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A Fan of Freedom: Thoughts on the Biography of RMS … All of us narratize our lives; we all reinvent our own histories to some extent. But one of the perils of reinventing yourself as a prophet/visionary is that you can end up forgetting who you were before the vision. … Again, one of the most interesting things about RMS’s story is the respects in which it is not unique, but representative of themes which recur constantly in the lives of people like us. [Read More]

Link Ladies and gentlemen, CPSR incautiously invited me to say a few words about social responsibility in computing tonight. And my first words are these: when I hear someone speak of “social responsibility”, that’s when I reach for my revolver. In point of fact, I don’t actually own a revolver; but I do believe the rhetoric and the very concept of “social responsibility” have become badly corrupted by political abuse. All too often, people who invoke “social responsibility” are demanding that we give up individual liberty — that we accept just a bit more taxation, just a bit more regulation, just a bit more governmental intrusiveness, all for the the supposed good of society. [Read More]

Two days ago I hard-bricked my phone. Today I un-bricked it. I bought my first smartphone a couple of weeks ago. I had selected a 3.5 years old model - a Mi A1 32GB - through the store’s website. It was being sold at a clearance price of about $120. Its Chinese sibling Mi 5X with twice as much storage cost $20 more. I intended to re-flash the phone (I had learnt about LineageOS shortly before that), so I chose the cheaper model for two reasons: [Read More]

In the new - hopefully a better - year and a new setting it’s time to define the goals for the future. When I quit my day job five years ago, I did that with the purpose of working on my own project(s). Time flew by, and none of them even started to materialize. Partly that can be explained by the goals being too ambitious, leading to an extended analysis paralysis period. [Read More]