Alan Turing invented the primordial computer, and people felt so eager to imagine that the ticker-tape might come alive and have a chat that he immediately had to invent a test to stop them waffling about 'what it means to be conscious'. Nothing has ever passed this test, but chatbot companies do love to say they do, …

A mild ride looms. It looks like action will commence at any moment, but those moments turn into a sensible withdrawal or a short book review. Ghost Dog is a samurai, because he read a book on how to be a samurai. This makes no sense in the modern USA, so he must create sense out of it. The film quotes extensively from …

Recfiles let you write and check plain-text notes. They look like this: %rec: Book %key: slug %sort: year month slug: thinkingexperience author: H. H. Price title: Thinking and Experience year: 1953 publisher: Harvard University Press, Cambridge slug: yugocaves author: Dr Neven Krešić title: Karst I Pećine Jugoslavije …

Git servers like Github and Gitlab are a complete mess, because they try to appeal to every use-case. If they were a person, they would be someone who says 'yea, me too' so reflexively that everyone gives them pitying looks. Each could do better as a more specialized service for a particular use. But we don't need …

I bought a book called 'Thus Space Zarathustra', full of turgid language, making it a challenge to read. Nietzsche wrote the book in the 19th century, so he's old, and the book is old, but why translate it in faux-archaic English? People of the past didn't say 'here we are, living in the olden-days'; Nietzsche …

When I complain about struggling with vague language, people often tell me 'you know what I mean'. This always makes me think about the South Park episode called Starvin' Marvin in Space (season 3, episode 13), and the language 'Marklar'. On the planet Marklar, everyone is called 'Marklar'. The language ('Marklar') is …

Two factor? Which two factors? Something you have, something you know, and something... No, not in theory - in reality. Which two factors? You need a PIN from the phone to access resources, such as email. Do you have email on your phone? Because that's one 'factor': your phone. Once someone controls your phone, they …

For the past month or so, I've been using the standard editor: ed. It's standard because it's old and has outlived everything which came before it. And it's so old that using it has become a bit of a meme, but it has lessons for anyone who wants to take it seriously. Ken Thompson created ed to run on a typewriter …

I know two ways to be wrong very well, but people have more ways to be wrong, and I don't know the rest very well at all. But I'd like to. The first way to be wrong - and the most wrong someone can be - is to make a contradiction. People do this when they get their sums wrong, miscounting how much money to give to a …