@PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz

Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 19, 2026

RE: https://mastodon.world/@Oxymetheus/116944206513552370 A medina not just for fixing things but for experimenting with new businesses ... that's one of the things that make Tokyo great ... a person can open a hole -in-the-wall bar or café or antique jeans shop or obsessively complicated model airplane shop; and it doesn't take a fortune in rent and renovations and 3 years and public hearings to get a licence. And such areas are fun to walk around. (Akihabara and Ameyoko and Golden Gai are examples, although they're not what they once were)

Quoting

Oxymetheus 🇨🇦 @Oxymetheus@mastodon.world

Excellent! https://riftlymedia.com/zipper-mechanics-fail-everyday-product-engineering/ I swear, every city needs a medina, a cheap mixed-use neighborhood where people can open tiny 2m × 2m shops that specialize in fixing zippers. Or sharpening kitchen knives. Or replacing shoe heels. You can get those services now, of course, but only at ruinous cost, because every shop has to pay thousands of dollars a month in rent on a high street. More tiny kiosks on narrow streets, sez I. #economics #urbanism #cities #repairability

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 18, 2026

Replying to @paninid@mastodon.world

@paninid@mastodon.world I'm entertained by the left-NIMBYs' incoherent arguments. (The right-NIMBYs are kinda boring: parking, traffic, "neighborhood character", water (it's California), and dog-whistles about maintaining property values.) And NextDoor showcases the ignorance my neighbors have of how governments work at the local, state, and federal levels -- most of them would fail the naturalization civics test. @mattblaze@federate.social

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 18, 2026

Replying to @paninid@mastodon.world

@paninid@mastodon.world If you think THIS site is problematic, you should try NextDoor. (Which, to be fair, is useful for finding gardeners, plumbers, etc. plus the odd lost cat and warnings about coyotes wandering our neighborhood) @mattblaze@federate.social

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz

@emilymbender@dair-community.social Disowning agency is good for one's career -- the Reinhart-Rogoff spreadsheet error doesn't seemed to have affected their reputations or even stopped people quoting their erroneous conclusions.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 17, 2026

Replying to @emilymbender@dair-community.social

@emilymbender@dair-community.social Some random thoughts on "AI" anthropomorphization (you did ask for other ideas about "agency") ... Maybe we could popularize renaming "AI agents" as "clever-Hans-the-horse"? (But how many people know that story?) https://braddelong.substack.com/p/crosspost-arin-dube-clever-hans-at "Stochastic parrot" seems to have not caught on -- a computer scientist whom I otherwise respect got a bit upset with me when I used that phrase. Although "stochastic parrot" instead of "LLM" would have made more obvious some of the errors in the editorial you quote. At the same time, can we acknowledge that we're little more than "jumped-up East African Plains apes", to use DeLong's phrase, and much of our species' success is due to our hyper-sociability (which makes us overly trusting when presented with stochastic parrot output)?

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 12, 2026

Replying to @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz

Longer even: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science But not well-known before the 1960s ... global warming was common knowledge by the 1970s, at least amongst those who read newspapers, news magazines, or science magazines.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 12, 2026

RE: @FediThing@social.chinwag.org

Human-caused global warming / climate change has been known since the 1970s (I remember conversations about this at university). But even though most people in most countries(*) believe in climate change, only half believe it's human-caused. 🤯

(*) The US is an outlier in how few people believe in climate change.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 12, 2026

TIL that "privilege" comes from Latin privilegium "a law in favor of an individual" (typically the exemption of one individual from the operation of a law) and "white privilege" or "male privilege" take on an extra dimension.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 11, 2026

orbisai0security did a drive-by check of some sample code, and raised a "critical" security issue with a fix. It flagged a strpy() -- I agree, that is a security issue -- but replaced it with a call to snprintf(), plus a fair amount of boilerplate commentary. Where did this ridiculous replacement code come from? Sure, strlcpy() is BSD, but strncpy() is part of the C standard and is made trivially safe by:
strncpy(dst, src, size of dst);
dst[sizeof dst - 1] = '\0';

If this is indicative of what "AI" can do when writing code, we'll need much faster CPUs.

https://github.com/SWI-Prolog/swipl-devel/pull/1505

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 10, 2026

RE: @MostlyHarmless@thecanadian.social

Also true of NextDoor

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 06, 2026

Replying to @Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social I don't want to criticize you - after all, you don't charge for your wonderful content - but I've seen "traditional publishing" with the original publication date (or year) and the last revision date (this seems to be the house style for the NYTimes, for example). This is valuable in understanding the context - e.g., if you had written about Allende or Pinochet in 1975 (I can remember the reaction on my university campus to the coup), I would interpret the text quite differently than if it were written in 2025 or if it had been revised in 2025; and not just for seeing how well the article had aged. [In the software business, we keep a complete record of all changes to programs -- that way we can look at a particular line and see when it was written and why. This is overkill for literary work; but a lighter-weight revision history can be very helpful]

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 05, 2026

Replying to @mattblaze@federate.social

@mattblaze@federate.social As are most things in history. But not examining history/tradition is item #1 on Umberto Eco's list.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jul 05, 2026

Replying to @josh0@babka.social

@josh0@babka.social @LilahTovMoon@tech.lgbt In this case, it's not so much "capitalism" but zoning laws and democracy by loudest voice. Real capitalism would tell the complainers to shut up about someone else's property. I'm not defending capitalism (and another problem is how property taxes penalize for "improvements") but reforming zoning codes and community input would help a lot. https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html https://www.ft.com/content/023562e2-54a6-11e6-befd-2fc0c26b3c60

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 29, 2026

Replying to @mattblaze@federate.social

@mattblaze@federate.social I learned about Emperor Norton from jwz (who's on the fediverse) https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/01/the-pro-vaccination-emperor-of-1869/

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 28, 2026

Replying to @mattblaze@federate.social

@mattblaze@federate.social There's an ongoing attempt to name a bridge after the emperor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_Norton_Trust#%22Emperor_Norton_Bridge%22_advocacy,_2013%E2%80%93present Why not? Pete Seeger immortalized the boxes in a song https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boxes , so renaming a bridge seems reasonable to me (and, yes, this a non sequitur but so is San Francisco)

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 28, 2026

@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social I find it useful to at least have a year (and season or month) on an article (it's not always the published date), to give a bit of context. (Knowing the author's political preferences also helps, but I can usually figure that out ... it's interesting to read opinions that differ from mine, as long as the facts aren't mis-represented.)

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 19, 2026

Replying to @jrconlin@mindof.jrconlin.com

@jrconlin@mindof.jrconlin.com @mhoye@cosocial.ca Maybe we'll go back to a world like when I graduated in the mid-70s and didn't expect a career as a programmer (we didn't use the term "software engineer" in those days) and people will study Computer Science because they find it interesting/enjoyable. I've fixed more hideously broken code and broken system designs than I care to remember... it wouldn't surprise me to see LLM stochastic parrots generating better code than the average programmer (self-styled "software engineer"). Fortunately, I'm retired and don't have to live through any more "software revolutions".

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 10, 2026

Replying to @SteveClough@metalhead.club

@SteveClough@metalhead.club @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @tante@tldr.nettime.org I was once in Tokyo when there was a stoppage on a metro line and they were handling out tickets for other lines and apologizing profusely. And in both Japan and Canada, saying "I'm sorry" is not an admission of liability.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 10, 2026

Replying to @meredith@famichiki.jp

@meredith@famichiki.jp @nosrednayduj@hachyderm.io @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @tante@tldr.nettime.org But East Asian earwax is different from European and African earwax, so the tools and techniques are different. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know-general-science/your-earwax-and-sweat-have-something-smelly-common

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 08, 2026

Replying to @cross@discuss.systems

@cross@discuss.systems Algol68 tried to do that ...

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 07, 2026

RE: @courtney@pdx.social

Me too

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 04, 2026

@tokyobybike@famichiki.jp
The Empire State Building was erected in a little over a year, and it's taking Trump's favourite contractor 3 months to do "repairs" that don't fix the underlying problems with the pool, but they do stop it from reflecting and they cost over 10x what Trump initially said.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 03, 2026

@rk@mastodon.well.com My daughter got hooked on manga and anime in middle school and taught herself Japanese from them because the existing English translations were so bad (she was exposed to quite a bit of Japanese until about 8 years old but had resisted Saturday Japanese school so much that we gave up)

mastodon.well.com

rk: it’s hyphen-minus actually (@rk@well.com) - Mastodon

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Jun 03, 2026

@rk@mastodon.well.com It's French grammar that makes no sense (also English grammar of course). Japanese is just agglutinative RPN (SVO) with all the individual pieces being optional. Both Mandarin and Japanese use topics more than subjects.
.(In French, I'm constantly surprised when what I think of as an English idiom means the same thing when translated word for word to French)

mastodon.well.com

rk: it’s hyphen-minus actually (@rk@well.com) - Mastodon

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 20, 2026

Replying to @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz

And when I was in Englad last year, "avocado toast" at hotel breakfast usually had a poached egg on top, so sort of eggs Benedict but with avocado instead of back bacon. Tasty.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 20, 2026

Tired: Avocado toast
Wired: Avocado croissant
Inspired: Avocado and Comté cheese croissant

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 18, 2026

Replying to @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org

@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org @dzwiedziu@mastodon.social Bringing responsibility to "AI" could also be a first step (a precedent) in bring responsibility to corporations. After all, the Supreme Court has said that they are "persons" in terms of speech, so why not in other aspects? @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 18, 2026

Replying to @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org

@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org Replace "AI" with "corporations" and you'd fix a lot of flaws in capitalism. A few CEOs going to jail would do wonders to corporate governance ("pour encourager les autres"). Especially if "I didn't know" wasn't allowed as a defence (it's the CxOs' jobs to know and to insure that they know). (This wouldn't fix all of capitalism, despite what libertarians might think; but having "skin in the game" usually improves outcomes) @dzwiedziu@mastodon.social @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 11, 2026

Replying to @briansullivan@mastodon.sdf.org

@briansullivan@mastodon.sdf.org @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org Canadian politeness: "Please go ahead of me; I'm still reading the menu".

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 06, 2026

Replying to @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz

@regehr@mastodon.social From my jobs that involved systems programminng, I can attest that James Mickens does not exaggerate. (BTW, returning to the Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane article, I have also worked (briefly) with high explosives --- specifically C4, which can be used in the field to boil water for coffee; and mercury fulminate, which can go off if someone looks cross-eyed at it (as I was told when I was driving across a bumpy field with an explosives expert sitting next to me, holding a few boxes of mercury fulminate blasting caps).

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 06, 2026

Replying to @regehr@mastodon.social

@regehr@mastodon.social In times like these, we need James Mickens, e.g. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf "... a systems programmer has seen the terrors of the world and understood the intrinsic horror of existence ... has written drivers for buggy devices whose firmware was implemented by a drunken child or a sober goldfish ... has traced a network problem across eight machines, three time zones, and a brief diversion into Amish country ..."

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 03, 2026

Replying to @mattblaze@federate.social

@mattblaze@federate.social @deivudesu@mastodon.social I doubt that either architect thought their proposals would come true; they were trying to provoke. OTOH, following their ideas with half-measures has been horrible -- the giant apartment complexes in China; Euclidean zoning and suburban sprawl in the US/Canada. They also make assumptions about human behaviour that only fit a minority of people and force uniformity on everyone (Le Corbusier apparently got some of his ideas from a monastery -- which might make great buildings for introverts like me but not for most). Every utopian vision is a failure because every utopian vision presumes a population made of ideal people. Real life is messy -- which doesn't mean it has to be dirty and noisy like NYC.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 01, 2026

Replying to @glueckstein@digitalcourage.social

@glueckstein @alicemcalicepants I remember 6.3 (DEC RADIX 50)

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 01, 2026

Replying to @mattblaze@federate.social

@mattblaze@federate.social I just finished renting an apartment for a month in an area of central Paris that Le Corbusier wanted to demolish and replace with a group of sixty-story cruciform office towers surrounded by parkland. Almost anything I needed to do was within a 10 minute walk; and if it was farther away, there were half a dozen metro stations and bus stops, putting almost the entire city within 30-40 minutes (also lots of bike-shares). The cafés were full of people, most of them not looking at their cell phones (a fair number of them were tourists, of course; but the less touristy areas were also full); there was a nearby park with kids playing (and people watching the kids and the ducks in the pond) ... and to top it off, very few cars (thank-you Mayor Hidalgo). The antithesis of Le Corbusier's and FLW's visions. @deivudesu@mastodon.social

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · May 01, 2026

Replying to @deivudesu@mastodon.social

@deivudesu@mastodon.social I agree that Le Corbusier's and FLW's (sub)urban designs look very different but they are the same in two important ways:

They presume that the best way to get around is with cars (and completely fail to see the negative social and environmental effects of cars-dependency)
They ignore the social aspect of humans (in the case of Le Corbusier, if you think that people interact in a highrise, you haven't lived in a highrise; and in the case of FLW, you don't meet many neighbours in a suburb of 1/4 acre properties, let alone with an acre+ per family). @mattblaze@federate.social

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 30, 2026

Replying to @mattblaze@federate.social

@mattblaze@federate.social Frank Lloyd Wright's "Broadacre City" espoused car-centric (sub)urban sprawl, so his views on urban design were similar to Corbusier's, but with more vegetation. There must have been something in the water (or air) in those days. @deivudesu@mastodon.social

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 30, 2026

Replying to @mattblaze@federate.social

@mattblaze It *is* comfortable (a friend owns one and I've used it) @955_36

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 14, 2026

Replying to @joebeone@techpolicy.social

@joebeone@techpolicy.social @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org Do rants ever avail?

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 08, 2026

Replying to @katemorley@hachyderm.io

@katemorley Monet would've wanted to paint this.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 05, 2026

"... fascism is a loser’s ideology, a smothering emotional safety blanket for deeply insecure and broken people (mostly men), which only makes their problems worse until it destroys them and everyone around them."
https://acoup.blog/2024/02/23/fireside-friday-february-23-2024-on-the-military-failures-of-fascism/

"Fascist governments, as Eco notes, “are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.” Fascism’s cult of machismo also tends to be a poor fit for modern, industrialized and mechanized war, while fascism’s disdain for the intellectual is a poor fit for sound strategic thinking."

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

Fireside Friday, February 23, 2024 (On the Military Failures of Fascism)

Fireside this week! We’ll pick up looking at some of the successes of Hellenistic armies next week. Percy, having found a use for some of my books. And of course, less I miss a chance to note…

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 04, 2026

Replying to @chandlerc@hachyderm.io

@chandlerc Or do like Canada with OAS (old age security) payments ... use income tax returns to "claw back" excess payments to the rich.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 03, 2026

Replying to @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I am so glad I turned down Microsoft's job offer in what became Azure (I thought that the interview was too lightweight and that Google stock options had more upside. Also Microsoft's cafeteria sucked).

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Mar 31, 2026

Replying to @scruss@xoxo.zone

@scruss@xoxo.zone @Daojoan@mastodon.social You obviously are mixing with the wrong Canadians - and we have 2 languages for swearing.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Mar 31, 2026

Replying to @messaroundmarx@zirk.us

@messaroundmarx My observation in Paris is that almost nobody is looking at their phone when sitting in a café (I see a few people working on laptops, by themselves). And bicycling infrastructure has really helped - coffee with gas fumes has almost disappeared, although cigarettes are still allowed outside.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Mar 26, 2026

Replying to @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz

https://www.saltwire.com/newfoundland-labrador/gwynne-dyer-trump-iran-miscalculations

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Mar 26, 2026

"... it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result."

An analysis by a military historian: https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

Miscellanea: The War in Iran

This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Mar 22, 2026

Replying to @mauvehed@defcon.social

@mauvehed@defcon.social I've worked on systems where 1PB was getting low on storage (IIRC, there were ~10K machines holding a database that took 2 weeks to process all the records). That was 15 years ago, so I'm sure the system is much bigger now.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Mar 22, 2026

Replying to @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org

@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org https://open.substack.com/pub/fallows/p/one-man-a-hero-one-man-a-monster

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Mar 20, 2026

Replying to @codebyjeff@hachyderm.io

@codebyjeff@hachyderm.io Probably true for the majority of software, that the biggest problem is figuring what the problem is (business rules, use cases, UX, etc) But some problems are mostly about the code ... compilers, databases, webservers, browsers, operating systems, paxos/raft, end-to-end cryptography, etc, etc.

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Peter Ludemann @PeterLudemann@mathstodon.xyz · Mar 16, 2026

Replying to @meejah@mastodon.social

@meejah @petrillic @rk @norootcause Yes, there are bad interviewers at Google. And at other companies. (I turned down a Microsoft job offer because I thought the interviews were too easy - and I had another job offer that ended up being a better financial choice as well) (I did design interviews at Google until I got tired of a thankless job ... I didn't care what answers the candidate gave; I wanted to see their thought process)

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Peter Ludemann

Posts

rk: it’s hyphen-minus actually (@rk@well.com) - Mastodon

rk: it’s hyphen-minus actually (@rk@well.com) - Mastodon

Fireside Friday, February 23, 2024 (On the Military Failures of Fascism)

Miscellanea: The War in Iran

Remote instance