As just promised, a continuation of cheap refutations of 8+ year old posts. Previously, 2005q2.
Constructive Engagement and Withdrawing not an alternative to invading. Few would use family self-improvement as an excuse to not use the law enforcement apparatus to limit domestic violence. Likewise, we should not be satisfied with extremely indirect strengthening of civil society via information and trade exchange in the face of state violence. If our law enforcement mechanisms are worse than do-nothing, they must be improved, urgently. Learning by doing is the best way to improve — forcible regime change is creative destructive engagement, both for the oppressed jurisdiction, and for the international community’s law enforcement capability.
Supreme Dick. No reason for heads of state to have a low discount rate, and plenty of evidence for a high one: anything to stay in power just a bit longer. Calling on this population to consider their legacies is like calling on the hardest alcoholics to consider their livers 20 years hence: utterly pointless.
Where is server side JavaScript?. One might think node.js vindicates this post, but timing is everything: a facile prediction made years too early has negative value for anyone who heeds it. Furthermore, the post failed to warn of the grave danger posed by impending javascript everywhere, the results of which are only beginning to be felt. Javascript is a terrible language, its ubiquity and also use for cutting edge things is perhaps the greatest triumph of worse is better (well, for programming languages) to date.
Dominant assurance contract implementations? and Reverse bounties improved. See past refutation. Also, the DAC name is horrible, as noted in comments. But the idea itself has at best extremely narrow application. Don’t think that a better name meaningfully helps.
Realtime Wiki PileUp. Status 8 years later: ‘interesting enough to explore, not officially on the agenda‘. A specialized tool (etherpad) and web word processor have addressed real time collaboration needs, pushing wikis into an ever narrowing niche.
$700 billion fraud and Trillion dollar fraud. Previously.
Favorite Peruvian Film. What film cannot be described as “at once a political and apolitical and amoral film” when viewed through the right lens? This post attempts to justify my squirrely aesthetic preferences with anti-information and is amoral if not immoral.
EFF15. EFF asked fans how they became digital freedom activists. A dangerous ask — read carefully, my response (and probably most others) demonstrates the contingency, frothiness, and meaninglessness of political commitments. “Digital freedom” is but another set of squirrely justifications for aesthetic preferences which justification only sullies. Keep atavism to art.
Agriculture. Industry. Sane tool choice is not a matter of exploration and settling down, but of capital investment and mass production. Java.
Predict what will be free. Wales only made 2 of his promised 10 predictions, never continuing the series on his own blog. The first prediction is due in 2020, and will not be met without massive automated article creation across dozens of languages (conceivable with Wikidata). The second prediction is not due until 2040 and is conceivable. 2 undetermined, 8 absent is enough for the low standards of self-refutation here. My prediction about the half-life of proprietary software products has since been refuted by Windows Vista.
Accelerating cars. Super Ultra Vapid.
Enough dead and 1,844 Darwin Award Winners!. SUV with rage wraparound.
Ontology is Underrated. SUV phrasesquatting. Seems to have mercifully only been used once since, as the first of three central lessons of Stone Age Information Architecture!
Free Culture needs Free Software. Since refuted by Mozilla.
Lucene red handed. I don’t remember I avoided “sounding too stupid” about Lucene, but my speculation was false.
Three open source prediction market software options. Previously, and the rest have expired underwater as well.
Delete the border. The website (deletetheborder.org) now sports “international food and recipes, without borders.” Without any other information about the world, we must assume that anarchy has won. That was fun for a moment.