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I took an amazing trip to SE Asia last month, including Angkor Wat. I had a hard time finding good reading or other resources to learn from before I went, in part because Amazon is awash in AI garbage. Here’s some books and podcasts I found useful about the Khmer empire in general and Angkor in particular: Ancient Angkor by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques. The closest thing to a coffee-table book to preview what you will see. The practical information is outdated but the pictures and descriptions are good. Empire Podcast #185: The God Kings of Angkor Wat by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. An entertaining and fully detailed account of the Khmer empire. It’s basically an excerpt from Dalrymple’s new book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. Fall of Civilizations Podcast #5: The Khmer Empire by Paul Cooper. Another history, not quite as magically well told as Dalrymple but full of good information. Angkor and the Khmer Civilization by Michael D. Coe. A highly recommended history of the Khmer region. Honestly I found this very dry and too detailed, but I did learn from it. Lonely Planet Pocket Guide: Siem Reap & the Temples of Angkor. We didn’t use this much but it seemed like a useful practical guide. OTOH it dates to 2018 so things have changed. My other advice for visiting Siem Reap and Angkor is: go. It is amazing. Plan for at least two full days of touristing there. Hire a private guide and driver if you can, it is absolutely worth it. (Email me for a recommendation.)
I’ve been doing Dry January this year. One thing I missed was something for apéro hour, a beverage to mark the start of the evening. Something complex and maybe bitter, not like a drink you’d have with lunch. I found some good options. Ghia sodas are my favorite. Ghia is an NA apéritif based on grape juice but with enough bitterness (gentian) and sourness (yuzu) to be interesting. You can buy a bottle and mix it with soda yourself but I like the little cans with extra flavoring. The Ginger and the Sumac & Chili are both great. Another thing I like are low-sugar fancy soda pops. Not diet drinks, they still have a little sugar, but typically 50 calories a can. De La Calle Tepache is my favorite. Fermented pineapple is delicious and they have some fun flavors. Culture Pop is also good. A friend gave me the Zero book, a drinks cookbook from the fancy restaurant Alinea. This book is a little aspirational but the recipes are doable, it’s just a lot of labor. Very fancy high end drink mixing, really beautiful flavor ideas. The only thing I made was their gin substitute (mostly junipers extracted in glycerin) and it was too sweet for me. Need to find the right use for it, a martini definitely ain’t it. An easier homemade drink is this Nonalcoholic Dirty Lemon Tonic. It’s basically a lemonade heavily flavored with salted preserved lemons, then mixed with tonic. I love the complexity and freshness of this drink and enjoy it on its own merits. Finally, non-alcoholic beer has gotten a lot better in the last few years thanks to manufacturing innovations. I’ve been enjoying NA Black Butte Porter, Stella Artois 0.0, Heineken 0.0. They basically all taste just like their alcoholic uncles, no compromise. One thing to note about non-alcoholic substitutes is they are not cheap. They’ve become a big high end business. Expect to pay the same for an NA drink as one with alcohol even though they aren’t taxed nearly as much.
The Trump administration has made aggressive threats against immigrants in the US. It’s not clear what’s coming, my biggest fear is a violent display of fascism. (Don’t call them camps!) But even if it’s a polite legal process it will be chaotic and disruptive to many neighbors. Back in 2018 I donated reactively to the Trump administration’s cruelty to immigrant families. This time I’m trying to get ahead of it. The need for the money is now, no matter what happens it is going to be a bad few years for immigrants in the US. To that end I asked on Metafilter about charities to donate to. I got back a remarkable reply listing 18 charities that all have some California focus. I donated to most of them. I want to highlight two groups in particular. One is RAICES. They work in Texas, not California, but they are well organized and effective. The other is KIND. They have a simple mission. They try to ensure every unaccompanied minor has legal representation in immigration court (something not guaranteed.) The other groups on the list are all also deserving of consideration.
LLMs are good search helpers. Here’s three search tools I use every day. All of these use an AI to synthesize answers but also provide an essential feature: specific web search results for you to verify and further research. I use these for conversational inquiries in addition to more traditional keyword searches. Phind is an excellent free LLM + search engine. The AI writes an answer to your query but is very careful to provide footnotes to a web-search-like list of links on the right. I use this mostly for directed search queries, things like “what’s an inexpensive TV streaming device?” where I might have used keyword search too. The Llama-70b LLM that powers the free version is quite good, sometimes I have general conversations with it or ask it to generate code. Bing CoPilot has a very similar output result to Phind. I find it a little less useful and the search result links are less prominent. But it’s a good second opinion. Bing has been a very good search engine for 10+ years, I’m grateful to Microsoft for continuing to invest in it. CoPilot results are sometimes volunteered on the main Bing page but you often have to click to get to the ChatGPT 4 Turbo enhanced pages. Kagi is what I use as my general search engine, my Google replacement. It mostly gives traditional keyword search results but sometimes it will volunteer a “Quick Answer” where Claude 3 Haiku synthesizes an answer with references. You can also request one. I think Phind and CoPilot do a better job but I appreciate when Kagi intercepts a keyword search I did and just gives me the right answer. Google has tried various versions of LLM-enhancement in search, I think the current version is called AI Overviews. It’s not bad but it’s also not as good as the others. Not mentioned here: ChatGPT or Claude. Those are general purpose LLMs but they don’t really give search results or specific references. In the old days they’d make up URLs if you asked but that’s improving.
8BitDo makes good game controllers. A wide variety of styles from retro to mainstream, with some unusual shapes. And wide compatibility with various systems: PC, Macs, Switch, Android. They’re well built, work right, and quite inexpensive. A far cry from the MadCatz-style junk we used to get. The new hotness is the Ultimate 2C, an Xbox-style wireless controller for the very low price of $30. But it works great, doesn’t feel cheap at all. The fancier mainstream choice is the Ultimate 2.4g at $50 which includes a charging stand and extra reprogrammability. But what’s really interesting to me are the odd layouts, often small or retro. The SN30 Pro is particularly interesting as a portable controller. SNES-styling but a full XBox style modern controller with two analog sticks, easy to throw in a suitcase. There’s a lot of fiddly details for this class of device. Controller type (XInput, DInput, switch, etc), wireless interface (Bluetooth or proprietary), etc. 8BitDo makes good choices and implementations for all that stuff I’ve tested. They seem to work well with Steam. They’re a popular brand so well tested. It helps that PC game controllers have mostly standardized around the Xbox layout and XInput. Steam can patch over any rough spots for older games.
More in programming
The difference between "low prices" as a race to the bottom or as a success story (like Amazon, Costco, IKEA, Vanguard) is in leveraging intentional weaknesses.
I’m trying something a bit different today – fiction. I had an idea for a short story the other evening, and I fleshed it out into a proper piece. I want to get better at writing fiction, and the only way to do that is with practice. I hope you like what I’ve written! When the fire starts, I am already running for the exit. When the fire starts, the world is thrown into sharp relief. I have worked in this theatre since it opened its doors. When the fire starts, my work begins – and in a way, it also ends. When the fire starts, they run beneath me. When the fire starts, they leave their bags behind. Their coats. Their tickets. They hear me, though I have no voice. When the fire starts, I know I will never leave. When the fire starts, I will keep running. I will always be running for the exit, because somebody must. A “running man” exit sign. Photo by Mateusz Dach on Pexels, used under the Pexels license. Hopefully it’s clear that this isn’t a story about a person, but about the “running man” who appears on emergency exit signs around the world. It’s an icon that was first devised by Japanese graphic designer Yukio Ota in 1970 and adopted as an international symbol in 1985. I was sitting in the theatre on Friday evening, waiting for the second half to start, and my eye was drawn to the emergency exit signs. It struck me that there’s a certain sort of tragedy to the running man – although he guides people to the exit, in a real fire his sign will be burnt to a crisp. I wrote the first draft on the train home, and I finished it today. I found the “when the fire starts” line almost immediately, but the early drafts were more vague about the protagonist. I thought it would be fun to be quite mysterious, to make it a shocking realisation that they’re actually a pictogram. I realised it was too subtle – I don’t think you’d necessarily work out who I was talking about. I rewrote it so you get the “twist” much earlier, and I think the concept still works. Another change in the second draft was the line breaks. I use semantic linebreaks in my source code, but they get removed in the rendered site. A paragraph gets compressed into a single line. That’s fine for most prose, but I realised I was losing something in this short story. Leaning into the line breaks highlights the repetition and the structure of the words, so I put them back. It gives the story an almost poetic quality. I’ve always been able to find stories in the everyday and the mundane – a pencil is a rocket ship, a plate is a building, a sock is a cave. The only surprising thing about this idea is that it’s taken me this long to turn the running man into a character in one of my stories. I really enjoyed writing this, so maybe you’ll see more short stories in the future. I have a lot of ideas, but not much experience turning them into written prose. Watch this space! [If the formatting of this post looks odd in your feed reader, visit the original article]
As part of my work on #eng-strategy-book, I’ve been editing a bunch of stuff. This morning I wanted to work on two editing problems. First, I wanted to ensure I was referencing strategies evenly across chapters (and not relying too heavily on any given strategy). Second, I wanted to make sure I was making references to other chapters in a consistent, standardized way, Both of these are collecting Markdown links from files, grouping those links by either file or url, and then outputting the grouped content in a useful way. I decided to experiment with writing a one-shot prompt to write the script for me rather than writing it myself. The prompt and output (from ChatGPT 4.5) are available in this gist. That worked correctly! The output was a bit ugly, so I tweaked the output slightly by hand, and also adjusted the regular expression to capture less preceding content, which resulted in this script. Although I did it by hand, I’m sure it would have been faster to just ask ChatGPT to fix the script itself, but either way these are very minor tweaks. Now I can call the script in either standard of --grouped mode. Example of ./scripts/links.py "content/posts/strategy-book/*.md" output: Example of ./scripts/links.py "content/posts/strategy-book/*.md" --grouped output: Altogether, this is a super simple script that I could have written in thirty minutes or so, but this allowed me to write it in less than ten minutes, and get back to actually editing with the remaining twenty.
Building a mental model of computer architecture from first principles
One of life's greatest simple pleasures is creating something just for yourself.
