Viewing profile — squibbles

It is unfortunate we do not strive to make "work" as enjoyable and as addictive as some games, while also allowing employees to share significantly in the wealth they help generate…

A series of charts plotted by Wolfram Alpha (for US data) shows that debt seems to go up, steadily, forever. [1] The steady rise of debt seems to be a phenomenon independent of spe…

I have seen many people fail to realize (and sometimes to understand at all) that taking measurements of large numbers of people is always fraught with errors of all sorts. No matt…

Apple has kind of herded me into zsh for work in the terminal. So far it has been pleasant, with interesting plugins, but it's periodic updates are a little annoying. Despite remai…

For reference, Judea Pearl won the ACM Turing award in 2011 "[f]or fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and …

In the US, the judicial branch is the arbiter of truth. And yet, even judges write opinions. The world is a messy place and it is only hubris that makes us think we can organize it…

This post was quite a surprise. I have an old copy of Paradise Lost (illustrated by Gustave Dore) on a bookshelf next to me. (Digitized version here: http://digital.auraria.edu/AA0…

For me, personally -- I cannot think of a sufficient justification to put a production database in a container. A good database server is designed for performance, reliability, sca…

Definitely a good one: "Experiences with running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes - Gravitational - blog post 2018" For anyone who thinks running a database in a container environment is a…

I mostly want to point out that, when discussing ancient history, objective data are only one facet contributing to the interpretation of past events. Most people prefer simple, st…

I still cringe when I think back to some C projects from long ago, where the dependency chains of headers and libraries where unfathomably byzantine. On a related note, lately I ha…

> There was a brilliant programmer at Digitek who had completely novel and now unknown ideas for software development; he never published anything, but you could read and analyze h…

The Motorola 6809E[1] and the MC6883[2]. The 6809E was a 0.89MHz CPU (with external clock) used in the TRS-80 Color Computer[3] sold by Radio Shack. The MC6883 was the Synchronous …

> The pending disruption for DDoS-Guard and Parler comes compliments of Ron Guilmette, a researcher who has made it something of a personal mission to de-platform conspiracy theori…

>The whole article is a bad-faith farce, and should be treated as such. Ignore it. > >There are real points to be made about how the behavior of these companies might impact discou…

I do not mean to either encourage or discourage the taking of any kind of nutritional supplements, but I strongly caution anyone from looking to lists like the one on LessWrong for…

Speaking from many, many years of experience: Cash is king. Nothing is more important than cash flow. A runway is not a development budget -- it is a loan in the form of opportunit…

My words were meant as a light-hearted message of hope, with an allusion to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; not a philosophical argument to reject self-improvement.

"...an irrational, flawed monkey..." Remember -- "If it doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey." Embrace the inner ape. Instead of looking at our limitations, look at how well we ha…

I disagree that conservatism is a major flaw of human thinking, or even a flaw at all. I would argue that conservatism is one of the core principals of science. Although the quanti…

For those that may not have noticed, the article provides a link to a good document by Kennth Hodges with a list of prices for medieval items. http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Mone…

The Social Dilemma is a film currently showing on Netflix. The film focuses on how large tech companies exploit society for profit. If you can see the film, I highly recommend it. …