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She’s So Popular
There is some interesting research by Duncan Watts which seems to show that popular songs are popular because they are popular. He ran some experiments which showed that when people rank songs, the dominant effect is other people’s rankings. Thus even a small recommendation for a song by a couple of people can translate into…
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Unions
I used to think that unions were bureaucratic organizations which mainly existed to get in people’s way. The closed shop seemed particularly dubious in that all employees were required to pay union dues, effectively imposing a tax on working. My thinking has changed to some degree. While unions are deeply imperfect, they do have a…
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Voting
I vaguely recall that in one of Terry Pratchett’s books there is a quote along the lines of “he liked the idea of democracy until he considered the other people who would be voting.” No doubt other people have said similar things. Democracy always has the chance of devolving into mobocracy. The U.S. has a…
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Kernel Linker Features
As I continue trying to build the kernel with gold, I’ve had to copy several features from the GNU linker to gold. Historically, the GNU linker implemented the -R option to mean that it should only use the symbols found in the named object; the object should not actually be included in the output file.…
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Gold Feature Complete
I think that the new linker, gold, is now feature complete, and with a bit more testing it should be ready for an open release. I wanted to get it to the point where it could build the Linux kernel. I haven’t actually tested that yet, but it now has everything it needs. The most…