Arthur D. Hlavaty

These kids nowadays

2021-09-23T10:08:47Z

They don’t use file folders. [The Verge]

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An artificially demon-haunted world

2021-03-07T10:43:28Z

Charles Stross says, “As AI applications are increasingly deployed in public spaces we're now beginning to see the exciting possibilities inherent in the leakage of human stupidity into the environment we live in.”

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Artificial Intelligence

2019-12-13T20:27:02Z

Charlie Stross tries to figure out the unknown unknowns [Charlie’s Diary]

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Doing lines

2019-10-17T09:53:04Z

The most important lines of code [Slate]

Thanx to Metafilter

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Throw away that trust

2019-02-13T10:54:02Z

Bruce Schneier on why bitcoin doesn’t work

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Is it this bad?

2017-12-12T11:01:02Z

Nothing works and nobody cares. (And this is a Medium post so it molests your screen before you can even look at it.)

Thanx to Follow Me Here

And do-it-yourself celebrity (or anyone else) porn is almost here.

Thanx to andrewducker

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Code dead?

2017-09-29T12:12:47Z

The Coming Software Apocalypse

Thanx to andrewducker

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Extremely Controversial Statement

2016-07-29T11:11:08Z

Windows 10 is good. I was stuck with it when my old computer broke, and I’m happy with it.

Thanx to andrewducker

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Translated from the original BS

2016-01-21T01:48:37Z

Guide to software developer job advertisements

Thanx to andrewducker

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Bloat

2016-01-02T11:49:30Z

Remember when computers were supposed to run at computer speeds? Here’s a big fat article about how everything on the Web is too big and fat. He’s right. Not having to wait while the advertisers (and presumably the NSA et al.) note our presence would help, but that's just crazy talk.

Thanx to Metafilter

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My code’s bigger than your code

2015-12-19T11:14:51Z

Taking computer languages more seriously than religion.

Thanx to Metafilter

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Aptitude required

2015-12-18T11:28:35Z

Learn to code: It’s harder than you think.

Thanx to Slate Star Codex

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The unspeakable name

2015-12-12T10:25:16Z

Being Mr. Null

Thanx to Metafilter

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The faith of the tribe

2015-07-30T14:24:30Z

Unfortunate things programmers believe

Thanx to nancylebov

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Doing it right

2015-06-27T11:23:38Z

Maybe PowerPoint doesn't have to be awful.

Thanx to andrewducker

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Life is complicated

2015-02-05T10:53:21Z

The curious case of the disappearing Polish S

Thanx to Making Light.

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Scary

2014-05-27T09:56:03Z

Everything is broken.

Thanx to Making Light.

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Language of our Ancestors

2014-05-02T11:23:40Z

50 years of BASIC

Thanx to andrewducker

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30 years ago today

2014-01-22T12:17:46Z

File 770 reminds us that this is the thirtieth anniversary of the commercial that introduced the Macintosh. I don't remember how I felt about it at the time, but now I am tempted to see it as the Fall.

John Clute has written about that terrible stuff he calls First SF, characterized as a view of the material world as a series of problems to be solved. When I read that, I thought, "Oh, so that's why I love it." I don't actually have autism or Asperger's, but I'm on the spectrum: I live in my mind and deal with the world, rather than living in the world like we're supposed to. First SF dreamed of being better at that: We'd be safer from the elements, live longer and better, have machines doing the dull stuff, turn sex from a deadly serious business (Eric Berne called it a giant squid) into shared pleasure, escape the giant prison at the bottom of the gravity well….

And we would have computers. Well, First SF mostly thought we would have A Computer, but for once reality outstripped the Dream: Everybody could have one. And they would be more than "computers": We could use words, as well as numbers, to deal with the material world from a safe distance.

Then came the Commercial. Now there would be a computer for the rest of them. No more all those hard words and numbers; computers would have pictures. Perhaps some day computers will be just like television! Or better; you could push and pull the stuff on the screen instead of having to talk to it. (I love being able to utter a simple incantation like CTRL-C rather than d-r-a-g things.) In retrospect what it reminded me of was 1967 and that godawful song telling people to come to San Francisco with flowers in their hair: It brought a lot of Them into what used to be a place for Us.

I am of course not saying that the influx was all bad. Two of the best and smartest people I have ever known, my beloved cohusband womzilla and the late Robert Anton Wilson, love the touchable computer. I have no idea how many of the people I now enjoy interacting with online wouldn't be here if all we had was the old kind of PC, but I'll bet it's a lot. But just as "science fiction" has gone from words and ideas on a page to violence and special effects on a screen, so a "computer" can now be a handheld interactive TV. And it isn't safe any more: Outside forces are running programs on our computers all time, and we must defend ourselves against the bad ones. Still, we have not lost the ability to read science fiction or use words on computers. (I'm doing it right now.)

One thing I learned from File 770: For years no one could show the commercial for fear of lawsuits from the George Orwell estate. Imagine a copyright lawyer stamping on a human face forever.

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Ripjaws meets Barbie

2013-12-03T11:31:53Z

The worst product names in PC history

Thanx to andrewducker

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Charlie Stross says…

2013-11-19T11:59:25Z

Help! I am being held prisoner in Microsoft Word!

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Up your ASCII

2013-04-11T11:53:32Z

Computer science once again battles the wily alien apostrophe.

Thanx to andrewducker

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Alien symbols

2012-12-12T11:40:21Z

The Newspaper of Record cannot deal with last names that have spaces in them. Of course, it's not them; it's the computer people. Did anyone write a viciously satirical sf story in which many futuristic systems would replace the simple apostrophe with one of a dozen bits of gibberish that look like the ways comic strips represented Bad Words?

Thanx to Making Light.

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Another old fannish friend

2012-11-03T16:48:20Z

When I was getting into fandom in the 1970s, there was a group that called itself (with moderate inaccuracy) Rat's Mouth Fandom. It was small (for a while it comprised only three people), but it produced Craigslist and award-winning inventor Edie Stern

Thanx to File 770

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Obviously…

2012-06-29T14:41:48Z

If the writers of computer programming books wrote arithmetic textbooks

Thanx to andrewducker

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