davisdude

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy the book _When Information Came of Age_ by Headrick. The chapters on maps and postal systems in particular have some overlap with this article.

It's been a while since I read it, but I enjoyed _Jacquard's Web_ by James Essinger, which covers this in some more depth

This may not work for your case, but if you're good with Vim you could try the `:TOhtml` command, which converts a range into an HTML file matching the theme you're using.

I would disagree that it's the "wrong" analogy to make... maybe just different.

To me, insider trading is analogous to court siding, in that, in both cases, someone is seeking to use "private information" (information that isn't yet publicly available) in order to make money. So I would order the system:

1. Action occurs "privately" (firm decides on merger but hasn't announced it publicly; court sider reports data that the ump hasn't recorded yet/doesn't record; player notices how dealer plays the cards)

2. Party with the private information makes bets based on this information in an effort to beat the system

3. The public finds out about the previously private information and responds accordingly.

So, courtsiders don't have knowledge about what the player WILL do, but they can tell people what the HAS done faster than they would get normally.

Though I can understand how card counting may be a better analogy for courtsiding simply because of the fact that they're both legal gray areas, as opposed to insider trading, which is explicitly illegal.

This is an interesting concept. I'm somewhat surprised the author didn't draw a connection between the stock market and insider trading, which is more analogous in my mind than card counting in black jack.

Related: the Changelog podcast did a really good interview with the developer[1]. It's pretty long but worth the listen IMO.

[1]: https://changelog.com/podcast/280

Automatic updates aren't always a bad thing. Sometimes they can be very beneficial.

I just finished reading a book [0] about the Conficker worm, which infected people's computers by causing a buffer overflow in an unprotected port.

Windows published the security patch to prevent the buffer overflow as soon as they found it, but they couldn't force users to update. As a result, the Conficker worm continued to spread, despite the company fixing the problem, because people couldn't or wouldn't install the new patch.

While the botnet created by the worm never did anything too malicious, it had the potential to be catastrophic [1]. Experts even talked about it potentially creating enough traffic to shutdown the root servers of the internet.

All that to say, automatic updates aren't always a bad thing. I, too, hate having updates forced down my throat.

Security updates, however, are in a bit of a gray area when it comes to that, IMO.

[0]: Worm: The First Digital World War - Mark Bowden, 2011

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker#End_action

> I don't think most teens need smartphones, honestly.

In today's schools, some teachers plan activities where students use their smart phones for specific projects, so this is becoming increasingly harder to do.

Yeah. The trouble is, I have a very clear idea of what I'm doing when I start it, but then I get busy and drop the project for weeks to months at a time, only to pick it back up again. Sometimes I remember exactly what was going on. Most of the time, though, I look at the code, think "This was done horribly! Why are there so few comments?" then proceed to do the exact same thing.

It's a vicious cycle...

That describes my experience with some of my GitHub projects fairly accurately.

Actual commit I did a few days ago:

> Begin rewrite of rewrite of rewrite