Damian’s notes

Renderings by David Romero of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s unbuilt buildings, the Call Building (1912).

This abacus has an electronic calculator built in to it for some reason.

Micro.blog, a micro-blogging site with lots of interop with other platforms now has free hosting for teachers and nurses. If you know a teacher or nurse who might enjoy Micro.blog, let them know!

#IndieWeb #Micro.blog

Here is a fun, short video of people from around the world beings asked for the most popular tongue-twister in their country.

Here’s a neat idea (for people using Unix-like systems): add the venerable Fortune program to your login, bit replace its database of epigrams with reminders to yourself of useful command-line tools you have installed.

AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model. Editorial from 404 Media arguing that journalism not written by humans is not worth the e it is printed on.

Strunk & White’s classic style guide has changed its recommendations a little over the decades, including on the question of whether ‘junior’ used to differentiate two people with the same name is part of their name or is a parenthetical (William Strunk Jr versus WIlliam Strunk, jr).

As a programmer, I am often required to tell higher-ups that their suggestion of first-name, last-name fields is not a good way to store names of arbitrary humans. Patrick McKenzie (patio11) wrote a useful essay elaborating on this called Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, which I think is good and useful—though not to be taken without some interpretation.

Please do not title your own listicle Falsehoods Programmers Believe About X. Reserve that prefix for this essay and invent your own snappy title.

On July 13th 2005, Jacob Kaplan-Moss made the first commit to the public repository that would become Django. This is being celebrated at various events during the year. While awaiting an event near you, here is Simon Willison’s talk on Django’s origins from 2015.