I love that article. There are also ones about dates and times. The more you deal with dates and times, the more you realize how messed up they are.

It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.

As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser “The Internet”. And that’s the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.

Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.

My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.

The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.

The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.

That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.

Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.

There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.

They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.

I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.

It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.

It’s not just Europe, it’s everywhere.

Before the British Mandate, Iraq was part of the Ottoman Empire, and as Wikipedia says:

Throughout most of the period of Ottoman rule (1533–1918) the territory of present-day Iraq was a battle zone between the rival regional empires and tribal alliances

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iraq

Before the Ottomans were the Mongols, who slaughtered their way across the world.

The only kind of “stable” period was when the Abbasid Caliphate had Baghdad at its core – but that only meant that the border wars were happening elsewhere in the middle east.

When the Europeans got to the Americas, they killed a lot of natives. But, they also made alliances with some of the natives who were eager to have a new ally in their territorial conflict with other native groups, because, surprise surprise, before the Europeans got there the native groups were in a constant state of conflict over territory too.

The history of humanity is conflict. Even chimps fight brutal fights with other chimp groups over territory, so it goes back to our non-human ancestors.

There’s nothing unique about Europeans and conflicts over territory.

The whole reason that Google exists today is that their PageRank algorithm was a great way to identify good content. At its basics, it worked by counting the number of pages that linked to a certain page. More incoming links meant the page was more useful. It didn’t matter how many relevant search terms you stuffed into your page. What matters was votes from other people, expressed in the form of linking to your page.

But, that algorithm failed for 2 reasons. One is that it became cheaper and easier to put up sites that linked to sites you wanted to promote. The other was that people stopped blogging on their own blogs, and stopped creating their own websites, and instead used walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. That meant it was hard to measure links back to a site, and that it was easier to create fake links.

So, now it’s a constant war of SEO people vs. Google Search Quality people, and the Google people are losing. Sometimes there are brief victories for Google which result in good Reddit results appearing higher up. Then the SEO people catch up and either pollute Reddit and/or push Reddit links off the first page.

It would all be really depressing even if it weren’t for generative AI being used to pollute everything. With LLMs coming in and vomiting their content all over everything, we might be forced back to the bad old days of Yahoo where some individual human curated lists of good things and 99% of content was invisible.

I’m a woman and I have never needed to chart 28 days.

Is this because you don’t care when your next period is? Or because you don’t need to record it to remember it?

I can imagine a modern woman might not care if she always has menstrual products on hand or nearby. But, it might have been more meaningful in ancient times when there might have been more taboos associated with menstruation, plus it might have been more important to know as part of family planning. And, it might have been much less convenient to carry around whatever was needed to handle menstruation.

Also, in a modern world where calendars are everywhere, I can imagine someone might say “ok, so my next period will be in early July”. But, there was a time when days and months were not tracked, or were only tracked by priests, etc. In that kind of situation, I could imagine it might be useful to count the days until the next period was expected. On the other hand, a primitive society probably spends a lot more time outdoors and sees the moon a lot more often, so it might be just as easy to go “ok, so my next period will be when the moon’s 3/4 full”.

28 notches means that the bone had 29 sections, which more closely matches a lunar month than a typical menstrual period. But, I could see it being used either way.

In English common law, a “lunar month” traditionally meant exactly 28 days or four weeks, thus a contract for 12 months ran for exactly 48 weeks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_month

So, depending on the legal framework, a 28 day marker could be very useful. If they were actually tracking the moon, you’d think it would be 29 units even though a lunar month can vary between about 29.1 and 29.9 days. Then again, 28 notches on a stick means 29 sections, so…?

It’s interesting that a woman’s menstrual cycles is approx 28.1 days on average, with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That means 28 days is a lot closer to the average menstrual cycle than the average lunar month. But, the standard deviation is a lot greater.

When I first code something up, I think of it as a first draft, and I expect maybe 5ish typos / brainos per 100 lines. Only a few times in my life have I finished writing a few hundred lines of code, tried to compile / run it, and not seen at least a few errors.

When I don’t see errors, it’s almost always because somehow I managed to not compile / run the code at all. Like, one of my typos / brainos managed to cause it to skip that entire new block of code. Only once or twice has it happened because I actually wrote error-free code the first time. And, let me tell you, that perfect code sucked up so much more time than the more typical bad code.

With the bad code, I see the various errors, quickly fix them, and those errors convince me that the compiler / interpreter has actually seen all the new stuff and judged it. But, with perfect-from-the-start code, I now have to go in and throw in print statements, or step through a debugger to convince myself that yes, the system actually made it into that function and actually did execute those statements.

It worries me that a programmer wouldn’t know for sure what’s happening when they hit tab, and that it’s a setting that can be changed.

That’s a setting in the editor.

The kernel definitely mixes tabs and spaces:

https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/block/bfq-iosched.c#L390

Why would I use spaces if I use tabs?

To comply with Python’s best practices:

https://peps.python.org/pep-0008/

Also, if you work on the Linux Kernel, you’ll see a mix of tabs and spaces:

https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/block/bfq-iosched.c#L390

Also, it seemd like a huge waste of time hitting the space bar so many times…

You use an editor that doesn’t auto-indent?

but you can follow any exception down to the exact line of code (or JNI call, I guess) where the problem occurs.

But, it’s not really where the problem occurred. How often do you get a stack trace and the bug fix is at the line referenced by the stack trace? Almost never. It’s more that it takes you down to the exact line of code where the effects of the problem are bad enough to affect the running of the program. But, the actual problem happened earlier, sometimes much earlier.

For example, NullPointerException isn’t actually the problem, it’s a symptom of the problem. Something didn’t get initialized properly, and nobody noticed for a while, until we tried to use it, and got a null pointer. Sometimes it’s easy to go from the effect (null pointer) to the cause (uninitialized thing). But, other times that “thing” was passed in, so you have to work backwards to try to figure out where that thing comes from, and why it’s in that broken state.

Sure, it’s better than nothing, but it’s still frustrating.

Find me anyone who claims they use tabs for indentation, and I bet I’ll find at least one case where they’re using both tabs and spaces.

The only safe way to avoid war crimes is to avoid tabs.

Ah, so you can’t find a flaw in my argument, instead you tell me to “grow up”, as if you’re an adult and I’m not. It’s pretty clear you have no idea what you’re talking about since you can’t argue your point.

Are you dumb? I specifically pointed out how you’re wrong.

I didn’t say they weren’t still around, just that they’re not the police.

Socialism is not when the government does stuff

Socialism is when the “means of production” are owned by the people as a whole rather than individuals. Capitalism is when the “means of production” are owned by individuals. Every modern state contains a mix of both.

If the US is 100% capitalist, then explain how the fire department is a capitalist institution.