It is 2023 and I have graduated from college. My dissertation is comprop: Computational Propaganda on reddit.com (2013-2022) . Check it out, feedback welcome. I am looking for a job, the kind that pays dollars. Please email me if you know of any.
Ali: There are guns at Aqaba. Lawrence: They face the sea, Sherif Ali, and cannot be turned round. From the landward side, there are no guns at Aqaba. Ali: With good reason. It cannot be approached from the landward side. Lawrence: Certainly the Turks don’t dream of it. Aqaba is over there. It’s only a matter of going. – Lawrence of Arabia (1962) Hey there. It’s been a long time since I’ve written…
I’ve been kicking around the idea of writing an essay on why this year will be different for the Cowboys, unlike so many others. I truly believe that they could win a Super Bowl. Of course, you can never know that as a certainty, as any number of wrinkles can get in the way: an injury to a star player, a single bad playoff game, or a team that is simply better. Still, on today, the start of…
If you’ve done web programming for any length of time, you might too feel like we are at the start of some new era. For years, we’ve been using frameworks like Django and Rails in languages like Python and Ruby and PHP which use the old request-response cycle (for lack of a better term). Basically, a request comes into the server from a client, the server renders up an HTML web page, and then…
I love movies. I think what movies you like says a lot about you as a person. One of my favorite things that I’ve done for years now is to go see movies by myself on a weeknight. Some people think seeing movies by yourself is weird, but it is really relaxing. The benefit of doing it on a weeknight is usually you are either the only person in the theater or one of the few. I’ve decided to write a…
I love movies. I think what movies you like says a lot about you as a person. One of my favorite things that I’ve done for years now is to go see movies by myself on a weeknight. Some people think seeing movies by yourself is weird, but it is really relaxing. The benefit of doing it on a weeknight is usually you are either the only person in the theater or one of the few. I’ve decided to write a…
Pat: Mom, I…for what, I can’t apologize. I’m not gonna apologize for this. You know what I will do? I will apologize on the behalf of Ernest Hemingway, because that’s who’s to blame here. Pat, Sr.: Yeah, have Ernest Hemingway call us and apologize, too. The above dialogue is from the great Silver Linings Playbook . I found myself rewatching it recently because I found myself relating a bit too…
Good old Steve Yegge. For several years from time to time you’d get one of his rather opinionated, well-informed, and always entertaining blog posts on topics relevant to anyone doing computer programming. He’s been relatively quiet for several years now, but I’ve always thought one of his most memorable pieces was The Next Big Language . He wrote that just over seven years ago (wow), and although…
I should start this post by listing my Bitcoin “credentials”, if you will. While I never drank the kool-aid to the extent some have, I got quite excited by the notion of cryptocurrency towards the end of last year. Since then I have built a couple of proof of concepts based on it, one being a consumer-friendly DRM system , the other, a Reddit-clone which uses Bitcoin for voting . I also turned a…