Ed Kellett

Inverse parentheses

edk — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever noticed that lots of programming languages let you use parentheses to group operands, but none use them to ungroup them? No? Well let’s pretend this is a normal thing to be thinking about, and see what we can do about it.

Grouping with parentheses is relatively …

Keeping secrets, or (less than two weeks ago)

edk — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If you've used IRC in the last few years there's a good chance you have seen this before:

- Last seen  : (about 28 weeks ago)
- User seen  : (less than two weeks ago)

What does “about” mean here, exactly? Why less than two?

This is, of course, a privacy feature, designed so …

Freedom zero cannot survive a world with attestation

edk — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000

I can’t run TfL Go, London’s public transport app, because my phone does not pass Google’s attestation. This is very annoying, but at least it’s only public transport. Most banks in the UK are less strict, perhaps complaining that their checks don’t work, but ultimately …

On openness

edk — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 15:19:00 +0000

For some background, I'm heavily involved as a volunteer for an IRC network.

The previous evening, I learned (via IRC, naturally) that Mozilla intends to shut down its IRC network. With hindsight, I don't think this should have been surprising, but it was, and it precipitated a rather funereal line …