The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery has just published my editorial, "Competitive Compatibility: Let's Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Giants," explaining how interoperability was once an engine for competition and user empowerment – and how that ended.
The last time I wrote about the timezone database on this blog, the database was under threat from a lawsuit. Fortunately that lawsuit w...
This is what "democratization" looks like
An abridged version of this article appeared in Whole Earth 106, Winter 2001, pages 74-77.
Imagine a Silicon Valley strategy implemented with the United States phone system 100 years ago. It's not a pretty picture.
Link to: https://popular.info/p/apples-texas-problem
Accounts that have never been disabled include the accounts for Rocket League (a game whose Mac support [Epic discontinued in January 2020][rl]), and separately, Unreal Engine. My understanding is that none of those accounts are affected by Apple’s decision not to reinstate the Fortnite developer account.
An axis of the CIA, Big Tech and the DNC-allied wing of the corporate media spread an absolute lie in the weeks before the 2020 election. We now have definitive proof.
Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death
This month marks the publication of "The Actual Star," a new, wildly ambitious, wildly successful novel by Monica Byrne, spanning 3,000 years of history from the ancient Maya to a distant future.
There is a subfield of robotics research called “sim-to-real” (sim2real) whereby one attempts to solve a robotic task in simulation, and the...
Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement…
A 2014 paper predicted U.S.
Very weird, isn't it?
I listened to this song last night.
The story of why I stopped taking photos
Reading a good book is a great joy. And recommending a good book is almost as enjoyable. I’ve long been fascinated by books on espionage, and this contributed in no small part to me eventually joining the Dutch intelligence world, and later, rejoining it in some fashion. If you have favorite books that should be on…
Transcript of interview
Texts on this and that.
Apple v. Epic indeed…
The fundamental cause was a wrong attitude towards the core question: who is responsible for safety?
Domain registriert bei united-domains.de
TLDR: “make the web do apps” is not a disruptive strategy. It's like surviving The Great Oxidation Event, then saying “make anaerobes do photosynthesis”. Ok, but the blue-green algae got there first, so photosynthesis is no longer asymmetric. It is symmetric competition.
And other misadventures
