Software licences neatly fall into three categories - open, closed, and the uncertain - a king of Schrödinger's licence, which must become one of the other two types in time.

Ignorance can only end with knowledge or death. Once someone fixes a mistake in their thinking, by understanding the truth, and how they made …

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Some centuries ago, nobles learned about the riches in their estate through their seneschal, who would walk about counting things.

10 lambs, 8 sheep, 1 exceptional sheep, 2 sickly sheep, 50 pounds of turnip, 400 pounds of cabbage,...

So on and on the counting would continue, so that the lord knew how much wealth he …

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Google's began by indexing massive portions of the internet, and rating sites according to which sites had the most links going towards them. You might state the general goal like this:

We will write a program to rank the quality of writing on websites.

This worked well for a while, but people with businesses saw how …

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'Traditional' food has fat, and has sugar if the region could import lots of it in the 1800's. Traditional Serbian food includes fat-fried meat with meat on it. Traditional Scottish food includes an egg, wrapped in meat, fried in bread-crumbs. I'm guessing most European countries follow suit.

These diets were developed …

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In recent years I've slowly changed my thinking on the concept of 'faith'. Or perhaps I've been thinking about attitudes, and just made very narrow use of a very broad word. Here's the thought:

Someone with a cool mind, an impartial attitude, and some very basic arithmetic can optimize. It's fashionable to make fun of …

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The xz fiasco has made fascinating reading, and brought up some real questions about open source development and overall safety. It's also brought up a slightly malformed thoughts on 'open source vs proprietary'.

If comparisons were to juxtapose operating system safety, then it seems misplaced, given that Windows, OSX, …

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Going to a gathering in a synagogue, my partner said something about the 'Jew party'. This raised a tiny heckle, but I couldn't see why. She'd invited me to a gathering with her community. Most were Jewish, some brought non-Jewish partners (like she brought me). What's the problem?

Her native language is Slavic, and …

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Every computer I go to seems to have the same sad story. A mess of files sit on the desktop. In 'Pictures', random pictures sit (the user downloaded them before making a half-hearted attempt to organize) with a few folders, some marked 'holiday' (which one?), and others given names by the computer. Renaming the lot …
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Some American made a video on Balkan history which flipped between saying that the Balkans has many cultures, then mentioned some war or similar catastrophe, then went on repeat. The video asserted bluntly (if not explicitly) that multiple cultures coexisting created all the strife in the Balkans.

I commented:

It …

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Neomutt exemplifies everything wrong with documentation.

Neomutt advertises itself as an email client for the terminal.

I like email, and I like terminal stuff, because it's easy to automate, and works with all my automation stuff.

That was me, and probably a great many other unsuspecting victims of neomutt.

However, …

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