Blogbooks

Functional Programming Lessons in Imperative Code

A BlogBook is a collection of blog posts intended to be viewed as a sort of book on their own.

This BlogBook is on how to transfer the lessons that can be taught by strict, pure functional programming (think Haskell) into imperative programming languages.

The Ethics of Modern Communication

A BlogBook is a series of posts intended to be weaved into a single book-length essay.

I wrote this book around the year 2000 and 2001, to cover the ever-mutating field of the Internet in terms of the ethics of such communication, particularly as it focuses on copyright and related issues.

While the writing style could use some improvement, I find that I still largely stand by everything I wrote 20 years ago. The biggest change that I would include is something to address the increasingy hostility of the internet environment. While this essay works tends to point in the direction of ad blocking and similar technologies not being very ethical on theoretical grounds, in practice I think they’re almost a necessity for security reasons nowadays.

But otherwise, I think this largely holds up. Despite the superficial frantic changes in the Internet world, this all still makes sense.

In 2022, a new challenger is arising in the form of AIs that can consume the entire Internet (more or less) and then be used to produce “novel” content. Especially in the image AI space, this is getting a lot of people wondering about the copyright status of the output of such systems. As I write this on the tail end of 2022, I think people are finding themselves working around to the same conclusions I came to 20 years ago; if you slurp up that much content just to feed your AI you must be considered to be deriving from all those sources. An emerging story to be sure.

Programming Wisdom

A BlogBook is a collection of blog posts intended to be weaved into a book.

This page is the BlogBook I called “Programming Wisdom”. It is incomplete and will probably remain so for a long time. I’m still grappling with what I want to write here even years later.

Nevertheless, here is what I wrote: