Tag Archives: RMF

🥩 Red Meat Friday: Microsoft Backdoor?

Posted on 2026-05-22 by jcs

Our younger colleagues can be forgiven for viewing Microsoft as a benign company. Those of us who have been around for a while remember the old days and we haven’t forgotten or forgiven. Despite their efforts to appear a friendly … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Goodhart’s Law At Amazon

Posted on 2026-05-15 by jcs

You would think that by now every organization on earth would have heard of Goodhart’s law. The law can be briefly stated as, “When a measure is used as a target, it ceases to be a measure.” We see the … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Writing Telephone Numbers

Posted on 2026-04-17 by jcs

I don’t know why this is a Red Meat Friday item but, apparently, it is. Back in 2024, the AP Stylebook changed its specification for the formatting of telephone numbers. From now on the telephone number that used to be … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Rules For Lisp Programs

Posted on 2026-04-10 by jcs

Over at tfeb.org there’s an amusing post on rules for Lisp programs. The rules boil down to: Write only in Lisp Don’t use Lisp OOP constructs Don’t use the Loop macro Avoid package-qualified names The list is obviously meant to … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: AI FOMO

Posted on 2026-03-27 by jcs

Observant Irreal readers will have noticed that I hardly ever write about AI and its attendant hoopla. I recognize that it has shown itself useful in certain restricted domains but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s mainly a magic … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: User Hostile Websites

Posted on 2026-03-20 by jcs

A month ago I wrote about why I was still using an ad blocker. The TL;DR was that unfiltered websites have become too horrible to be usable. Ads popup to cover the content you’re trying to read, videos play—and loudly—without … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Reclaiming The Em-Dash

Posted on 2026-01-02 by jcs

Irreal is, of course, an em-dash friendly site. We’ve extolled the mighty em-dash and our love for it many times. Recently, an odious meme has arisen claiming that “real” people don’t use the em-dash and that its use is a … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Navigating Websites

Posted on 2025-12-05 by jcs

The other day, I mentioned that I took a long, excruciating train trip. The outbound trip had been so bad that we were confident the trip home would be much better. It wasn’t, of course. Most of you, I’m sure, … Continue reading →

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🥩 Red Meat Friday: Cloudflare And AWS

Posted on 2025-11-21 by jcs

I’m sure that every Irreal reader is aware of the recent Internet outages caused by problems at AWS and Cloudflare. Most of those readers also know that things happen. Servers fail, cables break, backhoes wreak havoc, software runs up against … Continue reading →

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Red Meat Friday: Gategate

Posted on 2025-11-14 by jcs

I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m fed up with the “-gate” meme. Lazy and generally ignorant journalists keep describing every would be scandal—no matter how trivial—as x-gate. The latest example that I’ve seen is the so … Continue reading →

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