Viewing profile — jkn

Star Trek's society is collectivist (as all societies are, to a degree), but is it authoritarian? I suspect that summarizing collectivism as authoritarian is like summarizing liber…

The Data Liberation Front team was formed at Google in 2007, and released Google Takeout in 2011, worldwide, well before the other big companies had anything similar in place. http…

Ha I thought you were wrong, but it turns out that indeed, you can disable image loading in the Gmail Web interface, in the Android app, but not on iOS: https://support.google.com/…

So on one hand a "bad" company advances its strategic interests by contributing to a free and open technology. On the other hand, this technology can bring general benefits beyond …

You could say the same of all Web technologies. Do you actually think it would be better to have software patents and royalties on every Web standard? For one thing, this would be …

No but it does grow the economy. Things you buy with the borrowed money count towards the GDP. If you have people buying and selling nothing that's going to be a small economy. If …

I'm impressed by the lengths to which the authors must go and have gone to refute the skeptics' counter-explanations. For example, they simulated the presence of a potentially obse…

The main idea is to have every line of text fall on an evenly spaced grid. Here's an example where the middle paragraph is not grid aligned: https://i.stack.imgur.com/XskJu.png Gen…

I'm typesetting a series of novels with LaTeX and memoir and I share your pain. I didn't have much trouble with fonts (fontspec is pretty awesome compared to the old TeX way), but …

Indeed... From the article: "He definitely goes where there is government money". In other words, he definitely goes where we wish more people would go.

This reminds me of Cloud Atlas... There is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare well. The natural order is the law of the jungle. The strong eat…

It's too bad the vision depicted at the beginning of the article (full texts potentially available in all libraries), didn't come true. But I feel that the public did get the most …

If you consider Nature in general, nothing is good or bad. Colder is better for organisms that prefer cold, warmer for those that prefer warm. No life at all might be best for the …

The BSD license is developer-centered. It's awesome for developers, mostly avoiding any licensing headache. The GPL is user-centered. It's not designed to be nice to developers, bu…

we saw this throughout the Obama tenure as well, more executive orders... Number of executive orders per president, per year in office[1]: Theodore Roosevelt 144.7 William Howard T…

All the data I have seen point to "altruism" [1] more than a war with Microsoft. Consider the list of Project Zero reports where the deadline was exceeded (thanks to brainfog for t…

This a pretty magical solution. - Backward compatible. No API change. - Naive, idiomatic and wrong use of the API automatically becomes naive, idiomatic and correct: Existing code …

On Unix, an empty file is a working implementation of the "true" command (provided that is in the PATH and set as executable). This is because it is interpreted as a shell script, …