zorked

People in workspaces with crazy work hours pad the remaining hours with meetings, email, going from here to there and back here. Humans only work so many hours a day. Outlier humans who can work more …

Hmm, mass communication wasn't easy back in the time the First Amendment was written and the problem was "we don't have enough free communication". You could just as well argue tha…

I was sad when I had to switch to Spotify. Rdio was clean. Even today I don't understand Spotify. Rdio also had an amazing recommendation engine from Echo Nest. Even though that company got bough…

I don't know if it is or isn't the plagiarism thing but GNU tools were written with a very different, way more modern style than Unix tools. Unix was pretty much "do a quick loop using …

The Tahoe LAFS model is more that you spread your data over multiple providers. NAS at home, several VPS providers, or what have you. It feels like RAID in the network, and it allows very precise sett…

A big thing is that Tahoe LAFS can be run on untrusted computers.

Maxima (maxima.sf.net) is one way to do that (and a lot more). I even have it on my Android phone.

From what I remember back then it isn't that people assumed only gay people could catch it (otherwise why would absolutely everybody be paranoid about it)... ... but that plenty of people thought…

It's more than just what the arguments are about. Anywhere else in the world someone making points so quickly as in the videos would sound desperate and instantly "lose" the debate. Nob…

It just means phones ship with larger dictionaries. And I would guess this isn't even the proper way to handle German. The long words are just sequences of words not split by spaces when writing.…

I worked previously at a recommendation systems company where we also generated this sort of recommendation. It looked incredibly shoddy to us too, but what we found out was: - yes, people who just bo…

Is there any concrete evidence of Huawei backdoors?

That is indeed a huge problem. I would happily pay hundreds of monetary units a month for journalism, but I want to be able to stop when I want. There's also the awful "1,99 a month!" l…

To read the file on a modern terminal: iconv -f cp437 -t UTF-8 HARDWARE.DOC (I'm suprised that this worked so well. Also the zip file is a zipbomb without a containing directory, MS-DOS style.)…

alias grpe=grep Nothing comes close to the amount of time I saved with this one.

... but wouldn't that be a violation of the GDPR? :)

APUE is good, but I believe it has now been superseded by The Linux Programming Interface.

The protectionism was/is there in the US too. I unfortunately can't remember the details but there is a video in the Computer History Museum that tells a story about how computers from Germa…

The point is exactly running on untrusted devices - get a el cheapo server at some VPS provider and have it backup all your data + serve it from a always-on decent datacenter connection. I've als…

Five people understand the system. You refactor it. Now one person understands the system.

That reminds me of the very specific nag messages I get from Python 3 when I don't write parens around parameters for print... do what I want already.

Not American, in my country Der Spiegel is assumed to be the media of record in Germany, just like the NYT in the US.

> POSIX for example is still with us Amen to that. I bought a house, married, had kids, visited four continents and never had to worry about money just because at some point I decided "hmm, gu…

Very happy to see this published. I bought the book on Wolfenstein 3D and read every single word of it even though I don't much care for Wolf3D - the book is inherently interesting. I immediately…

Brazil had such an outburst in 2013, also seemingly spontaneous and enabled by social networks. Fast forward a few years and the president-elect is a far-right idiot who ran on a platform of conspirac…

It's perfectly normal to install new root certificates - for example, so that a company can sign internal websites (or for MITM proxies). It's incredibly shady to have random software instal…

Among others there's the issue that patching may be a seek-heavy operation. Downloading a 40GB file over a fiber connection is much faster than merging 8GB of new textures into a 32G file on a co…