy, the Hilton Anatole’s varied collection ranges from 12-foot segments of the Berlin Wall painted by Jurgen Grosse to an 18th Century Thai Reclining Buddha fashioned in gilt-bronze.
The “just use Fossil” approach is particularly novel!
2022-08-05
Spectacularly contrarian take: “Use one server“
When you experience growing pains, and get close to the limits of your current servers, today’s conventional wisdom is to go for sharding and horizontal scaling, or to use a cloud architecture that gives you horizontal scaling “for free.” It is often easier and more efficient to scale vertically instead. Using one big server is comparatively cheap, keeps your overheads at a minimum, and actually has a pretty good availability story if you are careful to prevent correlated hardware failures. It’s not glamorous and it won’t help your resume, but one big server will serve you well.
Everything getting older
The Onion’s Our Dumb Century is a classic satirical look at the twentieth century, of course, but it’s also a nice tour through the American zeitgeist over that time. One of the headlines that hits a little harder than it used to is from 1985: “Dynamic New Soviet Leader Not on Brink of Death.” In the early 80s, the USSR successively appointed Yuri Andropov (68 years old, died in office in a year and a half) and then Chernenko (who took power at the age of 72 and died after just over a year). But now the US Senate is the oldest it’s ever been, the speaker of the House is 82, the party leaders in the Senate are 71 and 80, and the Presidency is held by someone who won at age 77, running against a 74-year-old.
A look at “low-level” schemes (though still missing a mention of Gambit/Gerbil)
An entertaining Youtube channel which also promotes a much-needed “cultural coming-together” in these times:
On the bio-electrical science behind how organisms control anatomy through gene expression.
On unifying “toy languages” and “real languages”
A blend of FreeBSD and macOS?
Sounds too good to be true, but good luck to the folks doing this 👍
Some Guix evangelism
Scheme in Excel? :-O
First Windows Subsystem for Linux, now this … how different from the world of 15 years ago ! 🙂
In which I learn about the python concurrency landscape
The promise of Rust, and a perspective on the languages that came before.
Matt Damon explains things 😐
(or, why moves are the way they are …)
Interesting overview of the types of computation in games (simulation numerical shading) and the varying performance aspects of each, and musings on “language suitability”.
Fun fact: a Russian team was hunting for Atlantis near Britain in the late 90s 🤷♂️
Fun fact: Alligators can go up to two years without food !!
(saw this while watching a new nature documentary)
Some interesting comments in this post on what was lost with the loss of the old Usenet:
A look at Racket and Rhombus
Surprised I never came across this earlier: Cliodynamics
(Reminiscent of psychohistory !)
Abacus Noir 