Back in November 2020 I started studying for an MSc. And, yesterday, I got this... All done! I've got to say, it has been... an experience. I've relentlessly blogged about the process. The academic content was pretty good, but the administration by QA.com was nothing short of atrocious. Missed deadlines, unhelpful staff, incompetent tutors, and admin staff who clearly didn't care about the…
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I've been thinking a lot about footnotes in Markdown. I've contributed a patch to make them slightly better in WordPress. Now I'm wondering how to make them more useful by enhancing their pop-up title text. To that end, I'm writing a patch for PHP Markdown which will display the first ~200 characters of a footnote in the pop-up title text. Hover over the superscript number and you'll get a…
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I recently read a wonderful paper by Mar Hicks called "Hacking the Cis-tem" which is about database design in the 1960s and the nascent digital state's approach to transgender individuals. It's a short and readable paper with some jaw-dropping anecdotes. Like the man who immediately got a pay rise after his transition, despite working in exactly the same job as before; women were on a lower pay…
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Much like Tom Phillips' last book this is a fun and well-written look at a peculiar facet of humanity. How conspiracy theories work, and why so many people are attracted to them. The book is very now - and I do wonder how it will date. But there's something invigorating about reading a book which tracks the route of a two-hundred year old hoax to the present day. It accurately describes just…
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This is an anthology of modern Chinese science fiction, loosely grouped into three main themes. I'm sad to say that some of the stories are a lot of hard work. One is barely sci-fi - more like a spiritual paean to the souls of people caught in a disaster which, bizarrely, has a throwaway line about aliens in it. One is an interminable description of domesticity which, if I've understood…
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This is a difficult and disturbing book. It is a great read for any hacker - it's all about the way technology abuses people and how it radicalises people into fighting back. The dialogue is Socratic and the stories are a set of parables. The first asks us to consider what are the limits of protecting people? When we try to restrict technology "for your own good" it often has a degrading and…
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