Links

Tiny tools and the ephemeral nature of digital art…

nathalielawhead.com

A friend of mine was talking about how emulation never really truly emulates an era. For example, if you wanted the full experience of SNES games, you would need an old TV, and sit on an old 90’s living room floor, and be surrounded by things from that era… all that being important because the console (system, games…) are products of that time. Can we ever really enjoy, or understand their significance, when they’re taken out of that space and just emulated in modern contexts?

The Descent to C

chiark.greenend.org.uk

You’re probably thinking, by now, that C sounds like a horrible language to work in. It forces you to do by hand a lot of things you’re used to having done for you automatically; it constantly threatens you with unrecoverably weird behaviour, hard-to-find bugs, and dangerous security holes if you put one foot across any of a large number of completely invisible lines that neither the compiler nor the runtime will help you to avoid; and, for goodness’ sake, it can’t even handle strings properly. How could anyone have designed a language that bad?

To a large extent, the answer is: C is that way because reality is that way. C is a low-level language, which means that the way things are done in C is very similar to the way they’re done by the computer itself.

How 9/11 changed us

washingtonpost.com

It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late; the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. claims to moral authority. And it has lasted long. The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.

Beyond the good ol' LaunchAgents

theevilbit.github.io

There are other posts as well, which does collect macOS persistence ideas, but these are always one-off posts, and don’t try to be comprehensive on the long term.

With that I’m starting a series with the title Beyond the good ol’ LaunchAgents and try to cover as much as I can. I will definitely cover even those which have been discussed somewhere else, so it won’t be always “new”, but the idea is that this can be a go-to resource on the long run.