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  ICantBelieveItCanSort Sort I learned about this from Matt Parker’s Stand-Up Maths channel. It was originally conceived as a counterexample, a sorting algorithm that was obviously broken, but it does actually sort correctly. The algorithm: for i = 1 to n do for j = 1 to n do if A[i] < A[j] then swap A[i] and A[j] It has a few quirks (like j accessing elements outside of i’s range, and the A[i] < A[j] comparator being backward) that should break it, but...

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  ``` text Second, I have previously speculated that pain needs to be unimpeachably painful, otherwise the animal could overrule it. Pain functions to warn the animal not to repeat a damaging action such as jumping over a cliff or picking up a hot ember. If the warning consisted merely of throwing a switch in the brain, raising a painless red flag, the animal could overrule it in pursuit of a competing pleasure: ignoring lethal bee stings in pursuit of honey, say. According to this theory,...

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  Only the dead have seen the end of zero-days.

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  I'm fond of WYSISWYG (what you see is sorta what you get).

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  There's something nice and showerthought-y about a relationship so mundane and inconsequential that it barely registers as a discrete idea being rendered as a factoid.

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  It would be really nice to have a community where everyone had household compute that was their "main" computer. They could be the hubs for communications that's always on, and you could set it up to communicate with an otherwise anonymous public handheld, or just leave it until you get home and decide to get online. handhelds wouldn't need to be repositories of sensitive data, they could just be thin clients that could be safely wiped and restored (without needing a corporate...

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  I think the ideal is to have some people who gravitate toward the bleeding edge, and some people who gravitate toward the stable center. I think, when the system works well, each group benefits the other. For example, I like debian for my servers because I like my servers to be as stable and low-maintenance as possible, but I am also really fascinated by NixOS and its approach to system administration. Personally I still need to play with it some more before I trust it with a production service,...

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  The day I stop distrohopping will be the day I die.

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  The first linux distro I remember using was Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake), so I'm just about at 20 years, maybe a bit less than that; I think it had been released for a while before I decided to give it a go. I tend to stick with debian-based distros, though I've used arch variants off and on for my daily driver for years at a time. Still got it kicking around on some machines now, though not any of my daily drivers. Servers are a mix of Debian and Ubuntu Server, machines with UI are either...