In 2017, Charlie Stross talked about corporations as slow AI, and he identified some ways in which they have supplanted humans as first-class citizens. I remember reading, as a teenager in the early 1980s, a story about a world where humans were not citizens of nations but employees of companies and the whole thing wasContinue reading “Age of Corporations”
Author Archives: pirateguillermo
Harbinger, Party of Some
A friend pointed out this paper about, “harbinger ZIP codes.” It is fascinating! Geography as destiny, and the likelihood is that cranks live near each other. Wow.
Right Thing, Wrong Time
Cryptocurrency, quantum supremacy, imminent death of the Internet. So, Google recently announced that they’d achieved quantum supremacy. One of the things that quantum computers are supposed to be really good at is cracking crypto really fast. The past couple of years have seen an explosion of cryptocurrencies, which are one application of blockchain, which reliesContinue reading “Right Thing, Wrong Time”
Well, duh
So, Iran has reconnected to the Internet, and there’s this quote way down in the Washington Post article about it: “Why did (the Americans) get angry after we cut off the internet? Because the internet is the channel through which Americans wanted to perform their evil and vicious acts,” Fadavi said. I’d say that this,Continue reading “Well, duh”
Regression
I’ve been ignoring Facebook for a few months, now, and my engagement with Twitter has mostly been retweets and likes. Yesterday, a friend who takes what other people say more seriously than I do decided he needed to back way off and go back to writing blog posts instead of tweets. Frankly, I would way ratherContinue reading “Regression”
Why Monoculture
At some point, I don’t remember exactly when, I told my family that since I didn’t use Windows in a professional capacity and I didn’t use it personally, there was no way I was going to go to the effort of becoming and staying smart about Windows, and if they wanted me to do techContinue reading “Why Monoculture”
Great Man Theory
Historians seem not to like the great man story of history nowadays, preferring to talk about how the actions of lots of people wind up being at least as important as the actions of a single leader. And that makes a lot of sense, really. So why are the papers and the politicians all aboutContinue reading “Great Man Theory”
Next Project
So, I’m writing a pantry inventory app.
Announcing DMS Calc
A few years back, I was playing Kerbal Space Program and had the need to convert back and forth between decimal degrees and degrees-minutes-seconds. I found some online tools to do it, but they were naive and forgot that floating point numbers are still kind of tricky on a computer. I wrote a post aboutContinue reading “Announcing DMS Calc”
I Wrote A Thing
Hey, I wrote an app and got it published on the App Store! It’s free and it only does one thing: it lets you slide a selector back and forth and show the equivalent temperature readings in Fahrenheit and Celsius. So, if that’s a thing that you want on your phone, go check it out!Continue reading “I Wrote A Thing”