Sam Gentle.com

I've been thinking recently about the XKCD sandboxing cycle – briefly, that we seem to repeatedly come up with new container technologies that isolate systems from each other for security, and then new networking systems that join them back together...

When organising your behaviour to achieve a goal, there are two equal and opposite skills: composing and improvising.
Composing means making decisions as early as possible. You anticipate the outcome you want, figure out the paths to that outcome, and construct a plan for getting there. You're making decisions at the point of maximum influence: with more time, your...

There's a kind of argument that starts with one person saying something like "social media companies should ban disinformation", and the other saying "but once you start banning speech who knows what it will include". Then the first person says "well...

You know that old trick for finding your way out of a maze? You keep your left hand touching the wall the whole time, leading you to follow a series of left turns that will, inevitably, bring you to the exit. It's a fascinatingly simple algorithm, and...