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Abuse of grace
Sarah McBride is a member of Congress, representing Delaware. She’s the first member of Congress to be openly transgender, and the highest level elected official in the US to be so as well. Earlier this week she had this to say as part of a conversation on Ezra Klein’s podcast: “On social media, we have 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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Home-cooked software
This article is about efforts to design and build “malleable software.” It’s an idea I think many people have had, fleetingly, and immediately dismissed because software seems to be so immutably brittle. Even a “flexible” program that can do many different things — emacs, for example, or photoshop (I guess) — can only do the 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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Hammering spaghetti
Tech companies — and probably others as well — are in a frenzy to find an actual use for AI. I’ve been asked to “look for ways to apply it” as well. It just seems to me like the old saw about having a hammer, then thinking everything looks like a nail. Like a nice 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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Lest we forget
At McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: LEST WE FORGET THE HORRORS: AN UNENDING CATALOG OF TRUMP’S CRUELTIES, COLLUSIONS, CORRUPTIONS, AND CRIMES. by Emily Greenberg and Cliff Mayotte 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 located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.
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