Tag Archives: Tech

If you’ve been reading Irreal for a while, you know that one of my goals is to be able to leave my house with nothing but my iPhone. That’s possible right now if you live in the right state, have … Continue reading →

If you’re a younger engineer, this probably won’t mean much to you but if you’ve been around since, say, the turn of the century it’s a huge story. Darl McBride has died and, oddly, no one seems to have noticed. … Continue reading →

At the end of my post on the FTC rule requiring making it easy to unsubscribe to services, I wondered what the response would be from those companies addicted to such abusive practices. We didn’t have to wait long. A … Continue reading →

One of the really annoying aspects of the digital age is trying to end an online subscription. These subscriptions are always easy to sign up for but very difficult to end. My favorite example is the New York Times. They … Continue reading →

Regular readers know that for several years I’ve been endeavoring to live a “digital life”. What that means—more or less—is eschewing pencil and paper, paper bills, checks, dead tree books, physical credit cards, and even things like keys when I … Continue reading →

I’ve written before about the dangers of messing around with Jim [1, 2]. The reference is to a wonderful Jim Croce song explaining the dangers of messing around with a bad man by the name of Big Jim Walker. The … Continue reading →

Paul Graham has another great post up. This time it’s about whether you should chose to work on what interests you. To a first approximation, it seems like a no-brainer: of course you should. But what if you want, or … Continue reading →

Here’s a very nice discussion of branch prediction from a Stack Overflow question. We graybeards and, really, just about everyone else like to pretend that all processors are still like the PDP-11. They were easy to understand and their semantics … Continue reading →