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PO POLSKU

Witaj internecie!

Witajcie na moim blogu. Nie jest to mój pierwszy, ale mam nadzieję, że jest ostatni. Dziesięć lat temu, gdy wszystko wokół Web 2.0 było nowe i świecące, zacząłem pisać bloga. Po około roku pozwoliłem mu umrzeć i zająłem się innymi rzeczami. Teraz uważam to za błąd. Byłoby fantastycznie, gdybym pisał na blogu przez dekadę. Niesamowicie […]

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Technology Backend

How to use utf8 in Perl and don’t go crazy

UTF-8 is the best way to deal with text, and I hope everyone can agree with that. Anyway, while Perl handles any character beautifully within variables, things get messy when you want to save and load these characters into a file, for example. God forbid it’s JSON, then you’re in for a wild ride. But […]

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Research

How random events show that nothing is random

When you toss a coin, you place it in a certain starting position on your fingers, you apply a certain force with your thumb to the particular edge of the coin, it starts rotating within a specific air pressure and movement, only to fall on a surface with a given elasticity and friction. An algorithm, […]

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Research

Electric cars & global balance of power

An anecdote has it that during the Industrial Revolution, electric cars lost to petrol over the range of travel — many cheap workers had to be transported to the factories and back, from rural areas. Electric transportation didn’t work outside of big cities, hence production & research focused on the more universal combustion engines. Fast-forward 100 years, […]

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Frontend Technology

Don’t use IDs in CSS

This article originally appeared on my first blog, f055.net In CSS, you can assign styles to elements in 3 ways: either by a direct reference to an HTML tag, or by a class attribute, or finally, by the id attribute. Each of these approaches has it’s pros and cons, but in this article, I’ll highlight why you should avoid […]

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Research

What are autonomous weapon systems and what ethical issues do they rise?

I wrote this paper in 2008 for an ethics class at Oxford University Computing Laboratory. The original pdf is available here. Autonomous weapon (AW) systems are a new and rapidly developing branch of warfare industry. However, autonomous weapons are not devices that belong strictly to the XIX century, in fact some authors date the birth of […]

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Research

Threats to privacy

I wrote this paper in 2008 for an ethics class at Oxford University Computing Laboratory. The original pdf is available here. The rapid development of computer industry amazed everybody — both the IT experts, government, and society. This unexpected evolution of hardware, explosion of various software and growth of the Internet (in 2000-2007 between 100% […]