The Old Web isn’t dead. It just got old enough that it constantly seems to leave the spreadsheet with all of its passwords open on the desktop. It is sinking into the sofa while images of a low-bitrate Spaghetti Western dance in its bifocals. — Things We Left in the Old Web

Introduction to Modern Statistics.

TIL about lieer, which can be used to fetch and two-way tag synchronization between notmuch and GMail. I no longer really use Gmail, and I use mu instead of notmuch to manage my Maildir’s, but this is quite nice. See Setting Up neomutt with notmuch, gmail(lieer) and gpg signing for additional information.

Computer Security and the Internet: Tools and Jewels.

In the software industry, there is a term for intentional designs which coerce the user into doing something, be it consciously or subconsciously - a ‘dark pattern’. These patterns are employed by social media networks, e-commerce, video games, and many more places. — The ‘Fuck You’ Pattern

Text editors inhabit a weird space in computing. What could be simpler than transcribing the ramblings of an operator into characters on a blank screen? And yet there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of different ways to do it, all targeting different use cases, writing styles, feature sets, abilities, and trade-offs. There’s a reason new ones still come out, despite the industry existing for decades. — Thinking out loud about Vim

And then, you learned about it: M-x shell.
It was all just text. Why did you need another application for it? Why should only the shell prompt be editable? Why can’t I move my cursor up a few lines to where the last command spewed out its results? All these problems simply disappear when your shell (or shells) simply becomes another Emacs buffer, upon which all of the text manipulation power of Emacs can be brought to bear. — Blurring the lines between shell and editor

What I’ve learned about data recently. Good points re. Learning 1 and 3.

Introduction to Locality-Sensitive Hashing.

Docker for beginners.