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The art of leadership and other secrets

In Taki’s Magazine, Steve Sailer remembers the late Jerry Pournelle, including a helpful leadership tip he once shared: I didn’t meet Jerry until 1999, but I’d known his son Alex in high school. The...

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Why Hold Music Sounds Worse Now

Tom Scott Published on 27 Nov 2017 It’s not your imagination; hold music on phones really did sound better in the old days. Here’s why, as we talk about old telephone exchanges and audio compression....

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QotD: Computer models

How can one be certain about outcomes in a complex system that we’re not really all that good at modeling? Anyone who’s familiar with the history of macroeconomic modeling in the 1960s and 1970s will...

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Transistors – The Invention That Changed The World

Real Engineering Published on 12 Sep 2016 Related posts: “3D printing will be bigger than the web” Aluminium – The Material That Changed The World Inventions That Changed the World – The Gun

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The notion of “uploading” your consciousness

Skeptic author Michael Shermer pours cold water on the dreams and hopes of Transhumanists, Cryonicists, Extropians, and Technological Singularity proponents everywhere: It’s a myth that people live...

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James May doesn’t trust Sat Navs | Q&A extras | HeadSqueeze

BBC Earth Lab Published on 27 Sep 2013 Don’t trust the Sat Nav! Speaking from experience, James thinks we shouldn’t blindly trust a machine. Get a map! Related posts: Bruce Schneier – “it’s becoming...

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QotD: Women in I.T.

… any woman who wants to be in a STEM field should be able to get as far as talent, hard work, and desire to succeed will take her, without facing artificial barriers erected by prejudice or other...

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The Internet-of-Things as “Moore’s Revenge”

El Reg‘s Mark Pesce on the end of Moore’s Law and the start of Moore’s Revenge: … the cost of making a device “smart” – whether that means, aware, intelligent, connected, or something else altogether –...

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In praise of Donald Knuth

David Warren sings the praises of the inventor of “TeX”: Among my heroes in that trade is a man now octogenarian, a certain Donald Knuth, author of the multi-volumed Art of Computer Programming, and of...

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Mind Your Business Ep. 2: Aceable in the Hole

Foundation for Economic Education Published on 11 Sep 2018 Believe it or not, parallel parking is not an impossible task. Meet Blake Garrett, the entrepreneur who is using VR to teach people how to...

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Verity Stob on early GUI experiences

“Verity Stob” began writing about technology issues three decades back. She reminisces about some things that have changed and others that are still irritatingly the same: It’s 30 years since .EXE...

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Mind Your Business #4: Free the Unikrn

Foundation for Economic Education Published on 25 Sep 2018 Forget about slot machines, the future of gaming is virtual reality! In this episode of Mind Your Business, Andrew Heaton is teaming up with...

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QotD: The closed-source software dystopia we barely avoided

Thought experiment: imagine a future in which everybody takes for granted that all software outside a few toy projects in academia will be closed source controlled by managerial elites, computers are...

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QotD: The first time ESR changed the world

I think it was at the 1983 Usenix/UniForum conference (there is an outside possibility that I’m off by a year and it was ’84, which I will ignore in the remainder of this report). I was just a random...

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Quantum Computing – Spooky Action at a Distance – Extra History – #4

Extra Credits Published on 7 Oct 2018 What happens when we can’t link physical cause and effect between two actions? Well, quantum bits (or qubits) do this all the time. Let’s look into how quantum...

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Quantum Computing – Decoherence – Extra History – #5

Extra Credits Published on 14 Oct 2018 Credit to Alisa Bishop for her art on this series: http://www.alisabishop.com/ Quantum computing isn’t a replacement for classical computing … yet. Quantum...

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Quantum Computing – The World of the Future – Extra History – #6

Extra Credits Published on 21 Oct 2018 Credit to Alisa Bishop for her art on this series: http://www.alisabishop.com/ What does the quantum revolution mean today? We talk about quantum computing...

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The value of boredom

I must have missed this Quillette essay by Caroline ffiske when it was published earlier this month: In their book The Coddling of the American Mind Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wonder where it...

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QotD: Nanotechnology and quantum computing

When I say Quantum Computing is a bullshit field, I don’t mean everything in the field is bullshit, though to first order, this appears to be approximately true. I don’t have a mathematical proof that...

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The dangers of over-relying on new technology

Ted Campbell discusses one of the potential problems when military organizations depend too much on new tech working as advertised by the developer: I have been a constant critic, in these pages, and...

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Your electronic devices and the Canadian Border Services Agency

A few years ago, many civil libertarians were upset that the US government allowed warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border, but it was less well known that the Canadian Border Services...

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Bitcoin mining’s massive carbon buttprint

Lincoln Swann explains why Bitcoin has become a huge environmental liability as its per-unit cost-to-mine has risen: “Bitcoin – from WSJ”by MarkGregory007 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Bitcoin is...

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“Experts” and their “models”

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, after offering us his current favourite mixed drink recipe, L. Neil Smith gets around to discussing our modern dependence on “experts” wielding their intricate and...

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QotD: Computer trade show tchotchkes

[Computer] convention attendees have no […] problem being showered with promotional gifts from all sides as they totter up and down the rows of booths. You can see them staggering back to their hotel...

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The Battle to Crack Enigma – The real story of ‘The Imitation Game’– WW2 Special

World War Two Published 26 May 2020 For the British, breaking the Germans’ seemingly unbreakable codes is one of the most vital battles of the war. If they fail, there is litte to stop the German...

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Britain’s technological edge in the Battle of Britain

Over at The Register, Gareth Corfield lists some of the advanced technological kit the Royal Air Force had access to during the Battle of Britain in 1940: Restored Battle of Britain operations room in...

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QotD: Heinlein’s “Future History”

I’ve been planning to write about Elon Musk’s Bowie-blasting space car ever since the video footage was transmitted back to Earth in the middle of this week. But I did not even notice until I sat down...

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QotD: “Genetics is interesting as an example of a science that overcame a...

This side of the veil, instead of looking for the “gene for intelligence”, we try to find “polygenic scores”. Given a person’s entire genome, what function best predicts their intelligence? The most...

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Recycling when it makes economic sense? Good. Recycling just because? Not...

Tim Worstall explains why a new push to mandate recycling rare earth from consumer electronic devices will be a really, really bad idea … so bad that it’ll waste more resources than are recovered by...

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QotD: Moore’s Law

Moore’s Law is a violation of Murphy’s Law. Everything gets better and better. Gordon Moore, quoted in “Happy Birthday: Moore’s Law at 40”, The Economist, 2005-03-26 Related posts: Charles Stross:...

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When printers malfunction – Printer

Viva La Dirt League Published 26 Apr 2021 Adam experiences the utter frustration of when printers malfunction. WATCH MORE SKITS HERE: http://bit.ly/VLDLvideos​ SUPPORT ON PATREON –...

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HMS Glamorgan – Computer Ship Of The Future (1967)

British Pathé Published 13 Apr 2014 English Channel. Top shots of the guided missile destroyer battleship HMS Glamorgan at sea. In the control/computer room a man pulls out old-fashioned computer...

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You think software is expensive now? You wouldn’t believe how expensive 1980s...

A couple of years ago, Rob Griffiths looked at some computer hobbyist magazines from the 1980s and had both nostalgia for the period and sticker shock from the prices asked for computer games and...

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QotD: The looming quantum computing apocalypse

We’re reaching peak quantum computing hyperbole. According to a dimwit at the Atlantic, quantum computing will end free will. According to another one at Forbes, “the quantum computing apocalypse is...

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The Most Important Invention of the 20th Century: Transistors

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered Published 23 Dec 2019 On December 23, 1947, three researchers at Bell labs demonstrated a new device to colleagues. The device, a solid-state...

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Underbusing Hunter Biden?

Long after the story was initially reported, and the New York Post was hammered for publicizing it at the time, the rest of the legacy media is showing interest in Hunter Biden’s laptop contents: … If...

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QotD: Programmers as craftsmen

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of...

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John von Neumann, The Man From The Future

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of The Man From The Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya. This is one of perhaps a...

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Still living, still breathing, still walking around … but “legally dead”

I missed this from Alistair Dabbs last weekend, but it’s still just as concerning as it was then: Zombies walk among us – until they need a nice sit-down, of course. It can be tiring to be undead. No...

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Apple, afterwards

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay looks at Apple after the death of Steve Jobs: In 2004, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs asked famed author Walter Isaacson to write his biography. It’s a mark of Jobs’s hallowed...

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Faint glimmers of hope for Canadians’“right to repair”?

Michael Geist on the state of play in modifying Canada’s digital lock rules to allow consumers a tiny bit more flexibility in how they can get their electronic devices repaired: “The Self-Repair...

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QotD: Computer models of “the future”

The problem with all “models of the world”, as the video puts it, is that they ignore two vitally important factors. First, models can only go so deep in terms of the scale of analysis to attempt. You...

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QotD: When reality fails to follow the model, ditch reality

Alexander wept, for he saw there were no more worlds to conquer … I get that, man. On some fundamental level. But that makes me a generally unhappy guy. So it is, so it has always been. For whatever...

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This 1970s tank simulator drives through a tiny world

Tom Scott Published 17 Oct 2022 At the Swiss Military Museum in Full, there’s the last remaining example of a 1970s tank-driving simulator. But there’s no virtual worlds here: it’s connected to a real...

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Once it was possible to be a fully fledged techno-optimist … but things have...

Glenn Reynolds on how he “lost his religion” about the bright, shiny techno-future so many of us looked forward to: Okay, there’s optimism and then there’s totally unrealistic techno-utopianism…...

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A very different take on the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic

At The Conservative Woman, Dr. Mike Yeadon lays out his case for doubting that there ever actually was a novel coronavirus in the first place: Wuhan Institute of Virology.Wikimedia Commons. I’ve grown...

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Computers and music, from 1961 to 2001

Ted Gioia explains the deep history behind the scene in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where H.A.L. sings a song: Not many people could afford an IBM 7094 computer back in the early 1960s — a typical...

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Why Web Filters Don’t Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem

Tom Scott Published 6 Jun 2016 In a small town with an unfortunate name, let’s talk about filtering and innuendo. And use it as an excuse for as many visual jokes as possible. I’m at...

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QotD: “Computer people are just people”

Not being a computer person myself, I keep forgetting that computer people are just people, meaning they’re no less silly, cliquish, and fad-chasing than the rest of us. Meyers-Briggs seems like a very...

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QotD: Financial bubbles

That financial markets sometimes go off on one has been noted for centuries now. Dutch Tulips, the South Sea Bubble, Dotcom and more recently Bitcoin have all shown that the lust for easy speculation...

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