Author Archives: jcs

Data Leverage

Posted on 2021-03-07 by jcs

Over at the MIT Technology Review, Karen Hao has a seemingly promising article with the enticing title How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you. I read the article with great anticipation hoping it would provide … Continue reading →

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Clojure and Scheme Compared

Posted on 2021-03-06 by jcs

As I’ve said before, I’m sometimes tempted to take up Clojure but have always been put off by its reliance on the JVM. Last year, Mike Zamansky posted a couple of videos (1, 2) on using Clojure for the Advent … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Offend a Programmer

Posted on 2021-03-05 by jcs

How to offend a programmer with a survey: #emacs https://t.co/j12Lj1dPpc — (webdev “Tory”) (@Endless_WebDev) February 28, 2021 You gotta admit: It is offensive. The proper survey would have been Emacs Vim VSCode, Atom, Sublime, or other bling-centric editor Eclipse, IntelliJ, … Continue reading →

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Brown M&Ms

Posted on 2021-03-04 by jcs

Do you know the story of brown M&Ms? It’s one of my favorite stories both because of the cleverness it reveals but also because of—at least according to conventional wisdom—the unexpected source of that cleverness. The short version of the … Continue reading →

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On Passwords and SolarWinds

Posted on 2021-03-03 by jcs

By now everyone knows about the major breach of the U.S. Government (and probably others) that had its genesis in an exploit that gave attackers access to the SolarWinds build chain. Some are reporting that the problem was a leaked … Continue reading →

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How to Implement a Zettelkasten Link Type in Org

Posted on 2021-03-02 by jcs

Christian Tietze is an author at the zettelkasten.de site and, of course, keeps his notes in a Zettelkasten. He has his own app, The Archive, for that but he’s also an Emacs user. He uses a timestamp as a key … Continue reading →

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An Interview with SciHub’s Alexandra Elbakyan

Posted on 2021-03-01 by jcs

I’ve written several times about Sci-Hub and the moral quandary it presents for some of us. On the one hand it’s easy to say that what they’re doing is stealing and that it should be stopped. On the other hand, … Continue reading →

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Emacs Writer

Posted on 2021-02-28 by jcs

As most of you know, I’m very interested in the ways that non-technical people use Emacs and ways of making Emacs more accessible to such people. Ashton Wiersdorf is a technical user married to a non-technical writer looking for a … Continue reading →

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Facebook and Apple

Posted on 2021-02-27 by jcs

It’s unlikely that any sentient being in the known universe, let alone any Irreal reader, is unaware of the squabble raging between Apple and Facebook over Apple’s forthcoming iOS change that will require apps to ask a user’s permission before … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Programmers—Then & Now

Posted on 2021-02-26 by jcs

Here’s a little red meat for all the graybeards out there waving their canes and yelling at the kids to get off their lawn.

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