Posting and Fascism · Recently, Janus Rose’s You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism crossed my radar on a hundred channels. It’s a smart piece that says smart things. But I ended up mostly disagreeing. I’m not saying you can post your way out of Fascism, but I do think it’s gonna be hard to build the opposition without a lot of posting. The what and especially the where matter. But the “posting is useless” stance is dangerously reductive ...
December 24th Lasagna · We had thirteen people at my Mom’s house this last Christmas. One of our traditions is a heroic Lasagna for Christmas Eve, a specialty of a family member. This year we asked them for the recipe and they agreed, but would rather remain uncredited. It’s called “Very Rich Red Sauce and four-Cheese Lasagna” ...
[1 comment]
[1 comment]
Photo Philosophizing · What happened was, I went to Saskatchewan to keep my mother company, and got a little obsessed about photo composition and complexity. Which in these troubled times is a relief ...
[3 comments]
[3 comments]
In The Minority · That’s us. I assume you’re among those horrified at the direction of politics and culture in recent years and especially recent weeks, in the world at large and especially in America. We are a minority. We shouldn’t try to deny it, we should be adults and figure out how to deal with it ...
[8 comments]
[8 comments]
Protocol Churn · Bluesky and the Fediverse are our best online hopes for humane human conversation. Things happened on 2025/01/13; I’ll hand the microphone to Anil Dash, whose post starts “This is a monumental day for the future of the social web.” ...
[3 comments]
[3 comments]
AI Noise Reduction · What happened was, there was a pretty moon in the sky, so I got out a tripod and the big honkin’ Tamron 150-500 and fired away. Here’s the shot I wanted to keep ...
[7 comments]
[7 comments]
Bitcoin Lessons · Here we are, it’s 2025 and Bitcoin is surging. Around $100K last time I looked. While its creation spews megatons of carbon into our atmosphere, investors line up to buy it in respectable ETFs, and long-term players like retirement pools and university endowments are looking to get in. Many of us are finding this extremely annoying. But I look at Bitcoin and I think what I’m seeing is Modern Capitalism itself, writ large and in brutally sharp focus ...
[5 comments]
[5 comments]
QRS: Dot-matching Redux · Recently I posted Matching “.” in UTF-8, in which I claimed that you could match the regular-expression “
[1 comment]
.” in a UTF-8 stream with either four or five states in a byte-driven finite automaton, depending how you define the problem. That statement was arguably wrong, and you might need three more states, for a total of eight. But you can make a case that really, only four should be needed, and another case calling for quite a few more. Because that phrase “depending how you define the problem” is doing a lot of work ...[1 comment]
QRS: Matching “.” in UTF-8 · Back on December 13th, I posted a challenge on Mastodon: In a simple UTF-8 byte-driven finite automaton, how many states does it take to match the regular-expression construct “
[Update: Lots more on this subject and some of the material below is arguably wrong, but just “arguably”; see Dot-matching Redux.] ...
[10 comments]
.”, i.e. “any character”? Commenter Anthony Williams responded, getting it almost right I think, but I found his description a little hard to understand. In this piece I’m going to dig into what . actually means, and then how many states you need to match it.[Update: Lots more on this subject and some of the material below is arguably wrong, but just “arguably”; see Dot-matching Redux.] ...
[10 comments]
1994 Hong Kong Adventure · This story is about Hong Kong and mountains and ferries and food and beer. What happened was, there’s a thirty-year-old picture I wanted to share and it brought the story to mind. I was sure I’d written it up but can’t find it here on the blog, hard as I try, so here we go. Happy ending promised! ...
[2 comments]
[2 comments]
QRS: Parsing Regexps · Parsing regular expression syntax is hard. I’ve written a lot of parsers and,for this one, adopted a couple of new techniques that I haven’t used before. I learned things that might be of general interest ...
[2 comments]
[2 comments]
QRS: Quamina Regexp Series · Implementing regular expressions is hard. Hard in interesting ways that make me want to share the lessons. Thus this series, QRS for short ...
[4 comments]
[4 comments]
Remembering Bonnie · The murderer I emailed with is still in prison. And the software that got him pissed off at me still runs, so I ran it. Now here I am to pass on the history and then go all geeky. Here’s the tell: If you don’t know what a “filesystem” is (that’s perfectly OK, few reasonable adults need to) you might want to stay for the murderer story then step off the train ...
[8 comments]
[8 comments]
TV In 2024 · It’s probably part of your life too. What happened was, we moved to a new place and it had a room set up for a huge TV, so I was left with no choice but to get one. Which got me thinking about TV in general and naturally it spilled over here into the blog. There is good and bad news ...
[8 comments]
[8 comments]
Why Not Bluesky · As a dangerous and evil man drives people away from Xitter, many stories are talking up Bluesky as the destination for the diaspora. This piece explains why I kind of like Bluesky but, for the moment, have no intention of moving my online social life away from the Fediverse ...
[4 comments]
[4 comments]
Privacy, Why? · They’re listening to us too much, and watching too. We’re not happy about it. The feeling is appropriate but we’ve been unclear about why we feel it ...
[3 comments]
[3 comments]
C2PA Progress · I took a picture looking down a lane at sunset and liked the way it came out, so I prettied it up a bit in Lightroom to post on Mastodon. When I exported the JPG, I was suddenly in the world of C2PA, so here’s a report on progress and problems. This article is a bit on the geeky side but I think the most interesting bits concern policy issues. So if you’re interested in online truth and disinformation you might want to read on ...
[5 comments]
[5 comments]
LLMM · The ads are everywhere; on bus shelters and in big-money live-sportscasts and Web interstitials. They say Apple’s products are great because Apple Intelligence and Google’s too because Google Gemini. I think what’s going on here is pretty obvious and a little sad. AI and GG are LLMM: Large Language Mobile Marketing! ...
[2 comments]
[2 comments]
Cursiveness · I’ve found relief from current personal stress in an unexpected place: what my mother calls “penmanship”, i.e. cursive writing that is pleasing to the eye and clearly legible. (Wikipedia’s definition of “penmanship” differs, interestingly. Later.) Herewith notes from the handwriting front ...
[5 comments]
[5 comments]
