Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from charity.wtf
I have not thought or said much about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) over the years. Not because I don’t care about the espoused ideals — I suppose I do, rather a lot — but because corporate DEI efforts have always struck me as ineffective and bland; bolted on at best, if not actively compensating […]
Hazel Weakly, you little troublemaker. As I whined to Hazel over text, after she sweetly sent me a preview draft of her post: “PLEASE don’t post this! I feel like I spend all my time trying to help bring clarity and context to what’s happening in the market, and this is NOT HELPING. Do you […]
I’ve never been good at “hot takes”. Anyone who knows anything about marketing can tell you that the best time to share your opinion about something is when everyone is all worked up about it. Hot topics drive clicks and eyeballs and attention en masse. Unfortunately, my internal combustion machine doesn’t run that way. If […]
Originally posted on the Honeycomb blog on November 19th, 2024 We’ve been talking about observability 2.0 a lot lately; what it means for telemetry and instrumentation, its practices and sociotechnical implications, and the dramatically different shape of its cost model. With all of these details swimming about, I’m afraid we’re already starting to lose sight of what matters. […]
More in programming
A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good. And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well. So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.
My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club
Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server
The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]
