A buzzword in the popular press is to describe Internet access as something that’s becoming a utility, that people are coming to need in the same way they need their water, electricity and gas. I realised today that a reliable e-mail account also has this status. My primary e-mail account has been my SDF account for about three years, but today I paid for a new FastMail account and started using an e-mail address at a .name domain that I’ve owned for six months or so but haven’t been using outside of git commit messages. I’ll talk about the reasons for this and also some observations about the place of e-mail in my life.
bsdtalk021: Interview with Stephen Jones of SDF
(original source; broken link to audio)
When migrating the system away from System V UNIX, he felt he had a choice between BSD and the GNU HURD. He was apparently “just not interested” in using the Linux kernel. Some interesting stuff in this interview. SDF is still going stroke nine years later.
As Stafford explains, our love for the Internet is rooted in the fact that human beings, in Ghose’s words, “compulsively seek unpredictable payoffs.” The cognitive-reward structure offered by services like email and social media are similar to those of a casino slot machine: “Most of it is junk, but every so often, you hit the jackpot.” … As researchers found in a 2001 article in International Gambling Studies, systems that offer a low-cost chance of winning a very large prize are more likely to attract repetitive participation and, in turn, stimulate excessive (and potentially problematic) play.
Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can’t pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you’d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have.
—Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (his memoirs)
David Cameron at the time: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: ‘As long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.’
It’s often meant we have stood neutral between different values. And that’s helped foster a narrative of extremism and grievance.
Normally Cameron’s public pronouncements don’t have any meat on them: I find they’re the kind of thing everyone could agree with and the only thing disagreeable is what they choose to focus on at the expense of other things.
This, though, is different.
These days I’m suspicious of anyone using ‘productivity’ but I think there’s something in this. Skillful resting to avoid minimally restive activity like scrolling down social networking websites need not be in the service of productivity to be a good thing.
David Cameron likes to talk a lot about the working people of Britain and how the Conservatives are behind them in their project of being busy working people. If we’re careful to avoid the Puritan deification of work, we can agree that the project of holding down a job and working one’s way through the ranks has a lot to be said for it. There is a sense in which holding down any job at all, in the short- to medium-term, uplifts people and gets them out of depressive self-centeredness. But in the longer term it’s irresponsible not to look at one’s work in the context of the national and international economies. And when we do this we find that Cameron is inviting the middle classes to vote him and his friends in for selfish reasons and then assuage the guilt by indulging in a narrative about being a working person.
Joel on Software: Things You Should Never Do, Part I
We’re programmers. Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.
There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:
It’s harder to read code than to write it.
Six months ago I activated the Emacs Vim Emulation Layer, EVIL, and tried to go back to the vim keybindings I used years ago, before Org-mode dragged me into Emacs like it does so many. I found that it didn’t suit me: the Emacs keybindings turned out to be more deeply wired into my fingers, and I was no longer convinced by the idea of the Vim zen cult (no hard feelings guys, you’re cool). One thing that I found when configuring EVIL was that although my configuration for the Vim emulation was complicated, I could strip out a lot of other stuff from my Emacs configuration that I was using to work around Emacs not being that great at editing text. I learnt something from this despite deactivating EVIL again, a lesson I’ve applied again this week.