Welcome to Everything

Everything2.com reaches a quarter of a century on this historic day! Like the humble horseshoe crab this beautiful site has persisted for eons of (internet) time. To the outsider it appears as the common ancestor of a wiki and Reddit; walking a middle way between the discussion thread of the moment and the sterile articles of facts. To we souls sailing the node gel it remains the best place to dump our thoughts and feelings. For me personally, the purity of hypertext has always been one of the great

The Lifecycle of Software Objects is a 2010 novella by Ted Chiang. It's about Anna, an animal trainer turned software tester, who is hired to train and/or create digients. A digient is a digital pet sort of thing; except that pets can't learn to talk while the digients can. They can also scamper about, pick up objects, and otherwise interact with their digital environment. They can also think; but not well. The digients Anna meets are like

Where to begin? Let me start with some reasoning, before proceeding on to the Ad Hominem part.

There is a logical fallacy called the base rate fallacy, that says that when dealing with a specific case, you also have to look at the base rate. That involves lots of math, so I will just refer to it by another term: the waving a metal pole during a lightning storm fallacy or the I am going to smear myself with salmon and wander around in bear territory fallacy. Do you know how many

Hello Everything2.

When I checked in for my "once a decade" login about a month ago, I did not think I'd be noding again. Like it says in my homenode, ya'll intimidate the crap outta me. I've never been a writer. I've never even been much of a communicator. I'm more likely to give you a cool rock if I want to get to know you than walk up and say hello.

But that is