jll29

Joined 6 years ago

Karma

6,009

Submissions

1,830

Member since

Mar 18

Interested in natural language processing, information retrieval/search engines, machine learning, software technology, GIS, start-ups, R&D, innovation, security, UNIX and ethical & social impact of technology.

AI research professor during the day, startup CTO at night, coder, avid reader and book collector.

Wrote my first compiler during high school. Systems I've had a hand in are used by folks ranging from London traders to the Justices of the U.S. Supreme court.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 12 days ago

Linux has come a long way, both in terms of matured installation processes as well as friendlier Desktop and GUI applications.

In Germany, some cities have migrated to Linux successfully.

Linux TCO is pretty good if you take a long-term view, because it is simpler and more predictable than some of its alternatives, and the organization can develop what it needs when it wants instead of following one single external corporation's roadmap.

Comment · 14 days ago

https://tokly.app/?utm_campaign=international-calls-search-t...

Comment · 16 days ago

Definitely there is a need, as you say, but the Internet lacks a cross-site (DB-like) transaction capability. Hotel bookings and flight leg bookings are interdependent, and you will want to lock them in (transaction "COMMIT") once the complete path has been validated as available; if, in contrast, one flight leg or one hotel night are unavailable, the whole plan path may have to be cancelled.

Such a tool would be enormously helpful even for individuals traveling (e.g. business people or scientists visiting customers or trade fairs), which is important as this massively increases market size/potential user base scale.

Comment · 17 days ago

See Sections 5+6 in https://drh.github.io/cii/toc.html

Comment · 20 days ago

This does not have to be an "either-or": you can be sovereign and still interoperate with others, while retaining your own infrastructre to fall back on or in parallel.

Comment · 21 days ago

I also got one for catching DEK out for claiming "Alan Turing broke the Enigma".

That claim goes to the Polish cryptoanalyst Marian Rejewski instead, of course (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski); what Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers did was automate the breaking, which was important because it had to be done again every day (due to the many combinations of configurations of the Enigma).

Comment · 21 days ago

plain text:

- longevity

- portability

- ease of processing

- cannot "break"

- viewable and editable with anything

Any other way is only acceptable if it can export to plain text.

Comment · 23 days ago

It's a great idea, and the OP and donors are making a big difference. While I was a doctorate student, I supported a Romanian orphanage (run by Americans I never met except via email) with parcels of medicine and stationary (basic stuff e.g. anti-fever pills, coloring pens etc.). Since I never sent any cash, I was not worried about being scammed.

I've also been financially supporting three grassroots projects to help children in three places, namely Lomé, Togo, Caruaru, Brazil and Bhopal, India (via https://www.fkb-bza.de, sorry, Website in German only, a charity that has the advantage of being free of any overhead - thanks to people I personally know and trust that travel there regularly, paying for their own tickets).

Thought experiment (putting back the geek hat on): I wonder if the OP's activity could be made viral and scaled up across the continent:

While there are more donors do:

- for each African country

- pick a seed city c

- pick a seed student s from c

- assign donor d to s to fund s' education

When paying for s.o. education, receiving students pledge to pay it forward by becoming a donor once they get a job that permits to do so or to return to become a teacher for a while.