…otherwise it's sparkling autocomplete.
It's only called AI if it comes from the AI region of France. Otherwise it's sparkling autocomplete.
The Fishbowl
Charles Miller's weblog, covering software development, online culture, and whatever assorted nerdery happens to cross my path.
Latest posts
Bite-size thoughts about AI
By law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we?
Usenet Spam: a Slice of History
Spam on Usenet was a big deal beacuse of the way Usenet worked. It was a broadcast protocol where every message posted to Usenet got copied to every server that carried the newsgroup it was posted to.
Political Discourse in the Early 21st Century
What happens when you debate what you think someone else believes, not what you believe.
#FirstSevenLanguages (Director’s Commentary)
One day, my boss pulled me into his office and said “Do you know Microsoft Active Server Pages?”
I don’t care. It’s not my problem.
The first priority of any software should be to do what the user is asking it to do. Don’t tell me that your time is worth more than mine.
Genuine People Personalities
All the doors in this spacecraft have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done!
Turning 101000
I’m not sure whether I prefer to be 0x28, or 101000.
Sithsplaining
Many things in Star Wars don’t make sense, but this one turns out to be pretty straightforward. Leia is badass.
The Java Deserialization Bug
Arbitrary object deserialization (or marshalling, or un-pickling, whatever your language calls it) is inherently unsafe, and should never be performed on untrusted data.
What the Facebook copyright hoax says about us
To members, these sites are vital means of maintaining contact with friends and loved ones, of not feeling left out of important parts of their lives.
My Blogging Workflow
Step 5: GOTO 3
The Death of Blogging
Sure, the component parts of blogging are everywhere now. The Internet is drowning in self-publishing, link-sharing, articles scrolling by in reverse-chronological order. But somewhere along the way, the soul of blogging was lost.
Deletionism
Once upon a time, I was dead-set against people deleting things from blogs. After ten years though, you find that parts of the site don’t smell so good…
Fuck Game of Thrones
There are increasingly flimsy justifications for the horrors of Game of Thrones. They motivate character A. Or they open up space for character B. But in the end it's obvious that it's all about providing the now-mandated quota of shock.