For half a century, the CIA secretly controlled one of the world’s most widely used cryptography companies, using that control to backdoor allies and enemies alike and eavesdrop on their most sensitive communications. This perhaps explains their concern about Huawei. #
Recent posts
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The high school students who uncovered a toxic waste scandal
Geoff Manaugh on a remarkable story of teen journalists in the 1990s uncovering what the “real” press was unable or unwilling to. An example of just what teens are capable of if given a project with meaning, import, and autonomy. #
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The hidden biases that drive anti-vegan hatred
Why do vegans provoke such ire in non-vegans? This interesting article looks at the cognitive biases that might lead to such strong feelings. #
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Artificial Morality
Bruce Sterling on AI ethics:
In the hermetic world of AI ethics, it’s a given that self-driven cars will kill fewer people than we humans do. Why believe that? There’s no evidence for it. It’s merely a cranky aspiration. Life is cheap on traffic-choked American roads — that social bargain is already a hundred years old. If self-driven vehicles doubled the road-fatality rate, and yet cut shipping costs by 90 percent, of course those cars would be deployed.
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Technological proliferation is not a list of principles. It is a deep, multivalent historical process with many radically different stakeholders over many different time-scales. People who invent technology never get to set the rules for what is done with it.
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#distracted – BLDGBLOG
A piercing view of modern outrage culture, which sees the opposition to fascism distracted by low-stakes nonsense while society is slowly dismantled. #
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The Unhappy King of Snooker
From five years ago, but still beautiful and resonant: a profile of Ronnie O’Sullivan, the haunted and preternaturally gifted snooker player. #
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Elizabeth Wurtzel and the Illusion of Gen-X Success
A poignant piece on the passing of Elizabeth Wurtzel (author of Prozac Nation) and the precariousness and vapidity of the modern creative industries. #
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Sn*wflakes and F*ggots
A wonderfully thoughtful and thought-provoking article about the growing culture war in the UK, as we slowly circle the drain. #
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Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
A useful name for an intuitive fallacy. #
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How to Make A Memex
I discovered this after writing up my post about Roam Research and, inevitably, it says much of what I wanted to say more effectively than I was able to say it. #
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How a cabal of romance writers cashed in on Amazon Kindle Unlimited
It turns out the world of self-published, Kindle Unlimited romance novels is cuthroat and scammy. Algorithm-gaming, fake readers, fake content, all generating millions in revenue. Kindle Unlimited is particularly susceptible because of the way it calculates and shares revenue. #
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A fortnight with Roam Research
I’ve been using Roam Research for a couple of a weeks now, and I have some thoughts about it.
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The Evolution of Socio-Technical Systems
A fabulous paper from the early 1980s. Taking examples from coal-mining, it explains the interactions between people and technology and the evolution and emergence of productive relationships between the two. There are so many lessons here for modern technical teams. #
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Ruby’s $_ variable
Ruby has many cryptic variables, but one of them is particularly useful – especially if you’re processing text from the command line.
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Mini Munging, Brighton Ruby conference, July 2015
The slides and summary from my talk at Brighton Ruby 2015.
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Command-line purging of Varnish caches
Varnish, the HTTP proxy, is a fantastic tool. Here’s a way to purge cached pages from the command line, a task I find myself wanting to do frequently.
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A Caching Analogy
Explaining caching is hard; here’s an attempt.
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Ruby regular expressions: the /o modifier
An explanation of the little-used – but handy-to-know – o modifier to Ruby’s regular expressions.
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Real progress in long-running command-line scripts
Sometimes, you write Ruby scripts that take a long time to execute. Here’s how to show progress to your scripts’ users – part two in a series, this time showing how to display real progress to users.
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Faking progress in long-running command-line scripts
Sometimes, you write Ruby scripts that take a long time to execute. Here’s how to show progress to your scripts’ users – part one in a series, this time dealing with how to show indeterminate, faked progress to reassure users that something is happening.
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Persisting data in Ruby with PStore
Ruby comes with a powerful persistent storage system that’s backed by flat files and handles concurrent access and transactions out of the box – stuff you’d expect to need a database for. It’s criminally underused, and it’s called PStore. Never roll your own file locking code again!
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Paths aren't strings
If you find yourself passing around lots of file paths in your Ruby scripts, you should save yourself a headache and use Pathnames, not strings.
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Nokogiri as a command-line tool
Most Rubyists are familiar with [Nokogiri][]. It’s a combination XML and HTML parsing tool most commonly used for “screen scraping”: that is, fetching a web page, and searching through it to extract information of interest. When a website you’re interested in doesn’t offer an API, it’s often the only way to extract information from it.
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Publishing tech books with LeanPub
My experience writing a book using the fledgling publishing platform LeanPub.
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Decoding "Almost Sinatra"
In 2010, Konstantin Haase wrote a golfed version of Sinatra that was just 999 bytes long. What can it teach us about both Sinatra and Ruby?