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Pascal was my first real programming language. I'd learned BASIC first, but I never built a full software application in it. Pascal allowed me to build and release software for the first time. It was magical. What I didn't know: Niklaus Wirth was from Winterthur, Switzerland,
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"Your career is not your job. It’s the humans you help along the way." I feel this in my bones. The people who have helped me in my career have made an outsize difference to my life, and I hope to make the same kind of difference
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"Until Substack, I was not aware of any major US consumer internet platform that stated it would not remove or even demonetize Nazi accounts. Even in a polarized world, there remains broad agreement that the slaughter of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust was an atrocity. The Nazis did
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Charles Stross on tech oligarchs trying to build the torment nexus: "SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but to
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Among other things, this campaign site has a useful list of US retail stores that use facial recognition right now (for example, Home Depot) as well as some that are thinking about it - and some that definitely won't (thank you, Costco). "Your face should not be
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I really like this exploration of what it might mean to build a sense of ambient togetherness on the web. "We currently have no visual, audible, tactile, spatial, or embodied awareness of one another. We also have no awareness of the other people reading this post, even if they&
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"Of course there will be examples of AI-generated misinformation, bots, and deepfakes during various elections next year. But the key question is how politicians will be using these tools." This is it: misinformation and disinformation threats are not some nameless force. Sure, there are people out there who
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"Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media amid the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups that began on October 7, 2023." This includes
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Some said it would never happen: Mickey Mouse is in the public domain. Or, at least, the very earliest version of him is. As the BBC points out: "It means creatives like cartoonists can now rework and use the earliest versions of Mickey and Minnie." Disney warns that
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I really like this: a starter pack of blogs to follow if you're new to RSS. Some of them are new to me (and others have familiar authors but seem to have fallen off my list). What better way to start the new year on the internet than
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There are some jaw-dropping infringements here, including an image where DALL-E apparently copies the entire Pixar universe from the single two-word prompt, "animated toys". It's impossible to hand-wave this away. Even if you don't think the New York Times case has merit, it'
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"I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about