Viewing profile — cryptopian

On the other hand, plenty of art can lean into being intentionally brash and be all the more memorable for it. The phrase "bad MS paint blog" immediately makes me think of Hyperbol…

Wait til you find out that in Northern England, we call the evening meal "tea", not to be confused with "tea", the delicious leaf water.

I can't find it sadly, but somebody made an 80s style industrial control panel for a SQL server deployment, with all the clicky radio buttons and 7-segment displays you could wish …

> start with a one-sentence definition, then a couple paragraphs of summary, then go into short specified sections, and keep links to the "Citations" at the end. It's been refined …

And for the record, it's fine for people to set their boundaries wherever they want. All the author loses in this case is a bit of time writing one email

Something I really grew to hate over my time at various software firms were complex and flaky stacks with big test loops, and it's exactly this kind of reason why. Ideally, I have …

I enjoy software more out of a love of maths than a love of technology. My favourite class of problems are the times I can boil a problem down to a simple equation without even tou…

Let's say you managed this. Say you designed trains and safety protocols for coupling/decoupling at 100mph, completely reconfigure the signalling system, solve the inevitable acces…

I find that when selling people on the idea of network upgrades, people find the solutions unintuitive because issues in one place are often caused by bottlenecks very far away. Ha…

I was discussing railways to somebody and noting how at-capacity the British network is. He was adamant that we just hadn't optimised the system enough and that more maths and more…

And like cookie clicker, once you're watching the number going up long term, it's hard for your mind to accept a point at which you have "enough".

It's why I prefer not to get bogged down in litigation over what counts as social media. It's far more productive to look at the individual mechanisms that make web platforms bad f…

One of the most insidious aspects of social media is how the reward and discoverability mechanisms train users to become their own marketing department. It's most obvious on Linked…

> So if they stumble into random niche subreddit because the algorithm suggested it or someone linked to it or it popped up in a search result, in two clicks they can be posting th…

Most importantly, modern platforms are optimised to maximise your attention and engagement, and nothing's more engaging than fear, anger and superiority. Your comment sorting algor…

This is quite a common linguistic phonomenon, where a word is rebracketed to form a new suffix, even if it doesn't make sense with the original etymology. See also -holic (alcoholi…

> But I actually think the majority of the backlash has nothing to do with stock valuations. I think it exacerbates the points you make. "You mean, you want to take all the IP, imm…

Somebody already linked 1053, but https://xkcd.com/2501/ also applies. When you're wrapped in an information bubble, it's easy to forget that this could be new, exciting/important …

I really enjoyed her talk "Making Difficult Things Easy"[1]. She's got a real talent for taking complex technical subjects, recognising the difficulties in understanding them, and …

In software too, it feels like there's been a shift to a more individualistic "learn-on-the-job" attitude in companies. If you're not the kind of person who knows how to structure …

Another reason is that these routes operate an airfare model where all tickets are for a specific seat on a specific service, with increasing prices as the seats sell out. It allow…

> AI is better at this than you Software is better than me at crossword puzzles but that doesn't mean I'm going to optimise my time solving the weekly cryptic

Given all the arguments above this post, I don't think there's a lot of value in trying to categorise any particular website as a yes/no to "is this social media". All that achieve…

For those who don't have the time to watch, the biggest point he hammers home: fossil fuels are a single use energy source; renewables keep producing energy. So long as you've buil…

It's a challenge, but remember that there is a lot of money in trying to convince people about the status quo. I'd keep in mind the kind of tactics that fossil fuel companies will …