In Europe, I'm considered a moderate. In my home state of Texas, I'm a god-damned liberal.
Husband, father, CTO, Perl fan, database geek. https://t.co/fcNldrSLb2.
Feb 11, 2022 • 28 tweets • 5 min read
So I kind of, accidentally, had the sex talk with Lilly-Rose when I put her to bed. Me being me, it was not your standard "sex talk." Instead, I was talking about science. 1/28
As I was putting her to bed, I started talking about the difference between instinctual and learned behaviors vis-à-vis evolution. For most of us, we tend to think of evolution as "survival of the fittest." But what does "fittest" mean? 2/28
Feb 10, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
A typical health care incident in France. I finally gave in and called the doctor this morning. I've been sick since Monday night, coughing, sneezing, aching. I took a COVID test Tuesday morning and it was negative. 1/9
So I figured a flu or something which will clear up in a couple of days. Here it is, Thursday, and it's not better at all. I take another COVID test and it's negative. So I call a doctor and he swings by my house an hour and a half later. Yes, that's right. 2/9
Apr 29, 2020 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
ALL NAMES ARE FAKE.
I was in Paris, in 2012, when the dreaded event happened. A woman named Alice approached me and she let me know exactly what she thought about me. It seems she had been working in London and she had the misfortune to maintain code I had written there.
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A few years prior I was in London and I was working for a company I'll call EXAMPLE. They had a domain, example.com. And they had an affiliate program. You could provide a banner ad for them and if someone clicked on it and spent money, you would get some.
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Nov 23, 2019 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
My favorite "failed" project: I was with a company that decided to rewrite a Perl project in C++ because Perl was too slow.
Already, I know several of you want to know what "too slow" means in this context, but no, you gotta wait for the punchline.
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This project was written years ago and was thus "legacy" code. It was clunky, but critical. Honestly, fixing it would have been cheaper and faster than a rewrite, but you probably know that. The dangers of rewrites are well-known.
2/6
Jul 28, 2019 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Always be willing to question "received wisdom". Case in point: carrots help you see better at night.
Truth: this is a lie, possibly started to help the Allies win WWII.
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During the war, German bombers often attacked at night to take advantage of the darkness.
The UK developed Airborne Interception Radar (called AI at the time!), which allowed them to easily detect these planes. But that caused a problem.
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Jul 26, 2018 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
You know what I'm sick of? The "Nazis were left-wing" crap. Please retweet this because people need to understand how alt-right propaganda works. Claiming that "Nazis were left-wing" is "Holocaust denial lite". You know why? 1/13
"Nazis were left-wing" is an attempt to shift the narrative away from "the Nazis were some of the worst evil in modern human history" to "hey, why don't we debate the finer points of Hitler's ideology without mentioning Hitler?" 2/13
