I've found it very frustrating to watch my parents among others open their browser, see whatever Google or Microsoft had dredged up, and then get dragged down into weird conspiracy theories.

In my late dad's case, he became a rabid climate change denialist, presumably courtesy of the Koch Brothers. I could see the economic rational of the fossil fuel industry spreading disinformation of renewables. When my father would try to pass the crap the internet was feeding on to me, I would ask him what the "provenance" of these stories were? For him, if the internet said something, it must be true.

In my mom's case, she loves stories about the British Royal Family and is a rabid Harry & Megan hater. Microsoft and Google feed her weird conspiracy theories in their news home page selection. I checked the provenance of these, and found its invariably Pakistani-based click-bait content farming operations, probably AI generated nonsense. Again, my mom doesn't have the media literacy to know the difference between a story originating from the Guardian or some Russian bot-farm, and just answers the "BBC says so" when I ask her the provenance of stuff like "Megan's children are hired child actors and not real".

Besides suing Google and Microsoft for knowingly spreading crap a better solution would be to make media literacy part of modern schooling, as it's done in Finland.

I foresee a lot of real cases of this mock Onion obituary.

Diana Yanko, 61, died on Tuesday after an AI incorrectly filed her charts, another AI denied her claim, and a third AI turned off her life support.

The book I wish I'd started from is How To Design Programs. While it uses a dialect of Lisp, Racket, the key ideas are applicable to all programing langues.

Essentially, it encourages designers of anything to "think before you ink". In the case of software, first write a "Signature, Purpose Statement, Header" which expands to: State what kind of data the desired function consumes and produces. Formulate a concise answer to the question what the function computes. Define a stub that lives up to the signature.

The book stresses test-first development, writing failing tests using stubs and then getting them to work. I find the discipline of this results in far better code, and the examples created by the tests help a lot when refactoring later.

A reason I wished I'd started with that book is that it's a difficult habit to develop later. Nowadays, using mainly JavaScript, I've come to rely a lot on JSDoc for documentation and Jasmine for testing, neither are ideal, but I can't find anything better.

My theory of why Unix took over the world was that it was slipped into a contract to supply a documentation system to the patent office, resulting in man pages as a side-effect, yielding documented applications which seems to still be a revolutionary idea among coders.

I've missed several episodes of this soapy, so completely lost track.

During the industrial revolution when steam engines were getting more efficient, a nowadays largely forgotten genius William Stanley Jevons predicted that instead of reducing coal consumption as most thought, demand for it would rise, coining an economic law called the Jevons Paradox. Time will tell if AI does for software developers what power consumption did for coal.

I only recently stumbled on Jevons who for some reason isn't nearly as well known today as his peers George Boole and Charles Babbage. It turns out what we call Boolean logic was actually developed by Jevons, and Jevons's "Logic Piano", a four-bit computer, he built a working prototype of which Babbage never achieved with his Analytical Engine.

The reason I know about Jevons is I developed an interest in the history of logic, and a story that made me chuckle was Jevons wrote to Boole about how to clarify "disjunction" (better known as OR in computer programing). Somewhat confusingly in Boolean algebra, AND is multiplication and OR is addition. Using 0 and 1, the multiplication rule works perfectly but OR follows the weird 1 + 0 + 1 +... = 1 convention. Thinking of AND as min(p, q, ...) and OR as max(p, q, ...) works as well without causing the confusion in my opinion. Anyways, Jevons wrote to Boole suggesting text books adopt a new symbol | instead of using +, which upset Boole so much he refused to communicate with Jevons further.

Several of our eminent breeders have, even within a single lifetime, modified to a large extent their breeds of cattle and sheep.

I read "On the Origin of the Species" a while back, but I recall a core message was that while natural selection tends to produce regimentation, as in everyone looks nearly the same as stays that way for ages, unnatural selection as in domestication of plants and animals produces the huge variety we have in dogs etc quickly. Darwin was a racing pigeon breeder, so he goes on about pigeons a lot.

TL:DR are we suffering from unnatural selection in humans?

Last time I went to X, saw this notice:

After careful review, we determined your account broke the X Rules.

Possibly because I liked a joke before Easter in response to Paula White comparing Trump to Jesus saying then crucify him and see if he's still alive on Monday. No clue why. But not being able to doomscroll on X means I spend more time here, so all for the best.

Last time I used Ubuntu, gigabytes of krapware but not even a terminal or text editor installed by default.

About 30 years ago Niklaus Wirth published an article titled "A Plea for Lean Software" which got summarized as Wirth's Law "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster". Nobody seems to have paid attention.

Luckily nowadays the photos would be uploaded immediately to some social network for them probably to be debunked quickly. Figuring out if they're fake is likely harder now than in the days of negatives, but it at least it wouldn't take decades before some monarchy's antient customs allow them to be made public.

I switched to XFCE a couple of years ago after I couldn't find a terminal or text editor on the default GNOME installation. All I ever really use is a terminal, text editor and web browser, and on the default installation of Ubuntu, I had to restart from scratch with Arch Linux to even get a terminal and shell to continue.

An interesting little detail is "the Record’s editor in 1990, the late Endell Laird, was a member of the MoD’s D notice committee." "We don’t know if the Record was handed a D notice, but Pope has confirmed that the MoD prevented the release of the photographs." If there was any valid security reason to suppress the photos, the military shouldn't have blown the purloined work into posters for all to see at press conferences. Long story short, the "chef" or "poacher" who took the photo, and subsequently mysteriously vanished, had his work stolen with the aid of a newspaper editor who doubled as a state censor, and the military must have broken some laws (even by UK standards) to have used his photo as a poster without permission.

"He forwarded the picture to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which told him to ask the Record to send the other five photographs and their negatives." I worked as a journalist for a couple of years in the UK, and that sounds exactly what those grovelling peasants living in a monarchy would do.

Time for France to put "Programmation en logique" where it belongs.

The best first book on programing is https://htdp.org/ Its "sequel" is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs which is in Scheme from which Racket was derived. Other languages simply don't have educational material that good.