Sierpiński, Sierpiński, Sierpiński.
Constructing the Sierpinski triangle.
The triangle is named after Wacław Sierpiński and as fractals are wont the pattern appears in many places, so there are many different ways of constructing the triangle on a computer.
Trigger warning: desperation.
Somehow, after 290,000 years of living without anyone having the power to tell us what to do, and with every member of a community having about as much as everyone else, most of us are now subject to command, and with immensely less than a favoured few. Why? Of course, in the state societies we live in, there’s no mystery about the many accepting their subordination to elites. While elites are vastly outnumbered, they control the army, the police, the state apparatus. An attempt to seize elite wealth would be met by overwhelming coercive power, and even successful revolutions have a dismal record of largely replacing one elite with another, usually at the expense of many lives, mostly of the poor. So, for those outside the elite world, their least-worst option is to accept subordination, perhaps with individual or collective attempts at amelioration, depending on the specifics of the political environment.
Using sqlite3 as a notekeeping document graph with automatic reference indexing.
Patterns of Distributed Systems.
Use logical timestamps as a version for a value to allow ordering of values across servers.
Vanessa Daou.
The Vernacular Effect: anonymous snapshots and the unlearning of everything.
Somehow relevant: What Happened to Peter Daou?
The Internet of Landlords Makes Renters of Us All.
There’s no security to be found in hoping that we aren’t evicted by the platforms that have unaccountable power over us. By e-commerce giants kicking sellers out of the store, by gig companies deactivating workers’ accounts, by manufacturers bricking our devices. This techno-economic infrastructure has become too critical to allow it to be controlled by the grace of digital landlords. We have to make platforms meet the needs of the public, not the other way around. Otherwise their cut of the economy will only grow larger and larger until there’s nothing left to extract.
Putin’s Hybrid War on Truth in Ukraine is a Threat to Us All.
The way to war is a slow one. First the flight, then the ride to the station, then the rickety overnight train in the carriage with a reedy mattress and the offering of bread and vodka. Then a drive in a Lada over pock-holed streets under a thin dawn, past fields of black earth, through checkpoints and over broken bridges. Until a place so nondescript is reached you wouldn’t realise the line of trees in the distance cover trenches that separate Ukraine from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic. So, you reach for your phone, raise your arm and take a picture of this – the frontline of war.
What's Inside the EU Green Pass QR Code?
A day in the life of a professional software engineer.
The QA team rejected the sort implementation I did last week. I’d written a basic Bubble Sort, and QA wanted to beat O(n2) for the average case. No problem, I switched to a Merge Sort and was done by lunchtime.
How to Handle Secrets on the Command Line.
Avoid leaking the secret in the command string eg. with
"$(< secret_file.txt)"