Category Archives: General

3. Brandolini’s law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullsh*t is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/laws/

In an internet-famous essay called Meditations on Moloch, SSC warns us that this god is behind humans’ failure to coordinate at scale. He points to a wide variety of intractable problems — climate change, the prisoner’s dilemma, overfishing, arms races, government corruption — and explains the underlying pattern they all have in common: https://aaronzlewis.com/blog/2019/07/25/metaphors-we-believe-by/

There was a question about which of these vulnerabilities were found by researchers, as opposed to troublemakers. The answer was most, if not all of them, but it made me realize one additional point I hadn’t mentioned. Unlike the prototypical buffer overflow vulnerability, exploiting features is very reliable. Exploiting something like shellshock or imagetragick requiresContinue reading “Features are Faults Redux”

The questions we often hear are “Why create a new query language?” and “What’s wrong with SQL?”. This post contains answers to both. https://www.edgedb.com/blog/we-can-do-better-than-sql/

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/docker-protects-a-programming-paradigm-that-we-should-get-rid-of

This is the story of how Feynman’s lost lecture came to be lost, and how it came to be found again. In April 1992, as Caltech’s archivist, I was asked by Gerry Neugebauer, the chairman of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, to go through the files in Robert Leighton’s office. Leighton was illContinue reading “Feynman’s Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun”

Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself. James Allen, As A Man Thinketh

We are the domestic pets of a human zoo we call civilization. Lawrence Gonzales – Deep Survival

Zero One Infinity is an invaluable rule of thumb during requirements gathering. There are only three numbers: zero, one, and infinity or N or any arbitrary number you care to use. The point is, if something is possible, and there is any possible variation or duplication or repetition of it, then there will be essentiallyContinue reading “Zero One Infinity”