Municipal utilities in the United States have famously bad information security. It seems that nobody has ever seriously put in the effort to secure these things, despite protracted effort from security researchers to raise awareness of the issue.

Presumably, you think this means utilities companies are absurdly lazy.

Ignore that thought. […]

From some very ancient Mozilla build instructions (underlining added for emphasis):


As preposterous as this sounds, the actual intention of the instructions above is to skip the Perl code entirely. Perl is not being used as some sort of preprocessing layer to feed into another language, as one might first assume.

There are around two dozen Perl scripts in the build tree, and they provide niceties like preventing build artifacts from getting recompiled unnecessarily, calculating and embedding an expiry date (timebomb) for the build, and generating build tags that include the NFS hostname. Obviously, these are not really essential functions if you are just trying to get a working browser at home.

Building on my previous musings about what I called the fittedness of computing environments, I'd like to introduce another, closely-related concept that emphasises just one aspect of the aesthetics of fittedness. For want of a better term, I'm calling it UI charisma or charm. The gist of it: a UI is charming if it feels like all the parts fit with each other. […]

The middle stages of typical Alzheimer's disease patients sometimes resemble the behaviour of a high-parameter large language model with a small context. In particular, some patients will exhibit a tendency to 'play along' with an interlocutor, inhabiting a persona from some arbitrary part in their lifetime that best fits the available stimuli. When they generate nonsensical utterances, these may seem to be attempts to decode incomprehensible stimuli with damaged hardware. This tendency toward annealing, and the resultant glimpses of a sophisticated memory or personality composed of the experiences of the individual, are iconic LLM behaviours—hallucinating and recall. […]

As 8458 draws to a close, the Museum has finished remodelling its displays in the western quadrant of the building. See the Visitors' Guide for specifics.

I used to spend a lot of time on r/linguisticshumor, being a smug idiot. Recently I got it into my head that shouting at the never-ebbing tide of first-year linguistics students was a waste of my life, so rather than continue piling bricks in an ever-eroding wall, I'll just post them here, and you can throw them through your own window (or your enemies' windows) at your leisure. […]

Lately I've been on a retro-computing binge, revisiting some past nostalgias (and borrowed nostalgias) with fresh eyes. I don't usually think highly of nostalgics in the purest sense—I've always thought of rose-tinted glasses as an obstacle to true appreciation of history rather than a justification for it—but this time I took a long, hard look at the technology of my own childhood for once, particularly the quirks of 90s Windows, from 3.0 through 2000, and in the midst of this I've come to realise that the standard terminology we use to describe the experience of using old computers is missing an axis, one that's worth defining. […]

Chlorine, Chlorine, Chlorine, Chlorine
Please purify every single last dram
Fluorine, Fluorine, Fluorine, Fluorine
I'm begging of you, bind to all that you can […]

In the first two parts of this series, we examined some of the physiological factors that motivate how real scripts developed into their preferred shapes, as well as evidence from history where lack of a clear set of rules (or clear knowledge of those rules) impacted the quality of text. […]

Last time, we looked at arm biomechanics and how physiology affects the ability of humans to produce shapes, especially straight lines, consistently. The prognostication was not exactly uplifting: we established that human muscles are naturally disposed to draw wobbly lines, and that extensive practice is required to draw a simple, straight horizontal line consistently without slowing down. But before we get into the marvels of how cursive writing avoids these problems, we ought to look at some of the strategies that various scripts developed to mitigate them prior to the invention of connected writing, as these approaches are still very much evident in all real-world continuous scripts. (And considering how bad the average person's handwriting is these days, you might even improve your natural-language legibility along the way...) […]