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Let’s do something different, and talk about decent country music and Satan.
Absolutely everyone has heard “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, by the Charlie Daniels Band. It’s pretty good, and like most songs with a plot, it’s pretty simple. The devil is “running short”, needs a soul, and comes across Johnny, “sawing on a fiddle...

It’s a little disconcerting to see a putative scientist write an ode to the virtues of trying not to discover things, but here we are.
Cathy O’Neil had a job to do. The job was to take other people’s money, and allocate it to provide the greatest reduction in homelessness per dollar. In order to figure out what the best use of that money was, she was supposed to figure out what the...

What is a type system?
Mechanically, it defines what sorts of operations you can do on or data you can store in an “entity” (that entity could be a variable, an S-expression, a type itself, etc.).
But in reality, “can” is a really loose restriction. I own a sledgehammer and my program is running on a computer roughly two feet from me; in a very real sense I can null any type I want to (and probably many at once). Less drastically, Java lets me...

Some people seem to think it’s easy enough to be accidental. You’re minding your own business, building a simple neural network based cat detector, when suddenly your monitor starts flickering in the ridiculously metaphorical way Hollywood uses to signal...