I've never been able to focus.

I'll be cleaning, or messing with spreadsheets for work, and all of a sudden I wonder 'could you type prose in the international phonetic alphabet (IPA), so you could put accents into a book properly?'. And then I think 'can I use the IPA as a keyboard layout, like I use the Polish …

I found out about the Russian invasion of Ukraine from a meme-site, where someone had cobbled together all the public footage available from the ground. The sirens, the little lights in the sky, the military aeroplanes, and the sound of bombs.

Jumping to Youtube (where I watch news channels), I found they have less …

I always find what I need with Duck Duck go. I've heard others don't, and I have a suspicion they're using it wrong.

Anyone used to Google might search for a film by typing in 'that guy with the beard', and find exactly what they're looking for, because Google's algorithm has cached thousands of similar results, and …

Sysadmins refer to the low-level scripted hacks as 'the background noise of the internet'.

So apparently if the internet could speak, it would sound like

Let me in, I am admin. Password is admin. Let me in. I am root. Let me in...are you still there? Let me in...

People often talk in terms of the false dichotomy between pragmatic software use, and ethical software use.

'Us pragmatic folks', they begin, 'just want to use what works'. We should understand of course that they have nothing against people who have principles, but would prefer functioning to non-functioning …

I have doubts about self-driving cars. The entire argument rests on analogy with software translators.

Software translators began as simple dictionaries. You type in 'cat', it returns 'le chat'. Next, programmers started to feed in simple rules, so 'black cats' could return 'les chats noire'. The rules became so …

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In one …

Printers never waged war on pens, they simply made pens redundant.

I suspect that if robots ever take over, we'll go the way of the pen rather than the dodo.

Once machines can bake bread, calculate the proper tax rate and generally take care of what needs done, and do so cheaply, humanity can take a breather. I'm not …