A little change of pace. As part of the Not Secret But Not Entirely Documented Either plan to save the Internet, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time with lisp weenies. The parenthesis are rubbing off on me, I think primarily because you can stuff lisp into tinier nooks than even Linux fits. One […]
writing
I’m hoping that the net time I get a promotional postcard from eyebuydirect, they’ll have added another “&” onto my fully-escaped surname, and so on, until it overruns the postcard’s CSS block into the street. A voice-mail from Central Computer: my computer is fixed, I can come and pick it up. It felt very like […]
The equivalent of “time to crate” in conversations with me, is the length of time it takes someone — not always me! — to ask “Have you read Seeing Like a State/Tyranny of Structurelessness”? It was IMMORAL to roll one’s eyes at this point, because obviously it is awesome that anarchist (or CIA, depending on […]
A throwaway comment from a friend noted that their scintilla of respect for Balaji Srinivasan had actually increased after he made his lose-lose bet on Bitcoin reaching $1 million dollars in 90 days. I agree! I (currently) approve of betting on beliefs! Or at least, trying to tie more weight to a stated opinion than […]
I wonder how many socioeconomic classes I’ve really hopped? There’s definitely a version of my bio that let’s me sound rags to riches: Basildon (so déclassé even the rest of Essex looked down on it) to Oxford and a weird proximity to Tory grandees of the future, to Silicon Valley where I sat close on […]
I have a couple of friends who (like my other friend below, who is also not made up) are very irritated by the non-stop AI/GPT coverage. I’m really intrigued by the hard and somewhat arbitrary line between those — like me, I admit — who are just endlessly fascinated by all its developments, and those […]
So I’ll keep this one short: it feels like I’m getting back into my stride, and I managed to knock out 2000 words on cognitive liberty and decentralization for a (shh secret) magazine that Mike Masnick is editing for us at the Foundation. The bad news is that my brief was 800-1000 words, but hey, […]
My PC died yesterday, screaming in pain as its brain heated over boiling point. I went out to Central Computer, San Francisco’s local computer store to get it a new fan. I got the wrong one of course, but jury-rigged it in anyway. It didn’t help: I think the CPU cooler may have died too, […]
Exasperated, I once said to a friend: “You can’t behave like you’re right all the time!”. She looked confused. “How else am I supposed to act?” she said. Strange attractors It’s unlikely that I’m correct on everything: even more unlikely when I’m in a minority. I don’t like music, much. But so many other people […]
I remember reading at some impressionable age that there was “no such thing as writer’s block”. I don’t recall the context, but I’m guessing it was the same as my friends who said “there’s no such thing as jetlag”: a small crucifix to wield at the devil itself, rather than a statement of fact. I […]