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• Post #4453533

  The city of Chicago had: 50,000 residents in 1850. 500,000 residents in the 1880s. 1,700,000 residents in 1900. Not wildly surprising that things were chaotic. It was, um, unclear who benefited, and low-level workers seem to have been especially whipsawed. It’s good that we in this era of Unicorn companies have a clearer understanding of how to handle disruptive economic change in a way that benefits society across the board. https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m0023gm2

• Post #4360912

  Contrast to the storming of the Bastille or the Paris Commune, whose (early) success I’d argue depended on already having won over or neutralized the normies. With reference to donning funny hats, my default assumption is that the normies will be slightly repelled and those with power will be utterly uninterested. My mind could be changed in a particular case. But spending time persuading a fat old white guy is not exactly a good use of resources. (2/2) @telepyleia@infosec.exchange

• Post #4176325

  RE: https://social.wikiworkersunited.org/@wwu/116999843114280732 Yesterday I chose not to fix a typo on Wikipedia in support of @wwu@social.wikiworkersunited.org. It’s the least I could do. Literally the least I could do. Wikimedia is not at all strapped for cash (thanks to the generous donations of people like me), so jeez – spread the wealth.

• Post #4150274

  “It’s Fourth of July weekend in New York City, and the brutal temperatures haven’t stopped a hundred-or-so people from donning pointy hats and dancing in the streets while chanting anti-Big Tech slogans. “Fuck, fuck, fuck AI,” the Luddite gnomes – people in colorful, pointy homemade hats – chant as we march.” https://www.404media.co/luddite-events-nyc-off-tech-summer-of-ludd/ I would like to suggest that this behavior will be less effective than the real Luddites were. The state will not need...

• Post #4122788

  I’ve been fond of quoting Philip K. Dick’s “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Have recently encountered other quotes: Bruno Latour describes reality as “what resists all efforts at modification.” (/Science in Action/, p. 179.) C.S. Peirce: “"There are Real things, whose character[istic]s are entirely independent of our opinions about them" (“The fixation of belief”)

• Post #4100653

  Our neighbors have a semi-feral outdoor cat, Pumpkin. For the last two days, she’s let me skritch her head for *multiple* seconds. Today, no - she cowered under their vehicle. How many generations has it been since the first cats were domesticated? How can they be afraid of a human hunkering down, going “psst psst psst” and holding their open hand out, wiggling their fingers? How often has that ended badly? Do they know something about us humans that I don’t know?

• Post #4098910

  I first read about hypertext in the ‘80s, prompted by @hrheingold@mastodon.social’s /Tools for Thought/. Yes, I was hypertext before hypertext was cool. My 1987 M.S. thesis was “Lynx: Hypertext on-the-cheap for software maintenance”. A thing that grabbed my attention in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “As We May Think” (a foundational document: https://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf) was his notion of “trails” through a hyperlinked corpus. (1/2)

• Post #4024539

  “Last song about Popper” https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2026/07/22/last-song-about-popper.html “Last Song About Satan” by Slim Cessna’s Auto Club leads into my last post being rude to the critical rationalists. I present three different people’s discovery stories: C.S. Peirce on Kepler, Lakatos on Newton, and Andy Pickering on Hamilton’s quaternions. The first and third are believable to me. They emphasize iteration, action, backtracking, and goals that shift in response to feedback over...

• Post #4003686

  uspol, Canada, O Canada "Canada is becoming the abused wife that Trump is lashing out at because things are going so badly at work. His hopes and dreams are crashing: The midterms look bad. His leg is caught in a veritable bear trap in his Iran War. So he goes home and beats up his wife, or in this case, lashes out at Canada.” https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-is-an-angry-violent-man-and-canada-is-his-battered-wife/sharetoken/0f460c62-ef9f-48c7-b55b-f84ce63de833 (1/2)

• Post #3939201

  Minard’s graph of Napoleon’s Russia campaign was created to show the horrors of war. It “defies the pen of the historian in its brutal eloquence." I get that, but as visual communication, maybe a side-by-side of two famous pictures of Napoleon works better for getting across the “how it started / how it ended” horror? (Yes, the first picture isn’t set at the start of the invasion of Russia. Work with me here.)

• Post #3922106

  Every team I’ve favored in the World Cup has lost their match. Argentina fans - Spain fans – you know what to do. I can be bribed to support the other team. (I confess that Argentina fans will have to give bigger bribes, so I guess Spain is doomed to lose.)

• Post #3902219

  I wish I knew enough about musicianship to know why Molly Tuttle’s guitar playing makes me sit up and say “whoa”, but her bandmates (who have pretty fast fingers themselves) do not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5aFKTvLqMg

• Post #3822711

  No matter what our differences, I think we can all agree that Orff’s “O Fortuna” is a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=ZIPQT3fwFxUJjCnU&t=23&v=PHEjODKHvIg&feature=youtu.be (I left off the first bit because I don’t like it.)

• Post #3772465

  24.7% of the voting members of the US Congress are 70 years old or older. With all due respect to my esteemed colleagues @GeePawHill@mastodon.social and @RonJeffries@mastodon.social, I think it’s good that we didn’t (wouldn’t have been able to) cling to our past influence. We remain available to whatever young whippersnappers actually have skin in the game, which is as it should be. They are best suited to weigh our experience and conclusions against current reality.

• Post #3683184

  RE: https://mastodon.cloud/@jasongorman/116877113827732750 My career meant nothing.

• Post #3631090

  RE: https://mstdn.social/@DemocracyMattersALot/116868444258059787 Being from downstate Illinois (which has the same relationship to Chicago as the rest of England has to London), it pains me to say it but Illinois’ net donor status is probably due to Chicago. Otherwise, we’d be a taker state like Indiana.

• Post #3592981

  I sense a Pulitzer Prize for some photographer next year. @Nonya_Bidniss@infosec.exchange https://infosec.exchange/@Nonya_Bidniss/116862764176799107

• Post #3567736

  It’s a bad sign when you write “The upshot of all this is that” and then can’t see how to end the sentence.

• Post #3545120

  There’s a saying, “the purpose of an X is to produce a new X” - or something like that. Does that ring a bell? Even with Kagi, my search engine skills do not let me find the original.

• Post #3527223

  “The great men and women of science to whom prestige accrues are simply too few to account for the gigantic effects they are supposed to produce.” – Bruno Latour, /Science in Action/ (1987), p. 166. (Related: https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2026/05/17/the-heros-journey-views-of.html) The same might be true of 10X programmers. (Which is not to say that they don’t exist. I’ve met some.) Disclaimer: I do have what I’d like to think is a cultural American bias toward “the little guy.”

• Post #2469573

  A nice example of the failure of utilitarianism as a practical tool is the Kalder-Hicks welfare criterion. It holds that a policy change is a social improvement if those who gain could, in principle, fully compensate those who lose and still be better off. What’s missing is that those who gain almost never do that. It’s sort of telling that policy makers made policy assuming they would. (I believe this was known in the Clintonite/Blairite ‘90s as “grow, gain, give.”) https://en.wikipedia.org...

• Post #2381571

  “In democracies, the road to foolish wars of choice is paved by pundits, lobbyists, advisors, and other alleged experts [… until] some foolish leader decides the warmongers are right.” – Stephen M. Walt, who names and shames them: Bret Stephens, Matthew Kroenig, Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, Michael Rubin, Niall Ferguson, Jack Keane, Mark Dubowitz, John Bolton More of this. The Epstein class has to get out of the habit of covering for each other. https://archive.ph/hn2CD (no paywall)

• Post #2248820

  I remember being surprised that all of England is of higher latitude than any of the US. It’s safe to say that the climate in London is… more conducive to human life than the climate in Winnepeg, Canada. But London is north of Winnepeg.¹ Let us hope the current that keeps Europe livable doesn’t crash. We wouldn’t want pasty-white people to become the climate refugees. That would be awkward. ¹ https://ecpmlangues.unistra.fr/civilization/geography/overlay-maps @climatenewsnow https://mastodon.so...

• Post #2050746

  Blog post: https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2026/05/02/waterfall-science-views-of-mount.html I scold critical rationalists (and other purveyors of abstract methodologies) for ignoring the complexities of experiment and observation, for not grappling with reality. I talk of building houses and detecting solar neutrinos. Barnacles make a brief guest appearance. Effective science (effective anything, really) requires people who think building houses and detecting neutrinos and dissecting barna...

• Post #1899182

  Wikipedia is so useful. So is the Internet Archive. Thank you to everyone who’s contributed to them.

• Post #1850132

  RE: https://cupoftea.social/@moof/116470265434408001 Ahh… remember the days of “Big Visible Charts” and “ambient awareness” (or whatever Alistair Cockburn called it)? https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/bigvisiblecharts/ So many clever tricks-of-the-trade from that era seem to have been forgotten, perhaps because they didn’t fit in with top-down managerial regulation and resisted being metric-ized. And maybe assumed colocation? Example: build-status lava lamps https://en.wikipedia.org/w...

• Post #1830711

  “To be oriented toward the writings of intellectuals is to be conscious of the community itself, stretching both backwards and forwards in time” – Collins, /The Sociology of Philosophies/, p. 27 That’s something I realize we in software miss. I remember attending a retirement dinner for a vet school professor. It struck me how much he was knowingly part of a *lineage*. In software, we have a lineage, but we’re not conscious of it. I’d say that’s, on balance, a problem.

• Post #1823416

  “There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.” – G. H. Hardy, /A Mathematician's Apology/ Thanks a lot, Professor Hardy. If it’s any consolation to you in Purgatory, my ability to explain has gone weird, so your top-tier descendants won’t need to kick me around as much as in past decades.

• Post #1808270

  "Street medicine providers and homeless outreach workers who travel into Las Vegas’s drainage tunnels have noticed an uptick in the number of people living underground."¹ Any other Olds noticing how much the vibe today resembles the dystopian "New Wave" science fiction of the late '60s and '70s?² Rather more than the later Cyberpunk genre. ¹ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-living-in-las-vegass-tunnels-urged-to-get-medical-t...

• Post #1657039

  Re: https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/221-chief-justice-roberts-and-the?r=3srfc&triedRedirect=true John Roberts will go down in history as a partisan operator who tried to pretend he wasn’t and, by doing so, made it obvious that the Supreme Court is not – and never has been – “above politics.”. He’s managed to push off that judgment with cute words, but his actions have caught up to him. Marbury v. Madison took agency away from the people’s representatives and gave it to an unaccountable...