I've had good experiences with ngircd. It's an IRC server that is very easy to self-host, and it can be installed via APT on any debian/ubuntu/raspbian etc system, and I'm sure on many others.

I'm not in the medical field either, but I remember they used niacin (a form of vitamin B₃) as an active placebo in the Good Friday Experiment[0] in 1962. The niacin doses produced some noticeable physiological effects, but it didn't take long before it became abundantly clear for everyone present who had gotten the psilocybin and who had gotten the niacin.

[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment

I have stopped arguing about it. I just cynically observe the people who keep insisting that they have nothing to hide, and then watch them suffer the consequences of their own decisions.

I have the opposite experience, at least with regard to your first two paragraphs. Most of the things that I have backed up on other people's computers over the past 3-4 decades are irretrievably lost. But most of the things that I have taken care to make backups of on personal equipment over the years, are still with me.

Cloud storage is still useful of course, but I prefer to view it as a cache rather than as a dependable backup.

I would like a more unified notation for the concept of "inverse". But I have no good suggestions for how to implement that. However, I have some bad suggestions just to illustrate what I mean:

INV(*) x, instead of 1/x

INV(+) x, instead of -x

INV(f) x, instead of f^{-1}(x)

The last one should really be (INV(°) f) x = f^{-1}(x), where ° denotes function composition as the group operator. But involving this operator in the notation would probably be overkill in most circumstances.

I agree, it's very irritating that so many people respond to who the messenger is, rather than to what the message is. You don't really have to anonymize the author's identity in order to focus on the message rather than the messenger. You just have to let go of identity politics and any similar goofiness.

There is no identity politics - which in itself isn't bad or "goofiness" by the way - when the author is read as part of the writing. Most critical comments mentioned Graham's biography for specific reasons that correspond to the writing.

If you do the key exchange face-to-face, all you need is some bytes from /dev/random for the key, and the cryptographic algorithm Data XOR Key. They can't outlaw the XOR operator and they can't "backdoor" all random number sources (not even the most trivial ones), so the idea that it is even remotely possible to obtain political control of encryption is quite insane.

I look forward to the day when this is no longer the case. But we need to get better at punishing bullying behaviour to make this happen.

What does "save point" mean in this context? The concept is mentioned several times in the article, but I didn't see any references to saving anything.

I think it means when you store the state of the active REPL, allowing you to close it down and resume it later with the same context.

Much like a "save point" in video games.

OK, I think I get it now. So comment macros saved from an earlier REPL session can be brought back for use later? That's pretty cool, and it does highlight the LISP roots of Clojure.

For me, it means that there is a bunch of instructions which will get you to some state.

It's not about actually storing state, which Lisp with image-based development can do in some form.

Yep. This is generally what I meant by that line.

You don't have to invoke color-blindness or tetrachromacy to explain that. Even normal trichromatic people will have differences of opinion about shades of blue or green. But every difference of opinion that might involve gender will always be exaggerated.