How a File Format Led to a Crossword Scandal.
In 2016 I designed a plain-text file format for crossword puzzle data, and then spent a couple of months building a micro-data-pipeline, scraping tens of thousands of crosswords from various sources. Then, having all those crosswords in a simple format, I wanted to see if there were any common grid patterns--and discovered egregious plagiarism by a major crossword editor that had gone on for years.
An essay called The psychology of learning from 2003 by Robert Strandh, director of the Département d'Informatique at Université Bordeaux, France, describes a trend in computing where close-mindedness (my phrase) risks opportunities for learning and effectiveness.
What Happened to the Webmaster?
(…) if you could stick a web interface in front of the SPIRES-HEP database people could access it directly and librarians wouldn’t have to spend all that time fielding requests from researchers and manually querying the database. It would be a massive time-saver and a way to distribute the content from the database to an even wider audience.
No to .io, yes to .xyz!
(…) by buying .io domains, one directly supports the still-actual behavior of the UK government defending their colonial history and acts against human rights.
No future.
A Future For Space Billionaires.
It’s imperative that we reject visions of the future designed for billionaires to extend their power and wealth for decades, if not centuries, to come. We need visions that bring us back down to Earth, and put the well-being of the many before the self-interest of the few.
Das Erdmännchen-Lied.
Article is from April but duh!
Corona-Zahlen: In Österreich herrscht ein intransparentes Chaos.
Open Data für Zahlen über den Stand der Corona-Infektionen ist in Österreich noch ein Fremdwort. Technisch ist das kein Problem. Es fehlt der politische Wille.
I happily chime in.
An ode to Syncthing.
Because Synthing is free and doesn’t depend on server-side storage, they don’t need to put weird or unnatural restrictions on you. You can use as much space as you have on disk. You can sync as many folders as you want. You can sync any folder, no matter where it’s located. You can sync with anyone in the world. In fact, you can sync any folder with any number of people. At no point have you to wonder “but will it work with my plan”? If your hardware allows it, it will work. As simple as that.
The great race to surrender our privacy.
(…) obtaining a reasonable amount of privacy is actually pretty easy if you’re ready to compromise. You’ll have to switch some of your everyday apps to a better equivalent (some of which you might actually find easier to use), and you’ll have to give up the notion of perfect privacy for reasonable privacy.
The Mediocre Programmer.
The truth is we're all mediocre programmers in some way. We all still ask questions and have to look up syntax and concepts in our day-to-day programming. Computers continue to evolve and programmers keep adding complexity to everyday programming tasks. It takes a lot of mental bandwidth to keep all of those concepts fresh in our mind.