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Punch-configured textiles go all the way back to the 1700s! The 1804 Jacquard Loom, which used cards, was a big part of the Industrial Revolution and influenced Babbage's Differenc…

One of their line items complains about being unable to bind 65k PostgreSQL placeholders (the linked post calls them "parameters") in a single query. This is a cursed idea to begin…

During the period for which we have evidence, Neanderthals seem to have had smaller populations than Homo sapiens, and they reproduced more slowly (longer gestation plus longer int…

He was critical of blockchain, because he considered a permanent register of transactions to be the antithesis of privacy. How much store you want to set by that is up to you, but …

This made me think of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams's 1987 novel, where there's an AI company that takes military and political decisions and comes up with…

There's an excellent SF novella, Walter Jon Williams' The Green Leopard Plague , where Transnistrian corruption happens to be a major plot device. The other characters derisively c…

Tiny correction: I heard it as "all languages are really just dialects of Perl 6," which makes a bit more sense in context. Either way it's a cute Wall witticism, of which there we…