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 …
My Presidential Platform by Scott Alexander gave me a good series of chuckles. It’s a truly inspiring combination of absolutely stupid and unusually clever, and should serve as a textbook example of “thinking outside the box”. It was all worth it just for this: The American rich …
And so it… begins? Continues? Let’s say continues to begin: Mushroom pickers urged to avoid foraging books on Amazon that appear to be written by AI (seen on Hacker News). Amateur mushroom pickers have been urged to avoid foraging books sold on Amazon that appear to have been written …
Installing NVIDIA Graphics drivers have become annoying. For one, they bundle this GeForce Experience horribleness in it, which requires an NVIDIA account (WTF is that and why would I ever want one?) but in turn has a lot of useful features locked behind it: automatic driver updates, for one. …
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 …
A long, long article summarizing lots of research on language-learning ability, and whether the commonly shared belief that children are much better at learning languages than adults actually holds true: Critical Periods For Language: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. In summary: Children seem to …
I’ve been reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. In the first chapter The new human agenda, the author gives his interpretation of history and how humanity has ended up as it is today due to scientific and technological development – roughly as follows: humans seeking comfort …
Error-handling is a heavily debated topic. Generally speaking, the following mechanisms exist to handle errors when implementing a function: Return something to indicate the error: an error code, a sentinel value (like NaN), or using a result-or-error type (like C++’s std::expected or …
I’m a big fan of traveling by trains, and it always pains me how impractical it is in most parts of the world, even in places where they would make economic and environmental sense. Europe has been getting better at this, with excellent high-speed rail connections from Amsterdam to Paris for …
The Carrot Problem seen via Hacker News: In World War II, the story goes, the British invented a new kind of onboard radar that allowed its pilots to shoot down German planes at night. They didn’t want the Germans to know about this technology, but they had to give an explanation for their …
Here is a comprehensive guide to light therapy by a renowned and practicing psychiatrist. In short: Light therapy can treat seasonal affective disorder (eg winter depression) and sometimes regular depression. Buy this light box [see link below], and at some time between 6 AM and 9 AM, sit exactly …
In today’s “so that is a thing that happened” column, found in a completely unrelated article (Still Alive): In Street Fighter, the hero confronts the Big Bad about the time he destroyed her village. The Big Bad has destroyed so much stuff he doesn’t even remember: …
A fun short article I found today: Fantasy Meets Reality One of my favorite things to notice as a weirdo is when the good intentions of design slam into the hard reality of humans and the real world. It’s always interesting. […] When it comes to design in the real world, there are a few …
I didn’t know, but apparently iPhone 14 and later offer Emergency SOS via satellite: Emergency SOS via satellite can help you connect with emergency services under exceptional circumstances when no other means of reaching emergency services are available. If you call or text emergency …
I recently encountered this on Hacker News: Kenton’s House I used to own a house optimized for LAN parties, with fold-out gaming stations built into the walls. (I sold it in early 2020 and moved to Austin, TX, where I plan to build another one…) Now that is cool! Is that the dream? It …
The key insight behind the Relative Age Effect is that schools and all types of education all over the world have fixed yearly start dates, and which year a kid starts depends on their age measured in years. One year is quite a long time, especially when it comes to the development of children: …
An interesting, thought-provoking, and well-written article: Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny Modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it. See also the discussion on Hacker News. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always? The answer, of …
It’s not exactly controversial to say that online dating is awful, at least for those seeking heterosexual relationships. It sucks very differently for men and women though, and from what I hear it can actually be pretty good for homosexual relationships. (Especially for gay men, I think? I …
I have never had to write particularly complex SQL queries, but I’ve written and seen enough to know that that SQL gets nasty and complicated once you start using the non-trivial features, not to mention things like optimizing queries based on the execution plan, or optimizing indexes, or the …
It’s turtles all the way down: The following anecdote is told of William James. […] After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, James was accosted by a little old lady. “Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball …
Senators to propose ban on US lawmakers and executive branch members owning single stocks, once again. The Hacker News thread is also quite informative, for example: I started building out tools to track congressional stock trading in 2020. Since then, I believe there have been 9 other proposals …
Daring Fireball wrote about the Apple GPT news. I think the news itself is pretty uninteresting: Apple wants in on the ChatGPT gold-rush even as it seems to be winding down. The more interesting part is what he writes about Bloomberg: Bloomberg reporters are evaluated and receive bonuses tied to …
I recently came by this fun story on getting an out-of-memory error on Linux when trying to free memory: Production postmortem: ENOMEM when trying to free memory That error made absolutely no sense, as you can imagine. We are trying to release memory, not allocate it. Common sense says that you …
Oh wow, now this is something: A Microsoft font may have exposed corruption in Pakistan: The Microsoft font Calibri is now a key piece of evidence in a corruption investigation surrounding Pakistan’s prime minister. Investigators noticed that documents handed over by the prime minister’s daughter, …