21Oct2026None of these compare, of course, to the one someone added to Jira that was later discovered to be accidentally adding several megabytes of (I seem to recall) a hidden gif to the initial page load. →
11Jun2024It's only called AI if it comes from the AI region of France. Otherwise it's sparkling autocomplete. →
08Jan2023By law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? →
12Jan2021Spam on Usenet was a big deal beacuse of the way Usenet worked. It was a broadcast protocol where every message posted to Usenet got copied to every server that carried the newsgroup it was posted to. →
10Feb2020What happens when you debate what you think someone else believes, not what you believe. →
15Aug2016One day, my boss pulled me into his office and said “Do you know Microsoft Active Server Pages?” →
04Aug2016The first priority of any software should be to do what the user is asking it to do. Don’t tell me that your time is worth more than mine. →
11Jan2016All the doors in this spacecraft have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done! →
03Dec2015I’m not sure whether I prefer to be 0x28, or 101000. →
02Dec2015Many things in Star Wars don’t make sense, but this one turns out to be pretty straightforward. Leia is badass. →
09Nov2015Arbitrary object deserialization (or marshalling, or un-pickling, whatever your language calls it) is inherently unsafe, and should never be performed on untrusted data. →
01Oct2015To members, these sites are vital means of maintaining contact with friends and loved ones, of not feeling left out of important parts of their lives. →
08Jul2015Sure, the component parts of blogging are everywhere now. The Internet is drowning in self-publishing, link-sharing, articles scrolling by in reverse-chronological order. But somewhere along the way, the soul of blogging was lost. →
19Jun2015Once upon a time, I was dead-set against people deleting things from blogs. After ten years though, you find that parts of the site don’t smell so good… →
08Jun2015There are increasingly flimsy justifications for the horrors of Game of Thrones. They motivate character A. Or they open up space for character B. But in the end it's obvious that it's all about providing the now-mandated quota of shock. →
03Jun2015Either and Promises/Futures are useful and I’ll use them next time they’re appropriate. But outside Haskell does their monad-ness matter? →
13May2015The weekend after I posted this article about the pitfalls hiding in a simple shell command-line, I had some free time and decided it might be fun to see what the same functionality would look like in Haskell. →
02Apr2015The Unix pipe model is actually a great example of how a complex system can be made to look simple by pushing complexity downstream, and how doing so can give you a very narrowly defined kind of simplicity at the expense of reliability—the simplicity of a system that mostly does the right thing most of the time.
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30Mar2015From then on, contact from Scientology became a regular, but not overwhelmingly regular thing. Every few months I would get a letter here, a phone call there. On one memorable occasion they invited me to their Summer barbecue. →
12Mar2015I would like to reassure you that we consider it important to be good Internet citizens, and take complaints about our subscribers seriously. I would like to thank you for reporting this incident to us. →
10Mar2015The world contains a lot of people who want to express their wealth by buying a better version of the thing everyone else is buying, and the Edition speaks to those consumers. But in that case Apple is going to make _a whole lot more_ money from consumers who now unconsciously see the stainless steel Apple Watch as the middle choice. →
02Mar2015Use Google (or just search Github directly) to find the Vagrant recipe for the thing you want to install.… →
03Jan2015In a world where every generation in recorded history has pored over the habits of their successors looking for evidence that the human race is getting lazier, stupider and more vain, it seems obvious that taking photos of yourself in front of interesting things is going to end up being Exhibit A for the prosecution. →