Why are poor people so generous? (2011/10/19)
My mom once told me something I found fascinating, and at the time inexplicable. When she was a graduate student, she and her friends were, of course, poor. (Graduate students are.) They occasionally went out for dinner, and at the end of the meal, people would toss money in and there would end up being enough to pay for the meal and leave a respectable tip.
[read more...]Man, that was fun. (2011/10/17)
/played
You’ve played 1 Days, 1 Hours, 22 Minutes, 32 Seconds
Learning from other peoples' experiences (2011/10/14)
One of the great abilities humans have is to learn from other peoples’ mistakes and experiences. A friend of mine was raised with a pretty strong sense that you should always do this rather than making your own mistakes. I have always had a prejudice towards this, but I have noticed that in fact I benefit a lot from learning from my own mistakes.
[read more...]Smartphones and servers (2011/10/14)
Apple’s new “intelligent agent”, Siri, is taking a page from Wolfram Alpha and trying to answer questions in a funny manner – leading to an amusing blog entitled Shit That Siri Says.
[read more...]Thanks, dmr (2011/10/13)
You’ll be missed.
[read more...]Why Steve Jobs did more for free software than RMS did. (2011/10/11)
No one denies that Richard Stallman is a very smart guy. He’s also an asshole. Most recently, he’s been ranting about how glad he is that Steve Jobs is dead. In the past, he’s done classy stuff like tell people to stop wasting time on their kids and work on bug fixes for his software.
[read more...]This is what I consider fun (2011/10/10)
Got a bug report. Studied the bug report. In it, apparently, a variable was ceasing to have its former value. Like, someone stored 3.0 in a variable, and a bit later, it was no longer equal to 3.0.
[read more...]Charity marathons for people who do not actually run (2011/10/10)
So, I’ve signed up for one of those charity drive marathon things. The gimmick is, instead of running 26 miles, we’re playing video games for 24 hours.
[read more...]This is why people never ask me questions (2011/10/07)
Discussing a bug report:
[read more...]Gay rights activists win right to be shot at openly (2011/10/04)
I am not sure this was well considered. It is now in some cases legal to tell an openly gay guy to stand somewhere and be shot at, where previously you would have been required to send him somewhere that he wouldn’t be shot at.
[read more...]