Like the 640k RAM thing attributed to Bill Gates, the five computers quote seems to be a fabrication from a later age, invented to teach us a lesson about the futility of grand predictions. It’s a shame, though, because the five computers prediction looks like it may come true very soon.
Fish are nothing like us, except that they are sentient beings.
We mustn’t deny that when we see the gasping gills of an expiring fish on a dock, there was something it was like to be that fish: that it was sentient, and it could feel pain, and it did suffer.
Biases, biases.
How STRANGE are your study animals?
A new framework for animal-behaviour research will help to avoid sampling bias — ten years on from the call to widen the pool of human participants in psychology studies beyond the WEIRD.
GDocs is the new Geocities.
A Collective Booklet for Computational Womxn.
Relevant: “We discovered writer/digital innovator Carly Ayres by way of her homepage—an editable Google Doc made long before such sites became the design trend du jour.”
The New York Times got a new kind of logic puzzle: Vertex.
Why we can’t stop fighting about cancel culture.
For those who are doing the calling out or the canceling, the odds are still stacked against them. They’re still the ones without the social, political, or professional power to compel someone into meaningful atonement, to do much more than organize a collective boycott.
The Last Line Effect.
heard somewhere, that mountain-climbers often fall off in the last few dozen meters of their ascent. Not because they are tired; they are simply too joyful about almost reaching the top - they anticipate the sweet taste of victory, get less attentive, and make some fatal mistake. I guess something similar happens to programmers.
WienerScript adds syntactic sugar to JavaScript that makes it less forgiving, more emotional, and even painful to write, allowing you to do less with more code.
SCHAU MA MOL {
I MAN JA NUR (calc('+', 1, 2))
} LECK OASCH (err) {
GSCHISSN GRISSN ('invalid operation')
}
The market is just humans. It's humans all the way down.
Markets, discrimination, and “lowering the bar”.
Townsend-Greenspan was unusual for an economics firm in that the men worked for the women (we had about twenty-five employees in all). My hiring of women economists was not motivated by women's liberation. It just made great business sense. I valued men and women equally, and found that because other employers did not, good women economists were less expensive than men. Hiring women . . . gave Townsend-Greenspan higher-quality work for the same money . . .
Goldman Sucks.
Oh look, big business releases a font you can't criticise it with.
(…) the license for the font forbids you to 'disparage or suggest any affiliation with or endorsement by Goldman Sachs.'