History, sort of
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Future infamy
Funny thing happened in 1857. The US Supreme Court heard the case Dred Scott v. Sandford. Their ruling was that African Americans could never be considered citizens of the US, and that Congress could not prohibit the practice of slavery in the territories of the rapidly expanding United States. The decision was written by Roger… Continue reading
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This pretty much sums it up
Amazing post on Reddit:“…whatever else there is to say, the most important thing about Donald Trump, the thing that is obvious from watching him speak for just 14 seconds, is that he is profoundly stupid. Whatever it is that he might be talking about or doing at any given moment, it’s clear that while he… Continue reading
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Orange Gangster
The term “gangster empire” seems pretty apt. The orange baby has, throughout its adult life, functioned like a crime boss (or at least like what normal people understand a “crime boss” to be. Source material: Lucky Loser. “We have now entered a new phase of Western-led global savagery — prefigured by the genocide in Gaza… Continue reading
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Dispatch from nerdland
Ars Technica reports that Microsoft has just released (or re-released, sort of) the MS-DOS Editor that shipped in 1991 with MS-DOS 5.0. I used that version of MS-DOS, and remember it pretty fondly, even though by then I was mostly using Macs. And I even remember the editor, which in those days was just called… Continue reading
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Just the latest version of nonsense
The Pessimists Archive posted an article about how modern refrigeration really started in the US in the late 1840s, when the inventor Dr. John Gorrie served ice to guests in the summer, in Florida. He got a patent on his new process a couple years later. But this was Florida, which has been…well, Florida…for a… Continue reading
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Imaginary walls
People create and use technology to do something they think they want to do. Typewriters, then word processing machines, then word processing programs on personal computers have all been technology for writing a lot of words quickly and easily, and being able to go back and revise and change. This used to be a lot… Continue reading
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There are some methods
(and then there’s the madness…) Most of the US, at least the part that gets reported in nearly any sort of media, seems to be baffled by the randomness and ignorance of the orange baby and its regime. The ongoing saga of the tariffs, for example, makes no effing sense. They’re “reciprocal” (they’re not); they’re… Continue reading
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A dying empire and its assassins
Chris Hedges’ piece The Rule of Idiots rings pretty true and it’s pretty depressing. Are we really amidst the death of the American empire, the empire that never really admitted to itself that it was an empire? Or is trumpism our society can recover from? “The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots.”… Continue reading
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“I’m from the government, and…”
It’s difficult to fully understand complex structures. That’s kind of tautological; “complex” already means “difficult to understand”, at least in part. But never fear; I have a point, and it’s this: in the same way we understand the complex physics of the universe by using simplified models that are “close enough” in most cases, we understand the… Continue reading
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Freedomism
“Freedom” is a word you see a lot lately, at least in the US. But nobody knows what it is. Or more to the point, everybody knows what it is, but each individual idea is different. Two recent books have new and thoughtful takes on what freedom might be. The Dawn of Everything by David… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my newsletter, Artisanal Scribbles, where I’m grappling with writing, authentic human authorship, integrity, and the craft of beauty in the AI age. You can also find some of my old software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly wrote tiny utilities in Python and shell scripts. I’m mostly retired from coding nowadays.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- Thought Experiment
- Can any good come of any of it?
- What is it about Florida?
- Why does anybody listen to this grifter?
- Fashionable or able to fashion
Categories
Artificial Intelligence
Chocolatiana
Essays
History, sort of
Immorality
Incompetence
Quotations
Resistance
Stories
Tales from the Forest
Technicalities
Tragedy
Unanticipated Consequences