Something stinks about 'social contract theory'. They way we live - the philosophers say - has the form of some contract where we relinquish the complete freedom to do just anything our bodies might do, and in return we acquire peace. This thing, where it's all chilled, and we have an understanding, is very much like a …

Obsidian is a note-taking app with a proprietary licence. This makes it prone to the usual abusive behaviours. But I only hear good things about it: Obsidian is ultimately just a markdown editor, so you can extract all of your notes in plain text any time you want, without fear of lock-in. It sounds like the users are …

Formal education in programming is surprisingly useless. Some people with a formal education in 'Computer Science' can tell you about set theory, but can't pick an appropriate database for a project. They can tell you when to represent a number with hex, but can't clone a repo. And worst of all, most of the …

I see a standard story, repeated in FOSS spaces. It starts with an exchange. Open source projects are not actually as anarchic as people think. They work very much like a corporation, with a single person in charge, in a pyramid structure. I hear these repeated gripes that people do not understand open source …

IT documentation has a disease: in-text links. The disease-inducing thinking is quite clear: someone writing the documentation writes 'install the drivers for your graphics card', and then provides a link to how to install graphics cards because they saw others do that sort of thing. But once you accept the general …

Could you drive the car over to my sister's place? Then she'll give you the KEYS once you're there. What a confusing request! What keys could this person mean? The car KEYS, for the car that she needs. You'll get the KEYS once you're there. Now you have found the confusion - this person is not thinking clearly. You …

We - the open source zealots - talk a lot about corporations with unkind interests quashing the movement, pushing their proprietary code, and violating everyone's 'privacy'. We don't talk much about push-back from coders, but it exists, because writing in the open is scary. We can say to engineers, 'your users will be …

I am a morlock - a naturally technocratic creature, comfortable with the darkness. When the pandemic hit, I heard the shock waves across the internet, and noticed every day how little my life had changed. It was at times, almost a nice excuse to sit and tap on the keyboard, and make dinner slowly to the sound of Nine …