Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

5 items tagged “maciejceglowski”

2019

Practical campaign security is a wood chipper for your hopes and dreams. It sits at the intersection of 19 kinds of status quo, each more odious than the last. You have to accept the fact that computers are broken, software is terrible, campaign finance is evil, the political parties are inept, the DCCC exists, politics is full of parasites, tech companies are run by arrogant man-children, and so on.

Maciej Cegłowski # 30th May 2019, 12:03 pm

We don’t like limits on discrimination and lending, so we’re gonna use machine learning, which is a form of money laundering for bias, a way to blame mathematical algorithms for desires to simply avoid rules that everybody else has to play by in this industry.

Maciej Ceglowski # 8th May 2019, 11:11 pm

2011

One interesting quirk of Pinboard is a complete absence of unit tests. I used to be a die-hard believer in testing, but in Pinboard tried a different approach, as an experiment. Instead of writng tests I try to be extremely careful in coding, and keep the code size small so I continue to understand it. I’ve found my defect rate to be pretty comparable to earlier projects that included extensive test suites and fixtures, but I am much more productive on Pinboard.

Maciej Ceglowski # 11th February 2011, 2:57 am

2010

Scott and Scurvy. Did you know that Scott’s 1911 expedition to the south pole was plagued by scurvy, despite the British navy having discovered an effective cure way back in the 18th century? A fascinating tale of how scientific advances can lead to surprising regressions. # 8th March 2010, 6:15 pm

2009

We are facing an economic crisis that is within our capacity to solve, and an ecological crisis that we lack the political means to prevent. It’s only by failing at the former that we might have a chance at surviving the latter.

Maciej Cegłowski # 19th March 2009, 4:11 pm