So you’re into sending the police after the writers, directors, and producers of the Saw movies, but not the audiences?

I dunno man, that’s still too fascist for my tastes, but you can keep fantasizing about it. I promise I won’t try to send the police after you for your perverted fantasies of state power.

I hate torture-porn movies like the Saw series, but a lot of people are fans of them. Should I worry that those people are likely to commit kidnapping, torture, and murder? Should I advocate that the makers or watchers of those movies be investigated for kidnapping, torture, and murder — without any evidence that a crime was committed?

We don’t send the cops after people for liking murder stories, theft stories, industrial sabotage stories, or treason stories. We shouldn’t send the cops after people for liking stories of Harry Potter getting fucked by Severus Snape either.

I think you should be more careful to distinguish fantasy from reality. Most fiction readers and writers have no problem doing so.

I’m just saying, police investigation of fiction creators and readers for the content of their fiction is way over the line of a lot of social and political norms.

(Also, I think you’ll find that police abuse children a lot more than pervy fiction fans do; so really, who should be investigating whom? Investigation into crime is supposed to start with evidence that a crime actually occurred — not with your personal disgust towards someone’s reading matter.)

Just to be clear, are you saying that people should be investigated by the police for fictional stories that they read?

Many Republicans are sponsored and bribed by fascist powers such as Putin’s Russia. They are under orders to take actions intended to weaken American industry, government, and society. This includes, for instance, sabotaging infrastructure projects, blocking disaster preparedness and relief, and fomenting political violence. The long-range goal is to make America incapable of projecting force to protect its international allies, global trade, etc.; a medium-range goal is to restore a regime broadly supportive of the international fascist movement.

(Just consider: Why does Putin support Trump? Putin doesn’t want to make America great; he wants to make America incapable — especially, incapable of defending Ukraine and, ultimately, other European allies. Putin predicts that Trump/Vance will accomplish that goal.)

Once you learn about parser combinators, all other parsing looks pretty dopey.

In the future, all Windows apps will be part of Windows App.

Fun fact: While mudita is Pali for “vicarious joy”, it’s also Spanish for “little mute girl”.

You don’t kill zombies; a zombie is already dead. You wait for or reap zombies. (A zombie process is just a process table entry with its exit status; it goes away once the parent process has read that exit status.)

If your kids’ school laptops are surveilled, they’re surveilled by someone. Let’s call that someone Joe. Joe is a person who took a low-paying job that lets him surveil your kids. Joe likes his job, because he gets to surveil your kids. He gets to turn on the camera and look in your kids’ room. He gets to read the chat messages your kids send to their classmates.

Your kids would be better off without Joe in their lives. Joe is not a source of security. Joe is not protecting your kids; Joe is a threat to them.

“A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly ‘secure’ messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad,” Durov wrote on his own Telegram channel.

In fact, the folks running Signal — notably Moxie Marlinspike and Meredith Whittaker — have a long history of effective security & privacy activism. Whittaker was one of the organizers of the Google Walkouts, one of the more effective pieces of tech worker activism in recent history. And Moxie has bumped heads with the US intelligence community more than once, and famously with the Saudis too.

Regulating a money scam that uses art as a token isn’t regulating art, it’s regulating money scams.

Odd?

Suing your former customers, now there’s a way to make people want to do business with you!

Some homophobes don’t believe in the existence of straight people.

Once again, copyright maximalists fail to understand the medium they profit from, and propose to destroy it.

The display of hypertext always involves the active participation of both clients and servers. It has never been dictated solely by document authors. A given hypertext document (e.g. a web page) may involve resources drawn from many servers, including ones not under the control of the document’s author. In addition, client behavior may vary from that expected by the document’s author; in matters as minor as the selection of font size, or as major as whether to display images or execute script code. This separation of control is a fundamental feature of the medium, and gives rise to many of the medium’s strengths: for instance, the development of servers, clients, and documents may advance semi-independently, serving different interests.

Users may choose clients that they believe will better serve their needs. In many cases, users have chosen clients that take steps to mitigate the power of advertisers to control the medium: see e.g. the adoption of pop-up blocking (pioneered in Netscape plug-ins and minority browsers like iCab and Opera) and the later adoption of anti-malware technology such as Google Safe Browsing by Firefox and Opera as well as Google’s own Chrome. These choices have strengthened the medium, making it more usable and thus more popular: imagine how unpleasant the web would be today without the pop-up blocking developed 20+ years ago.

🍕 I only have pepperoni.

C++ programmers always let their friends access their private members, so …

Orange you glad …

How many 1700s drinking songs does anyone know the tune of today? Well, there’s “To Anacreon in Heaven”, better known as “The Star Spangled Banner”.

“Aura Lee” is from the 1860s, but the tune is better known today as Elvis’s “Love Me Tender”.