The advantages of full freedom are not that difficult to recognize and describe. What's tricky is recognizing and characterizing non-free components in a mixed environment, plotting a course away from them, and then navigating that course successfully.
I was heartened to see, for example, the GNU project develop a rubric …
What we share with other people of our own thoughts spans a massive range of possibilities from the very personal to the very public.
At the most personal level roil our wildest dreams, our deepest fears, our greatest hopes. Here then also are our greatest vulnerabilities.
At the other end …
How can I take the dent in the lid of a canning jar well-sealed, or the plain look of surprise on the face of a cow, when you meet it on the highway and it will not turn aside, or the way snow, when it first falls in the mountains …
I went looking for my copy of Freeman Dyson's Infinite In All Directions because I wanted to reread his essay Manchester and Athens.
Along the way, I found my copy of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which I dipped into thinking just for a moment to remind myself if …
The pets versus cattle comparison evokes a useful distinction. I'm trying to get on board with this trend because I can see at least some of the advantages in terms of overall resilience.
But taken more to heart, the comparison, has less to do about them--the objects of our analysis--and …
So, for some ongoing projects I maintain what you might call a semi-decentralized, or a weakly-centralized, git workflow.
The basic set up is this. I have three repositories on which I might work on my projects: A home desktop, a laptop, and a virtual private server.
The VPS would be …
I'm not sure I've heard a more apocalyptic sound than a snowblower kicking up a big racket, but hidden around a corner of a nearby house: Lots of weird, loud sounds coming from no obvious nearby source. Made all the louder and weirder by the deep hush from all that …
Nadia Eghbal first came to my attention through her essay (published in May but which I probably didn't see until June)
I found it alarming, given as how there was already a long-running terminological quagmire around what distinctions, if any, were important between the …
In the run-up to our trip last summer (August 2015) we were talking about packing, and I offered that Rick Steves says that one only needs to pack two pairs of slacks or two skirts or the equivalent. To which the household tween retorted "who is this Rick Steves, anyway …
These are some slightly-expanded hot takes regarding I'm giving up on PGP (later republished at Ars)
Several friends were discussing this last week & so I thought to pull my own comments from that discussion and extend them.
Lots of emphasis in that on private communication, instead of on verifiable communication …