The authors of the Signal messaging system are acting as useful idiots for state security and police services: while they are almost certainly not working for them or funded by them, what they are doing is extremely convenient for them.
Once upon a time, when the world was younger, a young and rather foolish physics student used to debug his FORTRAN programs using printed backtraces.
After WhatsApp’s threatened change to their terms of service, which may allow them to leak information to Facebook, many people are moving to Signal, a tool which purports to be more secure. If you want security which is not at least partly theatrical you should not use Signal.
Or: things you do to distract yourself from watching an attempted fascist coup.
Or: should you keep that tape?
MIME, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, seems like a good idea: what’s not to like about being able to send arbitrary data by email? In 1996, when I wrote the below, I didn’t think it was.
Duplicacy is a backup tool. It may possibly have good uses, but if you are using it on a Mac it is probably not actually making backups.
Or: the Cummings-Johnson effect.
I thought it would be interesting to get an idea of how many people will die because Dominic Cummings thought it was fine to ignore the lockdown rules, and Boris Johnson agreed with him. So I wrote a program to explore this Cummings-Johnson effect.
Anyone who says that the facts show that men are innately better than women in computing either does not know the facts, does not understand them, or is lying.
The U combinator allows you to define recursive functions and I think it is simpler to understand than the Y combinator.