I buy stuff when I’m bored. Sometimes, I buy random computer parts to spark project ideas. This usually works really well, but when I bought a 2TB external hard drive the week before thanksgiving, I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. At the time, I was in college, and two terabytes was way more storage than I had in my laptop, but I knew that hard drives weren’t the most reliable, so I wasn’t about to put anything important on it. There just wasn’t that much I could do with only one hard drive. I ended up writing a multithreaded file checksum program designed to max out the hard drive’s sequential throughput, and that was that. Years later, after having written a few custom file backup and archival tools, I decided it’d be nice to have an “air… more →

Political polarization is a hot topic right now. People say it comes from misinformation or social media, but I think it goes deeper than that. So today, I’ll be playing devil’s advocate and explaining the perspective from the other side. I’ll tell you why they always seem to be not only wrong, but also stupid. I’ll show you that sometimes a difference of opinion is just a difference in values, so hopefully the next time you get the urge to high five your whole face, things will make a little more sense. You see, I’ve written before about how not everyone is interested in the truth, but I’ve also discovered that not everyone is interested in life either. By that, I mean things like helping people, reducing suffering, and generally preventing unnecessary deaths as much as possible. Hero work, you… more →