The idea of prisons, frankly, disturb me, but I’m not sure whether it disturbs me more or less than the idea of hardened criminals being free. I think the general thinking in Western-Northern Europe is that prisons are not great, and I’ve mostly just defaulted to this belief. Prison And …
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity is a fascinating essay and historical overview of Ancient Rome that debunks a lot of my believes about that time. Somehow, in high school (where I come from at least) we are taught that Ancient Greece and Rome were advanced societies, and then they collapsed and …
Book Review: Deep Utopia talks about a book (you’ll never guess its title) that asks: What if there were literally no problems? What if you could do literally whatever you wanted? […] Would this be as good as it sounds? Or would people’s lives become boring and meaningless? In our …
I’ve really enjoyed the video Is Our World Broken? from Kurzgesagt. We indeed live in times where the general consensus appears to be that we as a society and as a species are doomed: the world just seems too hard and too bad, and we as individuals are all bombarded with all of this negativity …
Since the excellent The Three-Body Problem book trilogy and the similarly great Netflix adaptation, I have been wondering why exactly is the name-giving physics/mathematics problem called the three-body problem considered unsolvable. Frustratingly, searching on Google didn’t let me find any …
Why doesn’t advice work? really hits the nail on the head I feel, and lists most of the common “failure modes” of advice. Obviously go read the article (it’s short!) for the full details, but here is a quick summary: Maybe your advice is bad. Most is. Maybe your advice is …
Higher RAII, and the Seven Arcane Uses of Linear Types (discussed on Hacker News) introduced me to the concept of linear types and how they can be useful. It turns out: they can be extremely useful, because you can use them to make a promise to do something to the compiler, and it will hold you to …
The Emotional Support Animal Racket talks about emotional support animals and eloquently but succinctly critiques the entire dysfunctional situation. I found this particularly interesting because it provides a very clear example of how processes and systems can fail while their individual components …
Random find of the day: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept” […] So in a mathematical sense it’s kind of obvious. But I didn’t really mean in a mathematical sense, I think this is a pretty good guideline for life also. What I mean is that how fast …
Have you seen Dune: Part 2 yet? I think it’s well worth watching in the cinema, it’s an extraordinarily good adaptation of Frank Herbert’s book. If you have seen it, you have probably rolled your eyes on the Freemen’s extreme religiosity and felt empathy for Chani as she …
The Heart of Gaming Is the Power Fantasy is an essay on the nature of gaming. I have played computer games since I was a kid, but I have to admit I have never reflected much on what it is that makes games appealing to play… that is, what makes them fun or not-fun. The essay makes a really …
The Silicon Valley is such a weird place. I’ve never been, but from everything I hear, many people and companies there have really strange ideas about the world. Sometimes it’s entertaining, but on some fundamental level, also very sad. The stereotypical example would be something like a …
Do you get the feeling that time goes by so fast? “The days are long, but the years are short” I’ve heard said. It’s a common enough phenomenon. The essay Where All the Time Went has some insights on this that I felt were very note-worthy. Though it was written more in the …
Humans Need Not Apply was a YouTube video by CGP Gray published in 2014. It talks about how technological advancements, especially making computers smarter and more able to think and make decisions, will increasingly make humans unnecessary. It was made in time where AI research was still in its …
You don’t have polyamory, you hate people who write books makes some very good points, in particular highlighting how most people’s ideas (including mine) about polyamory comes from media, which distorts reality almost as a necessity. “They figured out their issues and lived happy …
The Psychopolitics of Trauma by Scott Alexander is a very interesting essay to read. It talks about politics and today’s social and political climate in a way that was new to me and felt extremely reasonable. In fact, it posits an explanation for the feeling of aversion I have always felt …
Nobody has seasonal affective disorder describes that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is one of those medical-ish conditions that cannot be tested for, has no specific or clear symptoms, nor treatment. It could be generously called an umbrella term: The more I read about it, the more I get the …
I feel like that as much hype as AI has gotten, rightfully so, the people advocating for caution and restraint, such as the Effective Altruism movement, have not been very popular. Part of that is just being in the unenviable and intrinsically unpopular position of a naysayer, but I think a large …
In The value of your work I have talked about how in a job, work is useful for your individual career only if your manager deems it so, even though that is not always the same thing as what is valuable for your team or your organization. In fact, it is rather difficult to come up with a good, …
2023-12-14 Work is valued if and only if it is something that management (or whoever evaluates your performance) cares about, which does not necessarily have to be in any way related to how much real value it provides. Have you fixed a bug or introduced a feature that helps every software developer …
I’ve come across The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and, well, I have thoughts. (I know, it was bound to happen eventually.) I agree with a lot of the points, perhaps even with most of them, but the rest strikes me as plainly naive: As techno-optimists, we believe that we must, and we will, create …
I’m continuing to read Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, which, by the way, is everything but brief at 496 pages. I’m currently at page 180 though, so making steady progress. Yuval Noah Harari, the author, continues to present interesting ideas and narratives. One interesting thing …
Beauty is the promise of happiness. (Stendhal) I’ve been reading Ted Chiang’s short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others and I have to say that I can really recommend it. I’m rarely in the mood for short stories, but every single story here presents a unique and …
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. I found this part very interesting (pages 65-67. “The Paradox of Knowledge”): In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx reached brilliant economic insights. Based on these insights …
I came by this story the other day: Zen Story: Maybe. Since it’s very short, I’ll just quote it in full here: There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad …