It's A Binary World 2.0

Category: Science and Technology

  • The Political Reading of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

    The Political Reading of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

    This morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Decoder Ring. The most recent episode had a very interesting title: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…Will he want a Welfare check? I don’t remember this book from my childhood, but I do remember reading this one (and others in the series) to…

  • Podcasts I’m Listening to In 2024

    I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes. Politics 5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important…

  • A Couple Recent Interesting Podcast Episodes

    First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, have been a giant source of wonder and consternation…

  • The Algorithm

    I sometimes forget that most of social media is governed by an attention span algorithm instead of a reverse chronological algorithm. There are at least a couple times, however, when I’m reminded of that fact:

  • Web Browsers: Vivaldi Features and Firefox News

    This post continues a series on exploring new browsers (last few posts): Vivaldi About 4 years ago I decided to start exploring various web browsers. Eventually I settled on Vivaldi as my main browser both on Windows and Linux. When I first installed Vivaldi, I mentioned that vertical tabs are very helpful on a wide…

  • The XZ Utils Backdoor has (finally?) penetrated the non-tech press

    Those of us who are deep in the tech world remember about 6 weeks ago when all our social media and news feeds were talking about the XZ Utils backdoor. (Here’s a great writeup from my favorite tech site, Ars Technica) Really quick, bulleted recap: I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on…

  • Red Hat and Family Release 9.4 and a Rocky Linux Take Down

    Red Hat released version 9.4 today. Lots of jargon (including a mention of AI), but one of the big deals considering how long Red Hat support contracts go is the addition of ARM64 as a supported architecture. 9to5Linux also had a summary of the new features. I remember back before CentOS became CentOS Stream there…

  • Programming Jan-April 2024

    This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects – some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll start in February. February and March…

  • A sure way to know you’re a Computer Geek

    Last night I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream where I was at a programmer convention. A bunch of devs were arguing and they came to me to be the deciding factor for the future of the KDE Plasma 6 project. Each was very passionate about the direction they wanted…

  • A few thoughts on Programming languages

    A few thoughts on Programming languages

    Just a few thoughts on programming languages that have been rattling around in my head this week, but which don’t each merit a full blog post. The main theme is that the culture behind each programming language leads to some interesting choices, as is the case with spoken languages. This week I started learning how…

  • Review: If Hemingway Wrote Javascript

    If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript by Angus Croll My rating: 3 of 5 stars The intro mentions the natural language nature of Javascript. I wonder if the book had been concieved a few years later if it would rather have been Python or Ruby – both of which are way more like human language than Javascript.…

  • Fedora 40 is out today!

    Back in 2013 when I started using Fedora Core 1, I had no idea I’d still be on Fedora when it reached its 40th release 11 years later. Congrats to the team and here’s the official announcement.

  • Programs used for Programming in 2023

    Programs used for Programming in 2023

    I didn’t really use any new programs this year. I just continued expanding on programs I’ve used in the past. Python For Python I continued to mostly use Pycharm. I’ve spoken about it for the past few years, but JetBrains continues to add features that make it easier to work with Python. For example, this…

  • My 2023 Programming Progress

    In 2023 I just didn’t have the urge to do as much programming as in years past. I felt more of a tug towards video games, reading, and baking/cooking. So this recap will be quite a bit shorter than usual. A couple upfront themes and ideas: The programming was essentially Go and Python. I started…

  • Happy 20th Anniversary Fedora Linux and Happy Fedora 39 Release Day!

    Happy 20th Anniversary Fedora Linux and Happy Fedora 39 Release Day!

    I can’t believe I’ve been using Linux for 20 years already! I started off with Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow) 20 years ago. It was in this book: Boy has the technology come a long way in those 20 years! One of my earliest desktop screenshots from back then: Now one of my more recent desktops:…