Links

The importance of personal computing

alexanderobenauer.com

Personal computing is one of the most important things humanity has ever built.

Personal computers — in all forms: desktops, smartphones, tablets, and so forth — are capable of helping you:

  • Connect with resources to learn virtually anything already known;
  • Connect and collaborate with others, across the globe;
  • Create new things and share creations with others;
  • Visualize, reconsider, and reconfigure your thinking, information, and processes;
  • Develop and explore your own thinking.

That last one is an incredible thought: plenty of things let you explore someone else’s thinking, but personal computers can help you explore your own thinking, giving you living spaces to externalize, review, expand, and refine your thoughts on the things that matter most to you.

Inverted computer culture (a thought experiment)

viznut.fi

So, what is the “essence” of computing then? I’d say universality. The universality of computing makes it possible to bend it to reflect and amplify just about any kind of ideology or cultural construct. In the recent decades, some ideas have just been so overwhelming that they feel very essential even though they are not. In an alternate timeline, other ideas might be dominant.

microsoft/checkedc

github.com

Checked C is an extension to C that lets programmers write C code that is guaranteed by the compiler to be type-safe. The goal is to let people easily make their existing C code type-safe and eliminate entire classes of errors. Checked C does not address use-after-free errors. This repo has a wiki for Checked C, sample code, the specification, and test code.

Will Shortz’s Life in Crosswords

newyorker.com

My thirtieth anniversary is coming up this November. I’m crazy about the job. I love the creativity of puzzle editing. I feel I’m always learning stuff. I laugh a lot. And I love puzzle people, because they are interesting, smart, creative, witty people.

The Lisp Curse

winestockwebdesign.com

The reason why this doesn’t happen is because of the Lisp Curse. Large numbers of Lisp hackers would have to cooperate with each other. Look more closely: Large numbers of the kind of people who become Lisp hackers would have to cooperate with each other. And they would have to cooperate with each other on a design which was not already a given from the beginning. And there wouldn’t be any external discipline, such as a venture capitalist or other corporate master, to keep them on track.