Viewing profile — BwackNinja

Zawinski's Law, when taken literally, argues that programs all eventually need to be communicated with by people and other programs using a generic protocol and without using progr…

It's easy to agree that the AI assisted email writing (at least in its current form) is counterproductive, but we're talking about email -- a subject that's already been discussed …

The professional matchmaker angle as a contrast is fascinating. The subscription model not only removes the incentive to provide quality quickly -- it reverses it. Doing a worse jo…

> The same applies to PAM word for word. That's one of the reasons that OpenBSD is rather compelling. BSDAuth doesn't open arbitrary libraries to execute code, it forks and execs b…

There is no distinction between system and program libraries in Linux. We used to pretend there was one before usrmigration, but that was never good to take seriously. The distro a…

Complexity has always been less respected the more it is separated from the experiences of the average person; or more personally, your own experiences. Unfortunately, that's the v…

This is only looking at the problem from one side. If there's a crisis and you're not treating it as one, you are committing two sins. Not only are you wrong, but you're wasting ti…

This seems emblematic of the general direction of technology. It's an approach to managing system complexity that works by adding additional complexity and handling that combinatio…

Requiring that you sit further back is built on the notion that you need to be able to see your entire workspace at once, which was never true with an actual desk and largely impli…

MacOS 9 and the spatial desktop metaphor is neat. I went that route for a while. What this misses, however, is that the biggest problem with the desktop interface is that we've sub…

With regards to abstractions, the perceived quality of code depends heavily on who will be expected to read it. "Principle of least surprise" isn't universal, it's subjective becau…

Or alternatively, should we be predicting that there will be a John Henry of AI?

On an ad-supported site, you're not the customer. The advertiser is the customer, you're the product. Making that even worse is social media, where being good on a technical level …

You /can/ package python applications into a single binary -- just a zip file prepended with a python shebang. You can do much the same with the base python libraries. No one does …