jonstewart

This essay extends one anecdote involving 16+ year old teenagers to the unsupported conclusion that kids should have phones and those who wish to restrict that are all wealthy 1% right wing authoritarians. Then with the personal note it seems clear that the core of the essay stems from the author's own personal trauma/experience.

I don't disagree that big adtech's reliance on dopamine-driven addictive behavior is real evil, but regulations that at least wall kids off from that makes sense and there's all kinds of research to suggest as much, in contrast to a personal essay about a video online.

Then there’s not just the issue of whether the engine supports a particular syntactical feature but the issue of matching semantics. Perl/PCRE’s semantics are far different from POSIX’s and some implementations different semantics altogether (and quite reasonably).

I’ve got a 15 year old workstation that I’m breathing new life into, but fortunately starting from a higher baseline. 24GB of RAM is going to 96GB, and it turns out it should be able to use an NVMe drive, so have a card and an M2 drive on the way. The annoying thing is that the GTX 460 is no longer supported by the Nvidia driver so I’m back to nouveau. That might get replaced with something more modern. I had an old Mint installed and decided to blow it away with stock Debian, and Claude’s setting up nix VMs for itself to run in. It has been crazy how $4k in 2011 for an SR-2 system has yielded a long productive life for this box.

Citation? I’m sure he’s fine but $100M?

There should be a "hickory" option where the axe just bounces back at you or gets stuck in the round.

Am I missing something? Is TFA only 2-3 paragraphs of a generic metaphor, with no actual data/research from aviation (or other fields) to back up the core thesis?

It’s from the Melian Dialogue (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Melos) and it’s perhaps the most succinct embodiment of the realist school of international relations/politics.

I quote it here because the best way to get a day off is not to continue being weak, but to find strength, just as miners and railroad workers found strength in the 1870s.

"The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must." — Thucydides

Jacques Pepin's knuckles don't compress.

Statutory antitrust regulation would be fantastic. Instead of litigation, the regulators, corporations, and shareholders know when a business must split or divest. The firm files a plan, it gets approved, everyone wins except monopolists.

Point of order: Anthropic is the most important AI company now.

Publishers (and authors) have long had a beef with Amazon. It was Barnes and Noble that put the bookstores out of business, and then Amazon put them out of business and no one really cared.

Most of the early internet unleashed pent-up demand for greater connectivity. The main industry that was negatively impacted was journalism. Most small towns had their own newspapers, there were many great newspapers across the country, and their business model was advertising, especially classifieds. That was all vaporized, more or less. I don’t think search ads were an improvement, though Craigslist is.

I don't have an opinion on Instructure (except as a parent generally hating the overall app-ization of education; fortunately our district switched away from Canvas a couple years ago), their cybersecurity posture, or this particular event. My only point is that even if backups exist, working through a ransomware attack often takes time.

Also, ransomware gangs often exfil the data and threaten to release it if the ransom is not paid--blackmail, of a sort. It depends on the company and the data set whether this is effective as a tactic. But when it is, backups don't help.

Backups are definitely helpful in ransomwares, but before systems can be restored and brought back online, victim organizations still need to assess the scope of the breach, find the initial access vector, identify compromised accounts, and evict the threat actor. That can take time.

I hate using languages that only have signed integers. Using integers that can’t be negative fits many problems nicely and avoids the edge case of having to check for negative.

'"That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.'

The vast majority of government employees would not have access to MNPI.

I would argue that nondeterministic finite automata are both more significant and more practical.

Dave Cutler and Raymond Chen might like a word.

This might be the major dilemma in the tech industry today, where the natural tendencies of literalism and optimism among technologists has turned into a form of defensive credulity. The real world rigor of The New Yorker’s editorial standards and concerns about defamation necessitate this circumscribed style that rewards close reading and skepticism, but those aren’t in favor in the tech industry currently.

The absolute best thing about coding agents is not having to waste time on build systems. I had Claude code port my autotools scripts to meson (which uses ninja) and it’s been a huge quality of life improvement.

It's a fantastic museum and featured a bit in Stewart Brand's Maintenance of Everything (https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...).

I once explained to a friend as "imagine Umberto Eco made a museum when he was drunk, and he was a mean drunk."

Woodworking is an analogy that I like to use in deciding how to apply coding agents. The finished product needs to be built by me, but now I can make more, and more sophisticated, jigs with the coding agents, and that in turn lets me improve both quality and quantity.

We had a government agency working on stopping threat actors, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, but then DOGE ruined it. Now it’s a shell.

The C++ standards committee’s antiquated reliance on compiler “vendors” holds it back. They should adopt maintenance of clang and bless it as the reference compiler.

John Backus had some correspondence with Dijkstra that's worth a read: https://medium.com/@acidflask/this-guys-arrogance-takes-your...

Yes, make it black.

It reminds me a lot of Hans Reiser’s original white paper, which can be found at https://web.archive.org/web/20070927003401/http://www.namesy.... Add some embeddings and boom.

About 150 Iranian sailors drowned this morning, far from home, not a clear and present danger to anyone, no war declared on them by Congress, nor sanctioned by the UN. We could have demanded a surrender but instead we blew them up.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/mar/04/iran-war-...