Technicalities
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Personal Software
AI coding assistance makes it possible (even relatively easy) to create applications for your own personal use. They can be weird, quirky, and “missing features.” It won’t have all those dozens of menu items, hundreds of icons, and thousands of features that commercial software contains in order to cater to every possible customer. Because there’s… Continue reading
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This explains a lot
I’ve often been baffled by economists, who comport themselves as super-smart academics who have everything figured out, but in practice make claims that are absurd, predictions that are incredibly, obviously stupid and wrong, and analyses built on unreasonable, imagined bases. In today’s post, Paul Krugman (an economist with the distinction of having won the fake… Continue reading
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Think about this
The orange baby’s administration is zeroing out the ability of the US government to compete with the rest of the world — including actual enemies — in cybersecurity. To the extent this is explained at all, it’s attributed to commercial vendors wanting no oversight, and “MAGA loyalists don’t care because they aren’t interested in leadership… Continue reading
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Navigation versus implementation
Years ago I designed mobile phone software. At the time, phones were just beginning to be able to connect to the internet, so we had a web browser. Since the platform was a phone, it made sense to us to provide a way to automatically dial a phone number you found on a web page.… Continue reading
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Two approaches
There are (at least) two general approaches to creating something technically new. At least I think there are. One is externally oriented. The creator notices or is given a situation or problem that somebody else experiences, and the creator tries to come up with a technical solution. The other is internally oriented. The creator finds… Continue reading
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About prepping
“Prepping” is a trendy meme, and it seems to usually means preparing a backpack with stuff you’ll need when you leave the city or town and go live a life of brave, individual survivalism in the woods. That is delusional; a fantasy that comes from watching too many movies. A lot of aspects of our… Continue reading
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Tattoos?
I need to first establish that I do not have any tattoos, and I do not anticipate ever wanting to get one. I entirely lack whatever it is that motivates people to get tattoos. Nevertheless I respect it quite a lot. It strikes me as a very human thing, and in a way a sort… Continue reading
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Simple tools
There are certain things I very much like about old-school unix software. I’m talking about the command-line utilities that were each designed to do one thing very well. To accomplish a more complex task, or in modern lingo, “workflow,” you could easily combine several programs, sending the output of one to the input of another,… Continue reading
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It figures
There is a competition called the International Math Olympiad (IMO). It’s an international competition for high school students. It consists of six questions that competitors have to answer within a time limit. There are only six questions, but these are extremely difficult questions, of course. At least at the level of excellent, but pre-university mathematicians.… Continue reading
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Back to the future
I was recently struggling with Yet Another bloated, unwieldy commercial application when I suddenly remembered the Unix “philosophy.” It’s been codified lots of times, but maybe most succinctly by Peter Salus: – Write programs that do one thing and do it well. – Write programs to work together. – Write programs to handle text streams,… 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
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- Fashionable or able to fashion
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