Ever wondered, "Is there an AI to see how your baby looks?" Well you're not alone! OurBabyAI is an app that shows how your future baby may look.
In a quaint bar on the outskirts of Catania (Italy), as whiskey glasses clinked and muted conversations blended into a […] The post Aging Code appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
People always talk about “P vs NP” like P problems are easy and NP problems are hard. This is a useful day-to-day model but also an oversimplification. Problems can get way, way harder than NP. (If you want a brief refresher on P and NP, check out my post NP-Complete isn’t (always) Hard.) PSPACE-complete P is the set of all problems that can be solved in polynomial time, relative to the input....
In the world of finance, there are a myriad of strategies employed by corporations to optimize their tax liabilities. One such method, known as transfer pricing, has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, raising concerns about fairness and equity in the global tax system.
As I suspected my energy for writing in August was diverted to more important things. Plenty of energy to read, though. With a respite in September, I should soon be able to write a bit on the Greek philosophers I have been reading. The Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics work well as a cluster. Then later a bit on Plutarch and the little philosophy project is a wrap. PHILOSOPHY Meditations (c....
A quasi-monthly feature. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests. I’ve been busy helping to choose the first cohort of our blogging fellowship, so my reading has been relatively light. All emphasis in bold in the quotes below was added by me. Books Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990). I’ve...
New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether they cross a “reality threshold.” The post Is It Real or Imagined? How Your Brain Tells the Difference. first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Rest of World's staff favorites, from around the globe to add to your must-read pile.
What Larry David's legendary sitcom can teach about creativity and work.
There are a growing number of AI coding tools that are alternatives to Copilot. A list of other popular, promising options.
Google Colossus Explained Simply
In 1994, Ted Leonsis was the head of the new media marketing firm he created, Redgate Communications, spun out six […] The post AOL Pretends to be the Internet appeared first on The History of the Web.
and other updates from me in Mar 2023
Everything about the Black Magic's acquisition + May 2023 updates
See you again soon
When she wrote the following entry in her journal and imagined fleeing college to venture into the unknown, Susan Sontag was a precocious sixteen-year-old studying English at the University of California, Berkeley. By the end of the year she had indeed left—not on a bus to an undecided destination, but to the University of Chicago […]
All ye readers, buckle up. Today, I'm giving you 14 non-fiction books I believe everyone should read. For each book, I've provided a brief summary. Now it's up to you to decide if it's worth your time. Let's dig in. This book dives deep into the world of trauma, discussing its effects on the mind, body, and daily life. If you want to know everything about trauma and how to deal with it, this is...
Architecture and interior design studio Archisphere collaborated with Carbone & Kacerovsky to design a ‘Cyclist’, a modern cafe at the Hotel Andaz am Belvedere Vienna. Archisphere drew inspiration from the movement, freedom, and enjoyment associated with cycling. In addition to this, the spirit of the art collector Prince Eugen, whose influence can be found throughout […]
A personal guide to Singapore for foreign friends visiting.
Do birds of a feather flock together, or do opposites attract? These are both common aphorisms, which means that they are commonly offered as generally accepted truths, but also that they may by wrong. People like pithy phrases, so they spread prolifically, but that does not mean they contain any truth. Further, our natural instincts […] The post How Much Do Couples Share Traits? first appeared on...
This was almost a post on why millennial motherhood is so challenging, but turned into tactical food hacks.
A monthly feature. As usual, recent blog posts and news stories are omitted from this; you can find them in my links digests. In all quotes below, any emphasis in bold was added by me. Books Thomas S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (1948). A classic in the field, concise and readable. Crafts (see paper below) cites this work as pointing out “the links between scientific thought and...
People talk about you the way you talk about yourself.
Surreal and otherworldly.
All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you’ve listened to over and over again. And then there’s a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective The post Whomst Among Us Let The Dogs Out (Again) appeared first on 99% Invisible.
One of the most exciting things a startup CEO in a business-to-business market can hear from a potential customer is, “We’re excited. When can you come back and show us a prototype?” This can be the beginning of a profitable customer relationship or a disappointing sinkhole of wasted time, money, resources, and a demoralized engineering […]
No you can't "have it all." You can have two things, but not three.
Covering the state of play as of Summer, 2023
will he go into destroy mode if I say no
Chinese policy and geopolitical risk are doing a lot of the work here.
A little bit of magic, but mostly just practice
The emotional rollercoaster I experience in art supply stores can be summarised in one word: greed. I want every single pen, every brush, every quill, and a sheet of every paper, ranging from crude cardboard to magnificent handcrafted Japanese washi. And yes, I need papyrus. And no, I don’t know what for. I want it all! Which one should I pick? Here is how to find your perfect partner in crime....
A FAQ of sorts
Designed by Dixon Baxi, London.
Recently I switched to a new calorie counting app, Cronometer. I’m quite happy with it. It’s a huge improvement over MyFitnessPal (MFP) or Lose It and is not exploitative like Noom. The key improvement with Cronometer is accuracy, particularly good data sources for nutrition information. MFP offered obviously wrong entries from random people, sapping my confidence. Also it’s quicker to log things...
Mathematical proofs based on a technique called diagonalization can be relentlessly contrarian, but they help reveal the limits of algorithms. The post Alan Turing and the Power of Negative Thinking first appeared on Quanta Magazine
AI is strange. We need to learn to use it.
EVs are just going to win.
This is the first in a series of posts about new LLM-related technology associated with the Wolfram technology stack. "Color" with something like: When you set up a plugin, it can contain many endpoints, that do different things. And—in addition to sharing prompts—one reason this is particularly convenient is that (at least right now, for security reasons) […]
Canadian design firm Level Studio has shared photos of a loft apartment located in a building that was once home to offices but has been converted into residential apartments.
One of the great paradoxes of business is that management is prediction, but entrepreneurship ... isn't. What a theory of expertise in entrepreneurship tells us about creating new things in business.
Lessons from building and growing Copylime to 6 figures all in public
Jason Cohen’s 2013 Microconf talk, Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business with Jason Cohen, is one of the most valuable resources I’ve found for bootstrapped founders. I watched it for the first time in 2020, and I’ve revisited it repeatedly since then. If you’re new to the world of bootstrapped software business, or you’re struggling to gain traction with your business, I highly recommend this...
Bad architecture must come from some underlying ethos.
There's a somewhat weird alien who wants to work for free for you. You should probably get started.
And some prompts that might be useful when it does.
Neurodivergent physicists face barriers in STEM, but there are also benefits to being who they are.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: If heroes would just check the betting markets before fighting they could make much better choices. Today's News:
If you believe that the most serious risks from AI are real, should you write about anything else?
I’ve been feeling more down these days. I am not sure if it is pms, covid, both, or just responding to reality in general. I don’t really get why people are not...
As some of you may know, I have been going to language school for the last few months in order to learn the world’s most widely spoken and useful language: Slovenian. At this point, my Slovenian is about as coherent as, well, a McMansion. In order to feel better about myself, I have sought out a McMansion that is worse than my cases and word-order. This house (in Naperville, IL, of course) does,...
Creative Union Network Inc. has designed a small laneway house in Toronto, Canada, that was originally built as a garage. The building occupied a prominent location on the corner of the lane and main street. The original structure, although rundown, was a well-loved structure that made an outsized impact on the neighborhood’s collective memory. The […]
Well-known URLs are pretty neat. I’ve even dared propose one before here on my blog. And now I’m here to propose another: .well-known/avatar The idea is: anybody that owns a domain can put their avatar in a well-known location. I’ve already implemented this for my own site[1]. You can see it here: jim-nielsen.com/.well-known/avatar In some ways, this is really just for me. I often find myself...
An optimistic take on technology and inequality.
It was only a year after first meeting, in 1895, that Marie and Pierre Curie became husband and wife. Together, they made groundbreaking contributions to science, not least the discovery of two new elements, polonium and radium, and in 1903 they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Tragedy befell the couple in 1906 […]
all images courtesy Gaku Yamazaki Gaku Yamazaki, a 21-year old college senior, spends his spare time traversing Japan in search of what he has dubbed ikei-yajirushi, or ‘unusual arrows.’ There are thousands of these abnormal road signs dotted across Japan and while drivers might find them confusing or even annoying, Yamazaki has developed a certain […] No related posts.
Bor Hung Chong from Nefin Group discusses green energy solutions beyond solar panels.
The world was plunged into darkness on 1st September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, an act of aggression that led France and the United Kingdom to declare war. Amidst this global turmoil, a young Albert Camus, then a journalist for socialist newspaper Alger-Républicain, found himself wrestling with the unfolding chaos, haunted by the memory of […]
Today is exactly 2 years since I quit my job and become a full-time indie hacker.
In 1974, two very significant things happened, if you are a fan of 99% invisible. Number one is that 99pi host Roman Mars was born. And number two, The Power Broker by Robert Caro was published. Roman learned about the power broker when he first started to cover cities and infrastructure on the radio. This The post Breaking Down The Power Broker appeared first on 99% Invisible.
some of you may know I've recently started a new company. I'm not ready to talk about -that- yet, but I did want to capture some notes on logistical stuff I have had to ramp up on as a first time founder. hopefully this helps somebody out there.
https://youtu.be/qJ8aRl1UNgw I'm on an old man rant today. The world's a shitfest, and something needs to be said: Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one, and most are full of shit. So, here's my argument: people need to have fewer fucking opinions. The problem is that we're all drowning in information, and this overload causes us to mistake the quantity of knowledge for the quality of...
This is the best media player for children. In the month before the pandemic shut everything down, I was in the midst of some research on how designers — and other kinds of creative experts and consultants — can best communicate results. I was looking at a variety of case study models and trying to devise a system that would best suit my clients goals and abilities. That’s when I found myself...
If you want to escape the hustle and bustle of touristy Kyoto, head to this newly opened oasis of books and coffee. Located slightly north of central Kyoto is the Donkou Kissa Fang, a serene cafe and private book collection built inside immaculately crafted townhouse and garden. Donkou means ‘slow thinking’ in Japanese, and is […] Related posts: Kaikado’s Tea and Coffee Cafe in Kyoto The Book &...
Several areas of physics suggest reasons to think that unobservable universes with different natural laws could lie beyond ours. The theoretical physicist David Kaplan talks with Steven Strogatz about the mysteries that a multiverse would solve. The post Are There Reasons to Believe in a Multiverse? first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Results of a four month accelerated expertise experiment in Judo. Or: "I expected to learn about deliberate practice but instead learnt a ton about my mental shortcomings."
You think I’m crazy, but just wait and see....
In the math of particle physics, every calculation should result in infinity. The set of techniques known as “resurgence” points toward an escape. The post How to Tame the Endless Infinities Hiding in the Heart of Particle Physics first appeared on Quanta Magazine
How does the Glove80 stack up against similar keyboards like the Moonlander and Ergodox? I share my impressions after the first few weeks of use.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: People on patreon seemed to be traumatized by this, and I guess what I'm saying is for a couple bucks a month, you could've been traumatized a day early. Today's News:
All images © Kenta Hasegawa courtesy Suppose Design Office “Buy a vacation home that doubles as a hotel.” That’s the tagline for ‘Not A Hotel,’ a real estate start-up founded by Shinji Hamazu. The company challenges the traditional hotel model by treating it as a timeshare and selling it to 12 people, each receiving 30 […] Related posts: Stay in Artist Designed Hotel Rooms at the Park Hotel Tokyo...
A pragmatic approach to thinking about AI
A lot of otherwise talented people are too pessimistic to actually do anything. They are paralyzed by risks that don’t exist and greatly exaggerate them where they do, preventing them from being one of the best. Consider this lightly edited excerpt from a conversation between Charlie Rose and Magnus Carlsen that argues it’s better to … The post The Winner’s Edge appeared first on Farnam Street.
And what happens when we don’t?
What, exactly, is the skill of capital? What does it consist of? How do you recognise it? We walk through three stories, and then talk about the shape of the skill in practice.
The Case for LLMs as Hallucination Engines
Today’s language models are more sophisticated than ever, but they still struggle with the concept of negation. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon. The post Chatbots Don’t Know What Stuff Isn’t first appeared on Quanta Magazine
YR Architecture + Design has shared photos of a modern 575 square foot (53 sqm) live/work studio in Columbus, OH, that was once a 2-car garage. The homeowners were determined for their two-car garage to be an asset, with the couple seeking to maximize their property, and at the same time, offer options for leasing […]
by Enda Harte For me, there are six important first steps that I prioritized for practicing Stoicism (referenced in the diagram above), and I wanted to use this opportunity to go over each of these in a little more detail. Hopefully you’ll get an understanding of what they mean, and why it’s important to practice Read More >>
With HBO walking away from Disney+ Hotstar, shows like Succession, The Last of Us, and Game of Thrones can no longer be streamed in the country.
More than ever, we’re pushed to have certainty. Strong opinions, tightly held and loudly proclaimed. And then, when reality intervenes, it can be stressful. The software stack, business model, career, candidate, policy, or even the social network habits that we had as part of our identity let us down. It’s not easy to say, “I […]
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Do you remember the summer of 2022 when a record drought had gripped not only a large part of the United States, but most of Europe too? Reservoirs were empty, wildfires spread, crop yields dropped, and rivers ran dry. It seemed like practically the whole world was facing heatwaves and water shortages. But there was one video...
I put my M1 Pro against Apple's new M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max, a NVIDIA GPU and Google Colab.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride.
After decades of frustration, researchers have finally determined how an airborne scent molecule links to a human smell receptor. The post How a Human Smell Receptor Works Is Finally Revealed first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Interior design firm Wise Design, together with General Contractor and Architect Owen Gabbert (formerly Clarkbuilt), has transformed a dated 1954 mid-century modern home in Portland, Oregon. Before – The ExteriorThe original home has a brown exterior with original windows and white trim. After – ExteriorThe updated bright white exterior, with a metal roof, has black […]
Two Customer Encounters
Remembering Albert Borgmann (1937-2023)
A talk with architecture critic Justin Davidson about the thorny knot of issues involved at New York’s most conflicted transportation-entertainment site.
Foxconn and Luxshare slashed workers. But under pressure to expand away from China, they suddenly need them back.
We spend almost no time teaching toddlers about freedom. Instead, the lessons we teach (and learn) for our entire lives are about responsibility. It’s easy to teach freedom, but important to teach responsibility. Because if you get the responsibility taken care of, often the freedom will follow. When someone points out a lack of responsibility, […]
What’s it like to be in the top 1%? According to the statistics, most of the readers of my blog are among the highest earning and/or richest people in the UK. I bet however that not many of you feel that way. Let’s start with income To be in the top 1% of earnings in… Continue reading The richest person you know →
Without Americans on the app, advertising dollars are at risk.
As a real estate developer, one of the big decisions you need to make is whether you will rent or sell the buildings you've built. Income from rentals flows in steadily over years, while income from sales hits all at once. This essential difference is simple but has many implications for your risk profile, upside potential, capital requirements, and business model. The following post is a...
By Michael McGill The Stoics had a name for a person who fully realized the virtues of Stoicism. A person who overcame all of their personal defects to achieve a life of complete tranquility and goodness. The perfect Stoic, if you will. They referred to this person as the Stoic Sage. Now, the Stoic Sage Read More >>
I used to drive 200 miles to Boston once a week or so. After a few trips on the highway, my subconscious figured out that getting behind a few trucks for the entire ride enabled me to spend four hours without using much conscious effort on driving. Every day, we make decisions. These require effort, […]
“Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent and beyond, they encountered a formidable adversary — malaria. There was a cure — the bark of the Andean cinchona tree. The only problem? The Dutch and the French were also looking to The post The Fever Tree Hunt appeared first on 99% Invisible.
https://youtu.be/kDqQGogavmY What if I told you there's a hidden treasure trove of personal traits that could turn your life around? Are you curious? Are you dying to know what they are? Are you wondering why I'm asking so many questions instead of getting to the point? OK, OK—fine. Here, I'll uncover the five good qualities that I think will help you make it through this chaotic, unpredictable,...
It's about having small expectations.
I consider database migrations one of the most annoying problems to deal with during a software engineer’s life. Not only […] The post Database Migrations appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
We have more agency over the future of AI than we think.
The clocks have sprung forward and the spring chicks are chirping: yes, April has arrived. But it’s not only those longer, lighter evenings luring us out of the house; this month’s brilliant list of cultural and culinary must-dos and -sees is equally tempting – even […]
I place a lot of value on creativity in my life, and this has been pretty consistent throughout my various life stages. For a long time it was tied to my identity...
Hi everyone! My April Cools piece is up! It’s about really weird stuff you can buy online. Now I know that’s standard SEO farm stuff, but I promise I put a lot of time into researching why people actually want to buy these things. If you ever wanted to know where carnivals buy and sell their rollercoasters, now’s your chance. Anyway, that’s just the April Cools for the blog. I’ve also got one just...
I had a good time. GREEK PHILOSOPHY The Nicomachean Ethics (4th C. BCE), Aristotle - a post, however shallow, should appear soon. FICTION Joseph in Egypt (1936), Thomas Mann The Long Valley (1938) & The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck - I last read this probably forty years ago. The great turtle chapter is still great. It's not Moby-Dick, but the mix of rhetorical modes is brilliant...
Several tech companies face a fresh problem after cutting jobs: their rating on Glassdoor nosedives. But there’s a way they can fix this. I show what companies are doing - and why.
Greetings from Australia!1 It's the morning of September 5th for me and the night of September 4th in the US. In two weeks when I fly back, I will leave Sydney at 9 AM and arrive in Los Angeles at 6 AM, that same day. Timezones are annoying enough for regular people, but us software engineers have to deal with the fallout. Then you add in the political aspects and, well, you can't always store...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Humans are the only social animal that is creating fake partners so they don't have to be social anymore. Today's News:
In the software development realm, asking questions isn’t just a right—it’s a downright necessity. Let’s cut the crap and dive […] The post Asking questions the right way appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
This week, we discovered that GitHub.com’s RSA SSH private key was briefly exposed in a public GitHub repository. – GitHub’s “We updated our RSA SSH host key” blog, 2023-03-23 Once you git push, nothing is private. Private info in git only stays private on your laptop. But once you schlep it out to a remote: all bets are off. As GitHub’s incident last week demonstrates—private repos are, at best,...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Also, in this model, everything is flat and it's the same everywhere and eventually all the stars are dead! Today's News:
In November 2020, I read the book Apollo’s Arrow after hearing Dr Christakis on NPR’s Fresh Air. Somewhere midway through this book, this paragraph stood out to me: “Either way, until 2022, Americans will live in an acutely changed world—they will be wearing masks, for example, and avoiding crowded places. I’ll call this the immediate […]
The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws.
For many people the first word that comes to mind when they think about statistical charts is “lie.” – Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information I wish we could all agree: pie charts should die. I know this is unreasonable. And pie charts are only part of the problem. The problem is data visualizations that show what’s already obvious. After spending some time learning about...
There is an ongoing culture war, and not just in the US, over the content of childhood education, both public and private. This seems to be flaring up recently, but is never truly gone. Republicans in the US have recently escalated this war by banning over 500 books in several states (mostly Florida) because they […] The post The Fight over Education first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
It was a 2012 evening, and I was driving home from the office. I was worried about finishing a big project at work on time. I’d made the journey from the office to my home so many times, my car almost seemed to know the way by itself. My hands were on the wheel, but…
Grids are very, very useful. I just published an essay on how anchoring the most important information on a web page to the Y-axis will help viewer’s focus on it and pay closer attention. It’s a pretty basic idea, really, but somehow I found myself writing over 1,000 words to describe it. I won’t do that here. Instead, I want to provide some very brief direction on using grids. Grids are a...
Tucker Carlson's move to Twitter led him to celebrate it as the last preserve of free speech. But his relation to speech was long slippery, best reflected on the heuristic display of the 2016 electoral map that was the logo of the pundit's nightly show's and its guiding rationale. Continue reading →
Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the central highway in the heart of the city, encountered every hurdle imaginable: ruthless politics, engineering challenges, secretive contractors, outright fraud and even the death of one motorist. It became a kind of poster child for The post The Big Dig appeared...
“We give them the same phone, in the same brand-new condition,” says one seller.
Part 1: How to spot misinformation, mistakes, and meaningless data
The X220 ThinkPad is the Best Laptop in the World 2023-09-26 The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you're wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of "design". Functionality is no longer important to...
The opposite of a good idea - Finding the real reason behind brushing our teeth - Let's not jump to conclusions
The differences between games development and more “standard” software engineering, roles, and how games are typically built.
William / Kaven Architecture has sent us photos of a home they completed in Portland, Oregon, that’s part of a collection of private residences perched on several steeply sloped sites within Forest Park, a 5,000-acre woodland. A simple material palette of dark steel, concrete, glass, and custom bronze-black cladding grounds the house within the surrounding […]
It’s almost impossible to safely drive a car while only looking in the rear view mirror. Only seeing where you’ve been is a terrible way to figure out where to go. But it’s really unsafe to go forward with no idea of what came before. AI plods along into the future, using machine learning to […]
We trace Michael Dell's skill at the art of capital in business, and use it to examine how skill at capital allows you to make moves that aren't available to a novice business operator.
I was quite vain when I was younger due to a low self-esteem which led to a high level of insecurity. That insecurity made me feel ugly and that I was never...
Hey Siri, set a reminder for 365 days.
According to statistics, Tokyo is home to over 1800 Shinto shrines. You have your major shrines like Meiji-Jingu and Hie Shrine but there are many other tiny shrines, often unstaffed and nestled in the depths of back streets and behind buildings. Tearing down a shrine would be considered incredibly bad luck so many smaller shrines […] Related posts: Exploring Japan’s Historical Landmarks and...
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Sacred Flames and Divine Philosophers
It’s time to expand our vision to include slower, more human-scaled speeds of transportation.
I spent Labor Day weekend reading about this beaten down retailer. This article provides some initial thoughts about the company as well as the overall retail landscape.
Magic: The Gathering, poker, and business strategy all have something in common: they're vulnerable to a cognitive bias known as results-oriented thinking. But to optimize for success, we should avoid this bias and strive to replace it with sound strategy.
Early notes on how generative AI is affecting the internet
The discipline of design is the commitment to structuring and systematizing good ideas. Ideas don’t stand on their own. When a good idea turns into a good thing, it’s because structure and systems — ones that existed before the idea — made it happen. There’s this myth in creative spaces that systems are where good ideas go to die. That innovation almost always means breaking free of...
In steganography, an ordinary message masks the presence of a secret communication. Humans can never do it perfectly, but a new study shows it’s possible for machines. The post Secret Messages Can Hide in AI-Generated Media first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Logic, Math and AI In many ways the great quest of Doug Lenat’s life was an attempt to follow on directly from the work of Aristotle and Leibniz. For what Doug was fundamentally trying to do over the forty years he spent developing his CYC system was to use the framework of logic—in more or […]
It turns out that operational excellence results from the pursuit of a certain form of knowledge. This is Part 3 of the Becoming Data Driven series, and the result of a deep dive into the field of statistical process control.
There I was, standing in the middle of a buzzing tech event that our company organized, feeling like a fish […] The post Networking as an introvert CTO appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
Quanta magazine this week published an article about two very recent papers, in which different groups performed quantum simulations of anyons, objects that do not follow Bose-Einstein or Fermi-Dirac statistics when they are exchanged. For so-called Abelian anyons (which I wrote about in the link above), the wavefunction picks up a phase factor \(\exp(i\alpha)\), where \(\alpha\) is not \(\pi\)...
Romantic relationships get all the attention, but I'd argue that friendships are just as important—if not more so—for our health and happiness. Just like with romantic relationships, creating fulfilling, lasting friendships as an adult can be really hard. But… Why? I mean, sure, there's the logistical side of it. As we age, our lives get more complex and filled with responsibilities, making it...
Maintaining balance and achieving personal contentment has been a pressing concern for people throughout history. From ancient Greek philosophers to modern-day wellness coaches, experts have offered diverse approaches to balance the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual dimensions of life. One such philosophy that has received renewed attention in recent times is Stoicism. Understanding...
I haven’t spent much time playing around with the latest LLMs, and decided to spend some time doing so. I was particularly curious about the usecase of using embeddings to supplement user prompts with additional, relevant data (e.g. supply the current status of their recent tickets into the prompt where they might inquire about progress on said tickets). This usecase is interesting because it’s...
On March 24 I wrote GPT is revolutionary. On March 27 I got access to GPT4.1 Now that I’ve used it for a month, I’m firmly in the “this is the greatest thing ever” camp. And, much like my experience at Burning Man, I’m finding a not-insignificant number of my fellow campers run around with their butts showing. GPT4 needs advocates that aren’t either SEO marketers or AGI fanatics, so here’s why I...
There is something delightful about riding a bicycle. Once mastered, the simple action of pedaling to move forward and turning the handlebars to steer makes bike riding an effortless activity. In the demonstration below, you can guide the rider with the slider, and you can also drag the view around to change the camera angle: Compared to internal combustion engines or mechanical watches,...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Please consult yesterday's comments (we have comments now) for the excellent post by Hans Rickheit. Today's News: We have them, like it's the 90s again! Please don't be a dick - I would like to keep moderation light. Also, if you have mod experience, please email me.
Last year, I started a photography hobby. Soon after, I've created a place where I can share some of my work, without any attention-driven algorithms dictating the terms. Here's a technical write-up of my journey. Table of contents: Motivation Inspiration Design Implementation Content management Loading performance Navigation RSS Accessibility Pipeline Preparation Metadata update Content...
“Clap on! Clap off! Clap on! Clap off! The Clapper!” This 1980s earworm of a jingle touted a gadget to turn your lights, your TV, or any other electrical device on or off with the clap of your hands. If you watched any amount of American television back then, you probably saw the Clapper’s repetitious and yet oddly endearing ad, and perhaps you, like many others, felt compelled to give it a...
I love writing and sharing code as open source, but it's not an abstract act of pure altruism. The first recipients of these programming gifts are almost always myself and my company. It's an intentionally selfish drive first, then a broader benefit second. But, ironically, this is what's made my participation in the gift exchange of open source sustainable for twenty years and counting. Putting...
From images of solar cooking to snake radio telemetry, we received 548 entries from around the world.
After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in the second half of the 1920s, the city built over 10,000 public housing units. It was some of the earliest modern architecture — simple, clean, and uniform. The massive The post The Frankfurt Kitchen appeared first on 99% Invisible.
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more titanium than copper by a factor of nearly 100. But despite its abundance, it's only recently that civilization has been able to use titanium as a metal (titanium dioxide has been in use somewhat longer...
Last week, I gave a 30 minute talk to a group of CTOs and VP Engineerings in San Francisco about measuring engineering organizations. This talk was essentially this blog post, and here are the slides. A few topics worth highlighting: Measurement educates you, and your audience, about the area being measured. Even flawed measures can be very effective educators. Don’t get caught up on not measuring...
There are good reasons to be skeptical about its ultimate utility.
On the back of US salary transparency regulations, two new salary transparency websites have launched, built by the creators of Levels.fyi and Layoffs.fyi. I talked to both teams to learn how they were developed.
We are still very much in the hype phase of the latest crop of artificial intelligence applications, specifically the large language models and so-called “transformers” like Chat GPT. Transformers are a deep learning model that use self-attention to differentially weight the importance of its input, including any recursive use of its own output. This process […] The post Have Current AI Reached...
We have this big issue right now because gaming is shifting from us to mobile platforms.
Thirty-eight years since the launch of e-filing, the IRS will pilot its own tax filing system ending two decades of Intuit's regulatory capture of the tax software market
Every so often, I come across a transit map that is just so unfit for purpose that all I can do is scratch my head and ponder, “Just why?” This is one of those maps. Produced by (or on behalf of) Newark International Airport, it purports to show regional rail services that you can connect […]
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On projects, side-projects, AI, and existential dread.
My psychology around money has changed significantly over the last two years. While some of that is captured in my monthly portfolio updates, I thought it was worth recording some of my emotions while they are still fresh. Two years ago Turning the clock back, my financial situation was, in word, ‘flush’. The stock market… Continue reading Feeling broke →
Once you use your plates every day, they cease to be the good china. Of course, the plates didn’t change. Your story did. The way you treat them did. The same goes for the red carpet. If you roll it out for every visitor or every customer, it ceases to be red.
Fifteen years ago, when I worked in the “social innovation” field, there was a world-view that was very popular among my colleagues about what was wrong with society and how to fix it. The idea was that people and governments needed to stop seeing economic growth as a good thing, and that by doing so, we could build a world that paid more attention to important things like environmental...
Harold Abelson once said that code should be written for humans to read and only incidentally for computers to write. It follows that, like any form of communication, code can carry emotions. Programming perversity, then, is code that conveys morbid fascination, the kind of amused horror where you cover your eyes but peek through your fingers. Take some innocuous features of a programming language...
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is Waterloo Park in downtown Austin, Texas, just a couple of blocks away from the state capitol building. It’s got walking trails, an ampitheater, Waller Creek runs right through the center, and it has this strange semicircular structure right on the water. And this is Ladybird Lake, formerly Town Lake, about a mile away....
By imbuing enormous vectors with semantic meaning, we can get machines to reason more abstractly — and efficiently — than before. The post A New Approach to Computation Reimagines Artificial Intelligence first appeared on Quanta Magazine
What does a great side project look like, which helps learn new technologies, but also helps stand out when looking for a new job? Analysis of an Uber simulation app, built from scratch.
The day must come when electricity will be for everyone, as the waters of the rivers and the wind of heaven. It should not merely be supplied, but lavished, that men may use it at their will, as the air they breathe. - Emile Zola, “Travail”, 1901
"The people we love are built into us."
Stoicism is a philosophy that has been around for over two thousand years. The ancient Greeks developed it as a way to live a good life, free from the distractions of emotions, desires, and material possessions. Stoicism has been embraced by many people throughout history, including Roman emperors, Enlightenment thinkers, and modern-day entrepreneurs. But what Read More >>
Earlier this year, the city of New York closed off several blocks around the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse. Instead of early morning commuters, the sidewalks around the building were flooded with reporters, photographers, and camera people. They were there to capture the arraignment of former president Donald Trump. Members of the media were so desperate to The post Courtroom Sketch appeared first...
I wrote a script that exposes browser and software platform data from hotels across the country. This data is very different from say: StatCounter or NetApplications estimates because they rely on getting their data from trackers on specific websites. The data I pulled comes from guests getting redirected by Network Access Gateways at hotel hotspots and so user agents are tracked regardless of...
The process behaviour chart is the easiest way to differentiate between routine and exceptional variation. This is everything you need to know to use it well.
I remember sitting in the car on the way to drop my brother to preschool. Being 9 years old and telling my mum how excited I was to turn ten. Double digits! I feel the same way about 29 to 30. I hardly even got used to saying I’
This post previously appeared in EIX. In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Think of profound beliefs as “strong opinions loosely held.” You can’t be an effective founder or in the C-suite of a startup if you don’t hold any. Here’s […]
"Is This Anything?"
Photography by Stetson Ybarra Multi-disciplinary design studio Daniel Joseph Chenin, Ltd. has shared photos of a modern home they completed on the edge of the Las Vegas Valley that has views of Red Rock Canyon. Photography by Stetson Ybarra Commissioned for a family embracing an active lifestyle of immersive environmental experiences, the home has a […]
Lessons from building AudioPen to 600+ paid users to clinching #1 on Product Hunt
How do we know which food is best for us? We might start a low-carb diet. Then we switch to whole grains, or even go fully vegan—only to return to a low-carb diet yet again. We constantly change our minds. Even scientists keep revising their perspectives. Why is it so difficult to be certain on issues like these? The Scottish philosopher David Hume answered this question almost 300 years ago....
I tried out Noom, the weight loss and cognitive behavioral therapy program. The app is more like CBT for upselling customers than CBT for weight loss. Now I’m hoping they’ll delete my sensitive medical data and refund the $3 they tricked me out of. (They did, quickly in response to my support email.) I was excited to try Noom. I’ve used basic calorie counters in the past and was hoping for...
Weight Loss, Civilization, and Good Reading
Drones have become an essential tool to map, measure and observe the extremely dangerous environments surrounding volcanic eruptions.
Seven principles for journalism in the age of AI
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small updates from me in July 2023
Just dropped on the LA Metro Twitter account, here’s a first look at their new system map once the Regional Connector opens at noon, this Friday June 16. First off, one prediction I made in my previous review [October 2022] has been proven true: this map marks the end of the old colour-based line designations. […]
Are standards elevating or elitist?
This 2000-era word processor is the ultimate distraction-free writing device. Maybe that’s why I never use it. AlphaSmart3000 in its Bondi-blue glory Before the term “distraction-free” made sense, there was AlphaSmart. Oozing with early-aughts Apple aesthetics, the AlphaSmart3000 is a Bondi-blue word processor complete with chonky keyboard and a crisp, four-line LCD screen. It’s an artifact that...
I interview Claire about her new book "Scaling People". Thanks to Stripe for hosting.
From Changamire's expulsion of the Portuguese to the ruined cities of Zimbabwe.
After decades of slumber, the country that brought us bullet trains and Nintendo has mustered some momentum.
I have a question: has anyone ever tried to standardize an RSS feed in HTML? I can’t find any discussion around it — but I’d love to read more about the idea because it intrigues me. The OG RSS was an XML feed. Later we got JSON feeds. So why not an HTML feed standard? (I know, I know, obligatory xkcd link.) At this point, I think it’s fair to say HTML has won. As Yehuda says: HTML…is humanity's...
A new Twitter clone is surging in popularity. Could it have legs?
In my previous post, I was creating groups of students, and I wanted to track how many times students had worked together. I created a nested dictionary to track the pairs: pairs = { 'Alice': {'Bryony': 3, 'Caroline': 1, 'Danielle': 0, …}, 'Bryony': {'Alice': 3, 'Caroline': 2, …}, … } To find out how many times Alice and Bryony had worked together, you’d look up pairs['Alice']['Bryony']...
Vitally important, rarely taught, easily messed up. In order to go onto the next thing, which we all do (unless you’re still wearing pajamas with feet and taking ballet lessons), we need to walk away from the last thing. Wrap it up, learn from it, leave it in good hands. And we also need to […]
There have been two main periods of subway (or “metro”) building in the US. The first was during the late 19th century and early 20th century, when Boston, New York, and Philadelphia all built subway systems
Back in 2014, USV got subpoenaed by the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) over our web3 investing activities. We hired a law firm, answered the subpoena, and that ultimately landed me in public testimony in front of the DFS staff. In my testimony, I explained to the DFS staff that the difference […]
Many startups fail despite identifying a real problem and building a product that solves that problem. This explains why, so you can avoid their fate.
I was on Twitter since 2007, and built a meaningful part of my career on it, and I won’t be posting at all for the foreseeable future
Spirit Halloween has over 1,450 pop-up shops and makes all its money in only 2 months (September, October)
If you haven't been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year (if that), I can't blame you. There's a lot going on right now. It's a busy time. But let's pause and take
Following the Renaissance period, a transition started occurring in West Europe, with rapid advancements in science and technology happening in the 1400s. With improvements in cartography, ship and other maritime technology, and an increased desire to understand and discover everything, Europe set out to explore the world.
In the data engineering space we have seen quite a few low code and no code tools pass through our radar. Low code tools have their own nuances as you will get to operationalize quicker, but the minute you need to customize something outside of the toolbox, you may run into problems. That’s when we […]
A talk with the author of The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight.
No GPU cluster required.
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How to skip the brain, bypass reason and head straight for the heart to sell
Emily Shore was just nineteen when she died of tuberculosis—a short life, but one brimming with intellectual curiosity. Born in Suffolk, England in 1819, her now-celebrated journal contains not just her intricate observations of the natural world, but also thoughtful reflections on literature, religion, her family, and her impending death. In May of 1835, when […]
A lie.
Imagine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used to drain water out of mines, pump bellows for blast furnaces, turn grindstones and lumber saws, etc. But to your dismay, the emperor responds: “Your mechanism is no gift to us. It...
After more than two decades of drinking, last summer, I decided to stop drinking alcohol for good. There were a lot of reasons for this, and obviously, there were benefits—I lost some weight, slept better at night, and no more ungodly hangovers. But also some life changes happened that I was completely unprepared for. And once these hidden benefits kicked in, I knew that I was probably done with...
Uber revamped its engineering levels in 2022. How did the levels evolve over time, why was it time to change, and what were they? I’ve collected details.
When looking at data engineering for your projects, it is important to think about market segmentation. In particular, you might be able to think about it in four segments Small Data – This refers to scenarios where companies have data problems (organization, modeling, normalization, etc), but don’t necessarily generate a ton of data. When you […]
How Twitter is breaking — and its CEO is accelerating its fall
Last December I was fortunate enough to borrow a copy of The Unmediated Vision, Geoffrey Hartman's first book, published in 1954. It is difficult to find a copy now but you can download a digital version of the book via the link. The opening chapter is a 50-page study of "Tintern Abbey" in the context of Wordsworth's work as a whole, focusing on the comparative simplicity of its language and...
https://youtu.be/c3uoyCNIa5c You've probably never heard of Kazimierz Dąbrowski. He was a psychologist from the 1940s with a fascinating background. He studied with Freud's contemporaries in Vienna, worked with mentally ill patients, participated in the Polish resistance during World War II, was captured and tortured in a prisoner of war camp, and lost many friends and family members in the...
Many of us harbor a deep-seated desire to adopt a particular identity, often picturing ourselves as something that we are not. For example, I've longed to be a surfer for years. The idea fascinated me so much that I even booked several weeks of surf lessons in Costa Rica. Surfing can be incredibly meditative. It compels you to surrender control and simply respond to the unpredictability of the...
I’m approaching the limit of my current iCloud storage tier, and most of that is my Photos Library. I don’t really want to pay for the next iCloud storage tier – I’d be tripling my bill, but I’d barely use the extra space. (My library grows pretty slowly – I’ve only added ~6GB of photos this year.) What I’d rather do is move some big items out of my library, and get some space back. I’ve got a...
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] One of the very first documented engineering disasters happened in 27 AD in the early days of the Roman Empire. A freed slave named Atilius built a wooden amphitheater in a town called Fidenae outside of Rome. Gladiator shows in Rome were banned at the time, so people flocked from all over to the new amphitheater to attend the...
Previous Next Using Marcus Aurelius's writing in his Meditations and experiences inferred from historical records, we created an AI digital personality that spoke with us about how to practice Stoicism in our modern world. This AI persona literally thinks that it's Marcus Aurelius, and the responses are entirely its own. You can scroll down to Read More >>
"Self-knowledge... is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but... the prime moral privilege."
Amid economic turmoil, President Julius Maada Bio is seeking re-election in Sierra Leone. His wife, Fatima, is dancing to a crowd of over 200,000 on TikTok to drum up votes.
The Bureau of Land Management wants to pay you $1,000 to adopt a wild horse. But the program has been criticized by animal rights advocates and subject to scrutiny by Congress.
We live in an era in which maps (and plenty of other graphics) are made with digital tools. Workflows vary, but the end result is that a lot of us base our cartography entirely on clean vector shapes and neat raster grids. For example, I talked earlier this year about a map I made of … Continue reading On the Practice of Wobbling →
I was hyperlinked to this comment where Rich Harris stopped by Hacker News to clarify his position on the (controversial?) steps Svelte is taking to move off Typescript in favor of types-via-JSDoc comments. First off, I love how Rich prefaces his comments by basically saying, “However you think you’ll use what I’m about to write as fodder to justify whatever your position, I’m afraid I’m going to...
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 9
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: The cape cost three dollars, but it's an investment. Today's News:
Cedric talks to Lesley Sim about her experience coaching the Singaporean Ultimate Women's World Championship Team in 2020, her approach to skill acceleration, and why a teaching technique designed for dogs and dolphins works just as well on humans!
Length is not the problem; lack of rhythm is. It’s 2023 and I’m still frequently asked by clients about scrolling. I understand why. Every design comes with assumptions about how much content will be seen by people because the space in which people access our designs is the one thing we cannot control. Even with responsive design and scaling techniques, we don’t really know how much of what...
Everything about a startup changes over time. The few things that don't, are its essence. The voyage is meaningless, unless you decide what those things are.
Hey, this is Jakob Greenfeld, author of the Business Brainstorms newsletter - every week I write this email to share the most interesting trends, frameworks, opportunities, and ideas with you. Let's dive in! #1 💡 It's cool that smartphones have become all-in-one devices. But at the same time, there’s a reason why people buy Kindle devices.
Rethinking the Role of PPO in RLHF TL;DR: In RLHF, there’s tension between the reward learning phase, which uses human preference in the form of comparisons, and the RL fine-tuning phase, which optimizes a single, non-comparative reward. What if we performed RL in a comparative way? Figure 1: This diagram illustrates the difference between reinforcement learning from absolute feedback and...
Sara has been working on a new course titled Practical Accessibility and it is available for pre-order right now. I’ve never met Sara in person, but have been an online follower for some time. She is one of those people who has the discipline and eye to make everything they release of the absolute highest quality. It’s inspiring — and for that reason, I’ve already purchased access to this new...
Fueled by the pandemic, medical professionals have cashed in on Douyin, dispensing advice and endorsements.
The low-hanging fruit of pizza happiness, possibly
In 1914, everything changed for Paul Klee. Whilst sampling the delights of Tunisia on a twelve-day trip with fellow artists Louis Moilliet and Auguste Macke, he found himself profoundly affected by the light and colours of North Africa—an intense experience that inspired him to explore new forms of abstraction and bring colour to the canvas […]
How can we train Resilience?
We can start to see, dimly, what the near future of AI looks like.
"Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself."
The investing legend, the goat of common sense and wisdom, and the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
Four mathematicians have found a new upper limit to the “Ramsey number,” a crucial property describing unavoidable structure in graphs. The post A Very Big Small Leap Forward in Graph Theory first appeared on Quanta Magazine
I would prefer that Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later? Not sure about this.. thanks Eric
"IBM's first computer"
A New Name for an Old Problem
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Oh wait, shoot, would you mind if I did a quick full body scan before never speaking to you again? Today's News:
I didn’t get much time to wander around Seoul like I did in Tokyo. Every day was a work day and it was a brief stop. So I was confined mostly to what I could see from the windshield as we drove through the city or from the hotel. However, this was my first trip […] The post Asia-Pacific, Part 6 (South Korea: Seoul) appeared first on Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places.
I’ve crunched data from a variety of sources for a sense of how startup funding is trending. So far, it’s downwards. What does this mean for tech? My analysis.
I want to write about a recently published paper, but to do so on an accessible level, I should really lay some ground work first. At the primary school level, typically people are taught that there are three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. (Plasma may be introduced as a fourth state sometimes.) These three states are readily distinguished because they have vastly different mechanical...
M.F.K. Fisher was an accomplished author and gastronome who brought the art of food writing into the realm of literature. From the age of nineteen she kept a journal, and this entry comes thirteen years down the line as she cared for her beloved husband, the writer and artist Dillwyn Parrish, whom she affectionately referred […]
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Fortunately they were just drawings and not people. Today's News:
I’ve been writing my thoughts on life, psychology, and mindset for some time. I’ve considered transferring some of these writings from Notion into this post. In physics, three laws can explain 99% of observations. However, in life, psychology, and mindset, 99 laws can barely explain 1% of observations. What I’ve written here stems from my…
During the past seven months, I’ve steamed across the Atlantic, sailed in a flying castle, teleported across the globe, and shuttled forward and backward in time. Literarily, not literally—the Quantum-Steampunk Short-Story Contest began welcoming submissions in October 2022. We challenged … Continue reading →
"Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstance entails continuous surrender... Only unconditional surrender leads to real emptiness, and from that place of emptiness I can be prolific and free."
Nothing connects.
In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe.
Number theorist Andrew Granville on what mathematics really is — and why objectivity is never quite within reach. The post Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Memories may affect how well the brain will learn about future events by shifting our perceptions of the world. The post Memories Help Brains Recognize New Events Worth Remembering first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Caught in a series of lies about his willingness to fight Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire's disturbing spiral accelerates
Mike Cardona is a solo founder who has managed to build a $200k online business by specialising in automation content and consulting
On the eve of a major antitrust trial — and its 25th birthday — the company is bracing for a fight
The next few posts are some of my favorite picture books. The 1st from 1965 is a very basic counting book about spaceflight. I hope that you find it as charming as I do. DeCaprio, Annie and David Krieger. Illustrated by Nydorf, Seymour. One, Two. New York: Wonder Books. (24 p.) 1965.
Searching for "that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life."
And the centre's not looking too good, either.
Home is a place where you have never been.
Laetitia@Work #62
Do you have a static site generator? If so, how do you handle the date and time for when your posts are published? For me, I record the publish date once: in the filename (e.g. 2023-05-16-my-slug.md). That YYYY-MM-DD string in the filename is the canonical location for my posts’ publish date. Now that date is fuzzy because, you know, timezones. If somebody looks at one of my blog posts and it...
How to bear the gravity of being.
The world has a new largest country, and it's on the move.
100 Architects has shared photos of one of their latest projects, a stimulating urban park in a newly built commercial and residential area in the port city of Ningbo, the second-most populous city in Zhejiang Province, China.
Although I use Docker a lot, I don’t leave it running all the time – it can be quite a resource hog, and even if it’s doing nothing it can make my laptop feel sluggish. I’ll often stop if it my computer feels slow, which is great right until the next time I need to use it: $ docker run -it alpine docker: Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon...
"Look, you can trust us. We can be depended upon. We are serious about our products and we take great care to provide you with excellence year after year. Your involvement with us will be predictable and stable."
I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks about making and hanging some AI art in my house. But I immediately faced some internal resistance. Like, I wasn’t (and still am not) sure whether this is the right way to “do” art. And that got me thinking what that really means. What does it mean to do art…
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 8
Amazon grew it's revenue per employee from $50K to $1M over its first fifteen years.
This week, as an addendum to our series on Roman civic governance (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V), we’re going to take a look at how Rome handles those parts of Italy it controls but which it does not inhabit. These are Rome’s ‘allies’ (socii), a euphemistic label for the Italian communities the Romans … Continue reading Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Addenda: The Socii →
Hotmart is quietly turning even micro-influencers into millionaires.
There’s a wonderful blog post called “Reality has a surprising amount of detail” which talks about how interesting the world is and how much depth there is to every concept. Here’s a quote about boiling water:
The best way to win a short-term game is to bet it all on one strategy. Someone is going to get lucky and it might be you. But we rarely thrive in the long run if we persist in playing a series of short-term games. Instead, organizations, individuals and teams do better when they understand […]
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: The keynote is gonna be reeeediculous. Today's News: Or click here for info! Tickets are more than half sold and we're still two weeks out, so buy soon to lock yours in!
Power laws in criminal behavior
The Last Archive is a history show. Our evidence is the evidence of history, the evidence of archives. Manuscripts, photographs, letters and diaries, government documents. Facebook posts, Youtube videos, DVDs. Oral histories. This stuff is known as the “historical record,” but of course it’s not a record, in the sense of an audio recording: It’s The post Player Piano appeared first on 99%...
Stefan Judis on Twitter: I'm diving into @remix_run and I strongly agree with the sentiment that a JS approach that includes writing event.preventDefault all the time is kinda off. The browser defaults are great, and yet we're rollin' our own for years now. 🤔 I’ve been thinking about browser defaults a bit lately. I think there are a few browser-related features that, collectively, we simply...
They're not going to disrupt everything (yet), but they're a ton of fun.
The OpenAI CEO’s dismissal of an Indian competitor launched a debate over the country’s tech capabilities.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: You can use an LLM to infinitely extend the description in panel 2. Today's News: See you tonight, NYC!
Lessons on Listening from Plutarch
At the beginning of the year I quit consulting to focus full time on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker tool. I also started working on a new side project, Emergent Mind, an AI-powered AI news site. My last update on how things were going was after 3 months which provides more background for anyone interested. […]
How this one small browser quirk turned into a tool used by countless people for decades. The post Wait, what’s a bookmarklet? appeared first on The History of the Web.
I have a bad habit of changing my computing setups all the time. I tend to see new gear, then I get some new ideas, and then I obsessively think about it for weeks and months until I just buy it. And then the cycle repeats. I’ve had time to think about why that keeps happening and I think I’ve got it. I keep changing the goals, constantly, and with that I kept optimizing my setup in a different...
Language shapes our perception of setbacks. Use words other than "failure" to describe situations and to suggest the next step.
To get the authorities’ attention, victims get help from influencers specialized in niches like corruption and pet justice.
Benjamin Robert Haydon was a 19th-century British artist and writer whose career was plagued by financial hardship and legal troubles. Born in 1786, Haydon’s passion for historical painting led him down a tumultuous path, as mounting debts and controversial public statements frequently resulted in his arrest; however, he remained steadfast in his commitment to his […]
Vegetable carts, flower shops, mom-and-pop stores: Small speakers that read out digital payment receipts are making fintech companies big money.
the Light Phone diaries
From traditional retellings to drunk adaptations.
There once was a cosmic seed that sprouted the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers have discovered its last surviving remnants. The post Astronomers Dig Up the Stars That Birthed the Milky Way first appeared on Quanta Magazine
These moments in time seem to have a higher density than usual.
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Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: My daughter saw me drawing and asked if it was kid appropriate, and I don't know. Today's News:
In two landmark experiments, researchers used quantum processors to engineer exotic particles that have captivated physicists for decades. The work is a step toward crash-proof quantum computers. The post Physicists Create Elusive Particles That Remember Their Pasts first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Although they only existed for seven years and released just three albums, Nirvana were a band of immeasurable influence in the music world thanks in no small part to Smells Like Teen Spirit, a single track on Nevermind, their second album. It was this song that brought them out into the open, going on to sell millions
The internet is inundated with countless videos and advice columns promising to teach you how to become more successful than 99% of the world's population. Most of these claims revolve around setting goals, developing discipline, and eliminating distractions. But let's face it: if you take a close look at the habits of highly successful people, you'll quickly realize that they don't strictly...
In our new podcast, Homing In, our co-founder Matt Gibberd invites guests to discuss their childhood home, where they live now and their thoughts on future living. (If you missed episode one, with Ruth Rogers, be sure to listen here.) Our guest on this episode […]
In 2005, Joel Spolsky’s software company, Fog Creek, filmed a documentary about their summer internship program. The film is called Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks, and it follows four college interns as they design, implement, and launch a completely new software product. That’s not the interesting part. Looking back on this documentary 18 years later, it’s striking how many interviews it...
Technological progress must be harnessed, not fought
You need all the hours you can get— you better start early (or go very late).
In a business context, what should you think when presented with a time series? Or: a really dumb question that nobody seems to talk about.
Urbanism in the forest region.
Several enterprise SaaS companies have announced generative AI features recently, which is a direct threat to AI startups that lack sustainable competitive advantage
Last week I explored how Henry VIII resorted to coin debasement as a way to raise revenues in order to fight his wars. This provided Henry with the financial firepower to annex the city of Boulogne from the French in 1544, albeit at the price of England experiencing one of its greatest inflations ever. Zoom forward five hundred years and Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the UK, has ignited a...
Our job as professionals is to show up and do the work. Not simply respond to incoming or do the chores, but to create and innovate. And yet, some days feel more conducive than others. There are moments when it simply flows. When the surf’s up, cancel everything else. Don’t waste it. Postpone the dentist, […]
In 2016, I wrote Productivity in the age of hypergrowth to discuss the challenges of engineering management during periods of hypergrowth. Managers in such periods spend much of their time on hiring and onboarding, with the remainder devoted to organizational structure and high-level strategy. Their technical expertise is important, but it’s demonstrated indirectly in the quality of their...
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On April 20, 2023, SpaceX launched it’s first orbital test flight of its Starship spacecraft from Boca Chica on the gulf coast of Texas. You probably saw this, if not live, at least in the stunning videos that followed. Thanks to NASA Space Flight for giving me permission to use their footage in this video. Starship launched...
Previous Next What exactly did the ancient Stoics think about marriage? It's true, there isn't a huge amount of quotes to find from them specifically about marriage, although there are plenty about love, relationships and caring for people in our lives. It's worth keeping in mind that marriage during the time of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius Read More >>
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I have recently published a report with Aaron Wudrick from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute about changes in the language that the news media in Canada use. I have documented previously how in American news media mentions of terms that signify distinct forms of prejudice have risen dramatically since 2010. The report linked above takes a similar analysis of Canadian news media, using data from 14...
On most days, I don’t feel like doing anything. This non-feeling taken to the extreme, can also mean I may not feel like living. Everything including breathing itself can feel like a chore. I am not...
The siren song of subs
'Knowledge' here is defined as 'theories or models that help you predict better'. How an idea from W. Edwards Deming may well be a working philosophy of business.
This is the second post in a row where I am bringing back an old tradition. This time it is Fun Friday, something I haven’t done in about five years. Like last week, the catalyst is our portfolio company Blackbird Labs, which I posted about a few months ago. Blackbird is a platform for the […]
Scars, scratches and wounds abound in these photos as encounters with unknown creatures and boat propellers leave their marks, imprinting a story of close escapes and cheating death.
Corita Kent was an artist with an innovative approach to design and education. She worked in the Immaculate Heart College Art Department, above, c. 1955. (Photo/Fred Swartz, courtesy of the Corita Art Center) “Sometimes you can take the whole of the world in, and sometimes you need a small piece to take in,” says Sister … The Legacy of Corita Kent Read More » The post The Legacy of Corita Kent...
The Ware for May 2023 is shown below. This is yet another fine ware contributed by jackw01. I suspect this one may be guessed quite quickly, but I’ll leave one hint anyways: there is more than one board in this assembly.
Symmetry is back with more physics-themed Halloween costumes.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: I wasn't gonna do this, but enough weirdos on mastodon liked it that here we are. Today's News:
Longform journalism is coming back (and deserves our support)
I'm asking a favor—but not for me. I want you to do a favor for the music.
A simple but nicely drawn map of tram services in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia in 1957. The lack of any sort of key for the routes means that users need to have some familiarity with the city to decipher where trams might go. The pamphlet that the map is part of includes information about the route […]
It was in March of 1907, aged 15, that Edna St. Vincent Millay began to keep a diary—an intimate chronicle that would continue throughout her life, with her final entry penned in 1949, a year before her death. By that time, of course, she was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Spanning over four decades, Millay’s diaries […]
Converting My X201 ThinkPad into a Slabtop 2023-05-01 I recently wrote about physically disabling the WiFi toggle switch on my X201 which was a fun "hack" to an annoying issue I was running into. Since then, the laptop has been running flawlessly. The only other minor issue I had was the poor display quality. The screen works perfectly fine but the X201's age prevents it from being the best...
I have been writing blog posts and engaging in science communication long enough that I have a pretty good sense how much engagement I am going to get from a particular topic. Some topics are simply more divisive than others (although there is an unpredictable element from social media networks). I wish I could say […] The post The Role of Plausibility in Science first appeared on NeuroLogica...
They are really going out of their way to say that they intend to kill QuickTime, and are being quite threatening and rude about it.
And not just the fighting bit.
After yesterday’s post about passkeys I got enough answers to learn how to use passkeys myself as a consumer. Here’s what I learned. If you want to try it yourself, passkeys.io is a nice demo server. Passkeys work a lot like passwords do today. You create a different passkey for each website and use it to log in. Your passkeys are stored in what’s called a “Passkey Authenticator”, agent software...
That’s unlikely. You’re rarely going to get the freedom and resources to do your best work unfettered. The hard part (and the opportunity) is to figure out how to get comfortable with fettered. Because fettered is what’s on offer. Boundaries and scarcity aren’t simply impediments. They’re leverage points and opportunities.
Panto is back for 2023 - oh yes it is!
A startup is a crucible -- a fiery place that tests your limits, not by probing them but by violently exceeding them, all of the time. It's worth it.
My Robotic Mower Woes 2023-05-19 A Brief Background I'm no stranger to robotic lawnmowers. When my wife and I moved into our rural home just over five years ago, we picked up the Husqvarna 450X Automower since I was far too lazy to manually mow my property and the cost was equal to that of a standard riding mower. It was a no-brainer. The Husqvarna 450X (not mine but same model) Fast-forward...
The striking synchronicity with which Great Awokening terminology increased in news media worldwide
I recently recorded a YouTube video on the notion of hydrogen fuel cell cars (it will be posted soon, and I will add the link when it’s up). One question I did not get into in the video, but which is an interesting thought experiment, is hydrogen – plug-in battery hybrid vehicles. I can find […] The post Will Hydrogen BEV Hybrids Be A Thing? first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
Going all in on life
After a rise in shootings, an all-woman group is advising the new Brazilian government on how to deal with radicalization online.
The iterator proposal is a neat way to write “lazy loops”, where we never generate more results than we actually use. Let’s see what that would look like in Go programs.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Almost immediately after I started making videos about engineering, people started asking me to play video games on the channel. Apparently there’s roughly a billion people who watch online gaming these days, and some of them watch silly engineering videos too! And there’s one game that I get recommended even more than...
There has been a lot of discussion about how AIs can make art and possibly replace artists, but I think the opposite is more likely to happen. Artists have been using AI to make art for a while now and the pace has picked up a lot in recent years. I have always loved the […]
This is a really busy week for me, so light newsletter this time. Let’s start with obligatory stuff and then get into fun newsletter stuff. Announcements So first off, I just finished the May TLA+ workshop. This is the first time I felt really happy with the material and that I won’t have to do a week of revisions before running it again. Speaking of which, the last workshop (for now) is June 12....
The Scandalous Success of the Daily Mail j.hoare Mon, 01/01/2024 - 13:07
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For some reason shoplifting is in the news. There’s evidently an epidemic of it. Not just in the UK, but wider afield too – hence major brands pulling out of cities like San Francisco. From what I hear there is a general increase in antisocial behaviour, dating from the covid-19 pandemic roughly speaking. I’m not… Continue reading Sep 23: Antisocial markets →
Watch a skate video today, and you’ll notice how similarly shaped the boards are. It’s called the “popsicle” design, because the deck is narrow in the middle and rounded off at both ends, like a popsicle stick. This may seem stupid simple, but that basic, clean popsicle shape is actually the product of a lot of experimentation and The post The Double Kick appeared first on 99% Invisible.
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A simple answer, and then a less simple one.
I have been following battery technology pretty closely, as this is a key technology for the transition to green energy. The most obvious application is in battery electric vehicles (BEVs). The second most obvious application is in grid storage. But also there are all the electronic devices that we increasingly depend on day-to-day. That same […] The post Some Battery News first appeared on...
With a little bash scripting, a modern reverse proxy like Traefik, and Docker Compose, we can put together a fairly robust and simple approach to zero-downtime deployment. Moreover, this approach is flexible and scalable, even for dynamic container backends.
Will the Reality Pro be the metaverse’s iPhone moment?
Plus: Why Britain can’t seem to fix its housing market, gene-edited super-rice, and one weird trick to reverse climate change.
"Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer."
We used to consider writing an indication of time and effort spent on a task. That isn't true anymore.
Ask yourself, “Is this needed?” Remove everything that isn’t. Study the function of the building well, but don’t let it drive the design. Connect the spaces with nature. Master the use of natural light. Create a balance between public and private spaces. Organize the Floorplan. With a grid, a datum, hierarchy, balance, symmetry, order. Place your structures within a greater ... Read More
I recently discovered Syncthing, an open-source tool for syncing files across multiple machines. Setting up Syncthing on my personal devices was easy, but I went on an interesting journey deploying it to a cloud server. Why run Syncthing in the cloud? Syncthing synchronizes files peer to peer. That means that at least two of my devices have to be online and running Syncthing simultaneously to stay...
Recently I’ve been building some tools to help me manage my photo collection, and part of that involves moving photos in and out of albums. The tool I’ve built is very specific to my workflow and unlikely to be immediately useful to anyone else, but I thought some of the code for managing albums might be of wider use. Local identifiers: unambiguously specify photos and albums Inside Photos.app,...
By measuring inflated helium nuclei, physicists have challenged our best understanding of the force that binds protons and neutrons. The post A New Experiment Casts Doubt on the Leading Theory of the Nucleus first appeared on Quanta Magazine
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Chinese platforms came for global customers. Now they want global sellers.
When my brother and I were little, we sometimes played video games on weekend mornings, before our parents woke up. We owned a 3DO console, which ran the game Gex. Gex is named after its main character, a gecko. Stepping … Continue reading →
Marcus Aurelius is one of the best-known figures of the Roman Empire, thanks to his writings on Stoic philosophy and his place in history as "the last good emperor." His face is famous, too, even though he lived long before photography. The many surviving statues of Marcus Aurelius provide a vivid portrayal of his curly Read More >>
Competition tends to eliminate high profits resulting from business models that have worked spectacularly well. Will Berkshire's playbook continue to perform well in the future?
Hey Friends, A year ago — in June 2022 — I started this newsletter. I had so many ideas of what I wanted this newsletter to be: copywriting and creativity, behavioural science, business, or personal essays. But after a year of writing Left to Write,
Controlling the space between text styles is as important as differentiating the styles themselves. Whenever I review design documentation, there are a few things I look for in the first few seconds. All of them have to do with how scannable a page or screen’s layout is. In fact, I was reading Design School Layout by Richard Poulin the other day and was reminded how good his definition of...
When I teach cartography, I am deliberate about not presenting my students with any rules. I do not want obedience to memorized maxims — instead, I simply tell them about practices that I think are good ideas, and then I offer an explanation of my reasoning. The students can choose to follow my advice, or … Continue reading Conventional Cartographic Wisdom that I have Failed to Grasp →
Letters and ligatures creating intricate logo designs abduzeedo0428—23 Hungarian graphic designer KissMiklós has created a stunning series of typography compositions that showcase the beauty of serif fonts, letters and ligatures. While they may not all be logos in the traditional sense, they are undoubtedly works of art in their own right. Miklós' passion for...
For the first time since the 2000s, I'm working on a new Rails application without using any form of real build steps on the front-end. We're making it using vanilla ES6 with import maps for Hotwire, and vanilla CSS with nesting and variables for styling. All running on a delightfully new simple asset pipeline called Propshaft. It's all just so... simple. It's also fast. Really fast. Infinitely...
Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the most popular and influential self-help books ever written. First published in 1936, it has sold over 50 million copies and been translated into over 30 languages. The book is a practical guide to improving one's social skills, becoming more likable, and influencing others.
Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion, and didn't go to prison for tax evasion.
Friends, I’m excited to offer to you a new poster. Not a map this time around, but something map-related. A 16 × 24-inch tangled web showing how 100+ different map projections are all related to each other: Projections are a niche topic even among cartographers, so I don’t exactly expect this to go viral. However, … Continue reading Projection Connections: A Very Nerdy Poster →
Milan (Preceden’s designer) and I recently wrapped up a project to redesign Preceden’s pricing page. Here’s the previous above-the-fold content: And here’s how the new design turned out: Few things to highlight: Very happy with how it turned out. Kudus to Milan for suggesting we work on it and for the fantastic design work. The […]
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: I like to think the robot apocalypse won't feel so bad if we really do our best to earn it. Today's News: PSSST. Hey NYC, it's gonna get pretty dorky.
A ~monthly feature. Last month was busy for me with a lot of travel and a lot of focus on The Roots of Progress as a nonprofit organization, so I haven’t had as much time as I prefer for research and writing. Recent blog posts and news stories are generally omitted; you can find them in my links digests. All emphasis in bold in the quotes below was added by me. Histories of technology Finished...
It’s been a busy summer, and the large shortfall in donations last month has been demoralizing, so we’re taking a week off to rest and recuperate. The curated links section will be (mostly) silent, and behind the scenes we’ll be taking a brief break from our usual researching, writing, editing, illustrating, narrating, sound designing, coding, et cetera. We plan to return to normalcy on the 11th...
Andrea Rodman Interiors has shared photos of a home in Vancouver, Canada, that they completed for their clients that wanted a minimalistic interior. Throughout the home, the interior was inspired by Japanese design, its simplicity, and maple wood tones. One area that stood out in the interior is the kitchen, where warm, white stained oak […]
You’re entitled to it, and we will do our best to help you find what you want. But it’s unlikely that what you want is what everyone wants. It’s hard to believe that there is only one appropriate standard for value, observance, speed or performance. The easiest way for us to help you is to […]
Out-discounting competitors: iFood’s bid to become Latin America's last-mile delivery king.
A behind-the-scenes look at my initial reaction 😬, all the stats, cross-posting to Medium, and lessons learned
A promised audit hasn't actually happened, sources say. PLUS: Twitter's Turkey problem, and a new CEO
Is everyone is working very hard, all the time, and yet accomplishing 1/10th of what it seems they should? Maybe this is why.
We can tell from the words. “I’m just doing my job.” “Will this be on the test?” “Don’t blame me.” “It’s what everyone else is wearing.” Keep your head down, do what you’re told, don’t stick your neck out, and most of all, pay attention to what everyone else is doing. All of this comes […]
We're living in an era where anxiety seems to be omnipresent, and everyone is struggling with it to some degree. It's important to remember that the reasons behind our anxiety may not be as crucial as our reactions to it. In this guide, let's explore five comprehensive ways to help you deal with anxiety, along with one slower, long-term approach. When we repeatedly experience certain emotions,...
I don’t feel comfortable making predictions about the future. There’s just too much that goes into it and it’s way too easy to be wrong. But if I don’t occasionally write my riskiest thoughts, do I really deserve a newsletter?! If this ends up being wrong, I promise I’ll do a postmortem. Here goes: I think GPT-4 will be revolutionary. I think ChatGPT already is revolutionary, and in fact the...
Lessons from building RadReads and helping over 40,000 professionals in public
The psychological machinery of our commonest coping mechanism for the terror of hurt, rejection, and abandonment.
As I’ve served longer in an executive role, I’ve started to notice recurring communication challenges between executives and the folks they work with. The most frequent issue I see is when a literal communicator insists on engaging in the details with a less literal executive. I call the remedy, “extracting the kernel.” For example, imagine a team is presenting about their upcoming timeline, and...
A few weeks ago, I shared my script for my latest talk, Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis, which I gave at QCon last week. They’ll have the conference video up in a few weeks, but I also decided to do a recording of the final version (albeit a few weeks after the talk, so definitely a bit less practiced than the live edition). You can watch that video on YouTube. As mentioned, I don’t think...
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How I find clear signals in a misinforming & disinforming noisy world; To see the future, look back in time
I’m participating in the Summer of Protocols research program this summer as a Core Researcher. It’s an 18-week program, funded by the Ethereum Foundation, that aims to catalyze a wider exploration of protocols and their social implications. I plan to focus on protocols as systems of social control. My brain has struggled to reconcile how protocols have a very technical meaning for the internet...
You can charge much more than you think, if you reposition your value-proposition. Here's how.
I recently read a post on social media that went something like this (paraphrased): “If you buy an EV, you’re part of the problem. You’re advancing car culture and are actively hurting the planet. The only ethical thing to do is ditch your cars and put all your effort into supporting transit. Anything else is … Continue reading It’s More Important To Recognize What Direction People Are Moving Than...
There are a lot of different ways to be an outsider. Nobody really wants to be a misfit or a "noob." But there is wisdom in outsiders. They can be characters who challenge societal norms and reshape our understanding of what it means to belong. There are some people for whom persistent weirdness is not a weakness but a strength. One person who made this case beautifully is Paul Graham.
William Samuels Architects has sent us photos of a small home they designed and built in Nelson, New Zealand, that includes a single bedroom. The project was created out of a desire by architect William Samuels and his partner, Hannah D’Arcy, to own their first home. Building upon leasehold land, the house needed to be […]
The five-day hospital stay breaking the month in half is likely invisible to anyone but me, but that is why the fiction list is so mystery-heavy, and for that matter so long. Many of these books, the post-surgery group, are not just short but light, well-suited for the invalid's tired hand. The invalid is feeling much better, by the way, in fact not much of an invalid, so perhaps I am ready for...
"Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent."
2022/11/01 The Demanding Work of Analyzing Incidents A few weeks ago, a coworker of mine was running an incident analysis in Jeli, and pointed out that the overall process was a big drag on their energy level, that it was hard to do, even if the final result was useful. They were wondering if this was a sign of learning what is significant or not as part of the analysis in order to construct a...
My life is pretty much like yours. Except that total strangers send me all sorts of things.
These white and intricate forms appear to be the work of mother nature, sculpted over hundreds and thousands of years. Instead, they’re the work of Japanese ceramicist Eriko Inazaki, who painstakingly shapes and assembles each prick and piece by hand. And in doing so, she’s pushed the art of ceramics beyond its traditional boundaries. “Arcadia” […] Related posts: Utilitarian Vessels Transformed...
government in central Africa.
I missed yesterday’s every-sunday-I-will-publish-a-post day because we’re now travelling in seoul. I used to write more stream of consciousness posts while I travelled, but somehow over the past few years my writing...
Thought-provoking series of 3D numbers for the Imperial Business School abduzeedo0428—23 OPX Studio recently created a series of 3D numbers for an education-focused publication, designed by Made Up Studio, that is both visually stunning and thought-provoking. Titled "OPX Studio: Imperial Business School '9 Digital Transformation Mistakes'", the project is a...
Products have versions, why don't companies? Watch: https://youtu.be/KgkRtxRKCjs Listen: Spotify Amazon Apple A Lesson Here's a quick riddle and a dopamine hit. A very strange lesson in psychology. We purchased Growthbar. It required a credit card on signup. Also the entire country of
Let’s continue our exploration of fuzz testing in Go with a look at how to write a fuzz target for a (nearly) realistic function. This time we’ll try to detect a common kind of bug involving a confusion between runes and bytes.
a short post about investors and getting money for what you're building.
On 21st March 1960, the South African Police opened fire on thousands of black protestors in what came to be known as the Sharpeville Massacre, a shocking event which saw 69 people killed, triggered a state of emergency, and led to mass detentions—including that of Hilda Bernstein. A British-born author, artist, and staunch anti-apartheid activist, […]
Where Is Just As Important As What
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: If anyone does this, please pour out a glass of eggnog antecedent beverage for me. Today's News:
Lessons from building HeyGen from 0 to $1m ARR in 7 months
(Edit: sign-ups are now closed. I received over 150 responses for 4 available slots, which has been great but overwhelming. I may offer this again in the future if it goes well, so make sure to follow me on Twitter and subscribe to the blog, to be notified of when this happens.) It’s time for … Continue reading An Educational Experiment →
Previous Next https://youtu.be/_W0xAHnxe6o Because suffering is an unavoidable part of the human experience and worries many of us, we can find many helpful quotes about it from the Stoics. Practicing Stoicism doesn't make us immune to pain, hardships and suffering . . . but it can help us re-frame our view of it and keep Read More >>
In today's fast-paced and often unpredictable world, financial stability and security are high on everyone's list of priorities. However, achieving financial well-being can be challenging, especially when faced with economic uncertainty, unexpected expenses, and financial stress. This is where Stoicism can play a role. By understanding and applying the core principles of Stoicism, individuals can ...
Another illustration intensive book. This one is only 3" tall and 2 " wide so you might have missed it :) . It was a premium with Mickey Mouse Weekly magazine. Evidently the magazine came with some pages that you could fold up into a tiny book. The others I have found evidence of were YA Pocket Book of: The Air, The Land, The Sea, Animals, and Wonder Quiz Book. It has very colorful images and I am...
If a fatal neurological virus were spreading across deer in the US, and showed up in cooked infected meat, my default assumption would be “we're in danger.” But a prion isn’t a virus. Why does that matter?
<p><i>For context, read <a href="https://valsopi.com/setting-sail">this article</a> first.</i></p><p><i>TLDR: A year ago, I took out a loan and went all–in pursuing my financial freedom. The words below are an update a year on the day.</i></p><hr><h2>Poetically speaking</h2><p><i>Here I am, one year later.</i></p><p><i>I am somewhere in the open ocean.</i></p><p><i>Doing...
Why write an essay when you can type a few words and have AI generate one for you? Why write an email when AI can auto-respond for you with all the typical pleasantries and talking-points? While AI doing these things for you is likely to happen, it’s not necessarily a good thing. Even when these … The post Why Write appeared first on Farnam Street.
They’re essential. The house begins to stink if we don’t take out the garbage. But at work, while they might be essential, they may not be important. At least, not important enough for us to spend a lot of focus on. Chores are: The bills have to get paid. But they might not have to […]
IRBs Scott Alexander reviews a book about institutional review boards (IRBs), the panels that review the ethics of medical trials: From Oversight to Overkill, by Dr. Simon Whitney. From the title alone, you can see where this is going. IRBs are supposed to (among other things) make sure patients are fully informed of the risks of a trial, so that they can give informed consent. They were created...
Digital Peace Now is working to raise awareness of the damage done by cyberattacks.
Winning the day and losing the war.
Plato, Cicero... Bilbo?
This is the 10th post in my series on building a toy GPT. Read my earlier posts first for better understanding. I asked ChatGPT to complete the sentence given the phrase: “I chose that bank for”. It completed the sentences sensibly. Here are the four sentences it generated: In order to generate the right words…
Travels, murders, and......eels?!!
Assembling yesterday’s post I saw that I was only missing one dialogue from Plato’s early period, so I knocked off Greater Hippiaslast night. The early dialogues are generally short; the three in the “death of Socrates” group are only fifty pages total, for example. Hippias is the highest paid of the Sophists, so he is treated as a braggart and a fool, unable to understand what Socrates is...
This is one of those technologies that most people probably never think about, but could potentially have a significant impact on our lives – timed drug release. The concept is nothing new, but there is a lot of room for improvement on current technologies. We already have time-release capsules, patches, and some drugs that can […] The post New Platform for Timed Drug Release first appeared on...
The read() and write() system calls take a variable-length byte array as an argument. As a simplified model, the time for the system call should be some constant "per-call" time, plus time directly proportional to the number of bytes in the array. That is, the time for each call should be time = (per_call_minimum_time) + (array_len) × (per_byte_time). With this model, using a larger buffer should...
Time is a river. A violent current of events. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Here we are again: Daylight Confusion Week. Much of Europe ends Daylight Savings Time today. But North America will neglect their clocks for another week. And for us remoties, that means next week’s calendar is a mess: 23 Oct 30 Oct 😵 06 Nov San Francisco, CA 📌 08:00 08:00 08:00 ...
Here's the answer. What was the question again?
the Kyoto Aqarium’s 2020 Penguin Relationship Flowchart Penguins, the way they waddle around and protect their eggs, are often thought of as cute, cuddly and romantic. But those who observe them for extended periods know they have a dark side. Two aquariums in Japan, Kyoto Aquarium and Sumida Aquarium, keep obsessive tabs on their penguins […] Related posts: This Tokyo Aquarium Will Transform...
On the day of her 77th birthday in 1997, proving that it’s never too late to begin, acclaimed detective novelist P. D. James wrote her first diary entry—one of many she would pen over the course of twelve months in a concerted effort to “record just one year that otherwise might be lost.” In 1999, […]
THE RIGHT TO THE CITY: Who has the right to move freely through the city and who doesn’t? Map of Lima, Peru About the project TRANSitar Lima is a project that seeks to create a visual record of transphobic violence, based on collective mapping sessions. Trans, transvestites, and non-binaries* who participate identify the specific points of the city where they have experienced violence or where...
The development of attosecond pulses of light allowed researchers to explore the frame-by-frame movement of electrons. The post Physicists Who Explored Tiny Glimpses of Time Win Nobel Prize first appeared on Quanta Magazine
To get status, you have to give up status.
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights I’ve started the process of...
When I first found my people online, forums were the main way people gathered to discuss shared interests. Web-based bulletin boards allowed members to have ongoing, asynchronous conversations over days or weeks as participants logged in to read and respond on their own schedule. Topics were neatly divided into threads, which made it easy to follow specific conversations. Unlike...
If only I had the will to write something. But I can read. PHILOSOPHY Fragments or Sayings or Tall Tales (4th C. BCE), Diogenes the Cynic, tr. Guy Davenport Cynics (2008), William Desmond - for an entry in a series aimed at students, surprisingly well written. It helps that the Cynics are entertaining. FICTION Darkness at Noon (1941), Arthur Koestler Between the Acts (1941), Virginia...
The US Megaprojects Database Very large construction or technology development projects are sometimes called “megaprojects." By directing thousands of workers and billions of dollars towards the achievement of a single goal, great things can be achieved. The output of megaprojects marks some of the most impressive achievements of civilization, and US megaprojects like the Apollo Program, the...
A meeting with Larry could calm this down if it's not true but he has been avoiding any meeting with me since last fall.
Known to many as the “father of existentialism,” Søren Kierkegaard was a pivotal Danish philosopher, theologian, and cultural critic of the 19th century. His extensive published writings grappled with complex themes including ethics, religion, and the intricate facets of individuality, leaving an indelible mark in the annals of philosophical thought. But to fully comprehend Kierkegaard […]
Ana Caraiani and James Newton have extended an important result in number theory to the imaginary realm. The post Elliptic Curves Yield Their Secrets in a New Number System first appeared on Quanta Magazine
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 3
The Swedish music giant is pushing to make Africa’s biggest sound the world’s favorite sound.
Ambitious people don’t just need peers. They need mentors. They need people who will encourage them to pursue hard and meaningful projects. The post Ambitious People Need Each Other appeared first on David Perell.
The little person at the control panel, the one who sees what the retina produces, the one who decides, the one who speaks up… (This is the dualist solution to the free will problem–yes, I have a physical body, they say, but I also have a little human inside of me that gets to make […]
A while ago an old friend texted me that an unexpected event had once again reminded her how transient life can be, and she thought of me because I was one of...
Around a year ago, I started noticing some spammy timelines being created on Preceden, my SaaS timeline maker tool. I’m honestly surprised it took spammers so long: Preceden is a freemium product (meaning people can sign up and try it for free), the product makes it very easy to create link-filled user generated content, I […]
I recently got an invite to Bluesy (thx JJ). I wanted to try it purely for the satisfaction of setting my domain name as my handle, as I’m fan of the idea of apex domain’s becoming the currency of online handles. As I once tweeted: domains are the OG handles. Granted, I own jim-nielsen.com so it’s not like it’s a land grab to get that handle on this new social site. No matter how late you come to...
On 28th May, 1968, the acclaimed English novelist Beryl Bainbridge embarked on a three-week road trip that would span the breadth of the United States—a 5,000-mile voyage carefully planned by her American friend, Harold, who had vowed to guide her through the nation’s most remarkable landmarks. A week into their exploration, while temporarily crossing into […]
The Gaza Strip’s spatiality continues to puzzle and fascinate–as much as the pressing question of its sovereignty. The two are of course intertwined, and the boundaries of Gaza are historically defined. The perimeter around the Gaza Strip was in a … Continue reading →
I’ve been listening to the same music every night when I go to sleep 10+ years now. Weird endorsement; I’ve listened to it with more attention plenty of times too. But it’s particularly good for going to sleep; calm, interesting, and comfortably familiar. That music is GAS, Werner Voigt’s ambient techno project (Bandcamp, Youtube). The primary collection is Nah und Fern, four albums that were made...
Hello, I’m Caroline. I live in London. Two years ago I picked up a carving tool and a block of lino. I quite liked it. Describe your printmaking process My process is an intuitive one, so I typically just start, and I will see what develops through doing. Experimenting with pattern and/or layout (using ink pads) is an integral part of my process. Sometimes I’ll sketch and transfer to lino, or...
The Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic and distinctive buildings in the world — but it took a relative newcomer and architectural outsider to dream up. The making of this future world heritage landmark is a tale for the ages — a cautionary tale, for which we turn to Tim Harford, producer The post Cautionary Tales of the Sydney Opera House appeared first on 99% Invisible.
Immigrating from Indonesia to the US and building Typedream in public
Figure 1: stepwise behavior in self-supervised learning. When training common SSL algorithms, we find that the loss descends in a stepwise fashion (top left) and the learned embeddings iteratively increase in dimensionality (bottom left). Direct visualization of embeddings (right; top three PCA directions shown) confirms that embeddings are initially collapsed to a point, which then expands to a...
Adults make choices and live with the consequences. No one else should tell us what flavor of ice cream we prefer, or what career to choose. We’re good at knowing what we want. In practice, this works really well for certain kinds of decisions. But when we add the network effect, profit-seeking industrial entities, statistics, […]
Is AI a Leveler, King Maker, or Escalator?
Imagine you could take a train ride to space. Tracks that slope up into the sky, higher and higher, until you reach a plateau above the planet where it’s a straight line up to orbital velocity. That’s what’s possible with a Lofstrom Loop. But sending you into orbit is just one of the things it can do! The mechanics of a Lofstrom Launch Loop (presented here) are simple and straightforward but...
Growing up in a takeaway - Growth is always painful - Struggle is what makes us human
UK musician Consensus spins the big ideas of physics into rap and hip-hop tracks.
In September of 1939, English housewife Nella Last began keeping a diary that would span 30 years, ultimately producing one of the longest diaries in the English language at more than 12 million words. Born Nellie Lord in 1890, she was a voluntary participant in the Mass Observation project, an initiative aimed at documenting the […]
Investment in people is absolutely essential to building a business that's not just getting by but actively thriving. People-first leadership offers an approach which consistently cultivates an environment where folks can show up and do their best work, propelling the business forward in ways that are otherwise almost impossible to replicate.
Political instability, economic crisis, natural disasters, and the promise of a better life abroad compel Pakistanis to risk everything.
New tools make it possible to detect hidden manipulation of maps. The post How Math Has Changed the Shape of Gerrymandering first appeared on Quanta Magazine
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I am an unhappy person in general. But once in a while, an acute sense of awareness strikes me and I experience the totality of that particular moment – I catch a...
In previous work, I documented the growing emotional negativity (anger, fear, sadness, etc) of American news media headlines between the years 2000 and 2019. Here, I extend that work by examining the attitudinal tone (pessimism, optimism or neutrality
Let's talk about ChatGPT with Code Interpreter & Microsoft Copilot
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What will be the ultimate fate of our universe? There are a number of theories and possibilities, but at present the most likely scenario seems to be that the universe will continue to expand, most mass will eventually find its way into a black hole, and those black holes will slowly evaporate into Hawking Radiation, […] The post Everything Will Evaporate first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
An insight into redesigning the Midland Appliance logotype abduzeedo0215—23 When it comes to branding, one of the most important elements is the logo. It's the visual representation of your brand, and it's the first thing that customers see when they encounter your business. So, it's no surprise that Full Punch, a design agency, was recently contacted to assist...
photoessay: documenting 7 years of togetherness
The term “censorship resistant” is used a lot in the decentralized computing/web3/crypto space to talk about a core feature of these systems. I don’t love the term censorship resistant because it is a wonky term. Software that is encoded in smart contracts (and other ways) on fully decentralized blockchains can’t be shut down or turned […]
Hey all 👋! It’s been a minute since my last post (for reasons I’ll get into below) so here’s periodic update on what I’ve been up to: TimelineGPT About two months ago I launched an in-app tool for Preceden that provides GPT-powered event suggestions to users to help them build out their timelines faster. The […]
The origin of life appears to share little with quantum computation, apart from the difficulty of achieving it and its potential for clickbait. Yet similar notions of complexity have recently garnered attention in both fields. Each topic’s researchers expect only … Continue reading →
Are you familiar with the “lumper vs splitter” debate? This refers to any situation in which there is some controversy over exactly how to categorize complex phenomena, specifically whether or not to favor the fewest categories based on similarities, or the greatest number of categories based on every difference. For example, in medicine we need […] The post Unifying Cognitive Biases first...
Our habits, preferences and idiosyncrasies make perfect sense. We each know that we have great reasons to embrace our ways and stick with them. Other people’s habits, though, show that they are simply picky, weird or too sensitive. The difference between a preference and a foible seems to be mostly where we’re standing.
Don't use phrases like "unlikely" or "almost certainly." Here's real-world data showing why not, and what to do instead.
I know the houses too. As I walk along they seem to run forward in the streets to look out at me from every window, and almost to say: "Good-morning! How do you do? I am quite well, thank God, and I am to have a new storey in May," or, "How are you? I am being redecorated tomorrow"; or, "I was almost burnt down and had such a fright," and so on.
How Did Christianity Change the Roman Empire? j.hoare Thu, 12/07/2023 - 09:29
The Convivial Society: Vol. 3, No. 20
Gast Architects has sent us photos of a remodel they completed for an Eichler home in the San Francisco Bay Area, that hadn’t been updated since it was built in 1955.
What is it like to reach the pinnacle of success? Is that where you attain happiness and fulfillment? Or are those found right here, right now.
After starting cross-border payments with Singapore, India is now setting up more international partnerships.
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Quote quiz: who said this? (No fair looking it up). I have modified the original quotation slightly, by making a handful of word substitutions to bring it up to date: It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to AI. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to AI nor that AI would willfully seize power....
Using a simple square block can create a myriad of possibilities of pattern. We have used Speedy Carve and Versafine inks for this project. Cut a square from the Speedy Carve using a scalpel. Draw a quarter circle curve on the block using a pencil. Above the curve draw some simple lines fanning from the corner towards the curve. Cut along the curved line with a scalpel – don’t press too hard as...
What a famous investing framework — part of the modern canon of value investing — tells us about the expertise of capital in business.
a self-help book for societies available now as an e-book, audiobook, or directly on the Wait But Why website The post What’s Our Problem? appeared first on Wait But Why.
Trust is fading, startups are shutting down, and Web3 workers are reconsidering their career choices.
From pioneering ambient music and ever-evolving light paintings to innovating production styles, installations, and strategies of surrender, Brian Eno’s work occupies a rare space in this world with an imprint as deep as it is wide. For the Roxy Music founder, art is the kind of surrender we all benefit from, especially when it helps us digest what science discovers. In this vein, he co-founded...
I got an Oura ring a couple of years ago and have been working on improving my sleep and sleep habits ever since. For much of my adult life, I have been a poor sleeper. I have always been able to fall asleep quickly, but I have been plagued by two sleep issues. The first […]
One of us must change our policy. Please let me know who.
We were smoked.
I needed to convert a URL object to a plain object yesterday. You might have used it before. It's pretty handy for working with URLs! const url = new URL('https://example.com/'); console.log(url); // URL {origin: 'https://example.com', protocol: 'https:', username: '', password: '', host: 'example.com', …} Alas, you can't provide a URL object as data to Handlebars for security reasons....
Running VSCode in Chromium on OpenBSD 2023-06-05 VSCode and its many variations are not available on OpenBSD. This doesn't cause issue with many OpenBSD users, but those making the jump from Linux might miss access to such a popular editor. Lucky for us, there is a hacky workaround to solve this problem. VSCode in the Browser I tried my best to build something like code-server locally and run that...
Here’s a fascinating map of streetcar lines in Omaha, Nebraska in 1927, beautifully hand drawn on top of a pre-printed single colour map of the area produced by the City’s engineering department. Not only does the map show the extent of all the streetcar lines (with 64.6 miles of track), but also colour-codes them to […]
Why do we film concerts?
"In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious)."
Everyone has tried it at some point. The authorities started turning a blind eye years ago, but it wasn’t officially legalized until the summer of 2014. Finally, after more than 80 years of illegitimacy, the City of Oakland has legalized…pinball machines. Today, we travel back to a stranger time in the history of pinball, and The post For Amusement Only (Free Replay) appeared first on 99%...
For decades, physicists have struggled to develop a quantum theory of gravity. But what if gravity — and space-time — are fundamentally classical? The post The Physicist Who’s Challenging the Quantum Orthodoxy first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Obsidian still feels like my “new” app for managing my notes, but according to my daily journal I’ve been using it for nearly three years. Time flies when you’re organising information! I’ve grown to really like it, and I expect to keep using it for a while to come. Its approach to tagging and linked notes fits my mental model, and there’s a lot of flexibility in the plugin architecture. I can...
People are blown away that Apple keeps winning while its competitors are floundering. It’s a simple formula. Make consistently super-high-quality products that work together as part of an ecosystem. Google and Microsoft have 20X Apple’s losses in the last year. A staggering $3 trillion in combined market cap has been lost in one year from just 7 companies.…
Musk has taken a cleaver to the costs and complexity at X. It hasn't always been pretty, but it sure has been effective, and in the process, he's proven his detractors wrong time and again. Not only has the site stayed up, despite hysteric proclamations that it would crater soon after his personnel changes, but X has been able to increase the pace of experimentation and feature introductions at...
Also prompts! And things to watch out for!
Apple uses Cassandra and FoundationDB for CloudKit, their cloud backend service. We take a look into how exactly each is used within their cloud and the problems they've solved.
The tech industry always has a reason why any new laws or regulations are bad - indeed, so does any industry. They always say that! The trouble is, sometimes it’s true, and some laws are (or would be) disasters. So which is it? Well, there are three ways that people say ‘NO!’
I’m not a big globe-trotting conference attendee. I’ve only been to a handful in my career. The event I remember most fondly is An Event Apart: Austin in 2013. In my memory (which, granted, might be fuzzy) that conference was more about ideas than any specific technology. What I don’t remember is a schedule full of talks centered around frameworks, tools, or DX products. For example, I remember...
Hi I’m Hazel, I live in Cornwall. I moved down just before Covid, very lucky me! And spent lockdown cutting Cornish Landscapes and really getting into my printing. My background is Fashion and Textiles, St Martins School of Art and I think my love of pattern shows in my work. Describe your printmaking process. I mostly work in reduction linocut which means cutting away each colour from the same...
The beautiful ambiance of a McMurdo summer.
Prompting for maximum impact (and why that is a bad idea)
This is the seventh post in my series on making a toy GPT. For better understanding, I recommend reading my earlier posts first. The MNIST dataset is the “hello world” of machine learning, containing images of handwritten digits that are used to train machine learning models. It includes 60,000 training images and 10,000 test images…
From Bali to Bangkok, people are ditching cards for QR code payments. There’s a catch: For now, it’s for locals only.
Ophelia Chong has had a long and storied career in photography, art, and creative direction that spans from magazines and music labels to film festivals and book publishing. When a family member’s medicinal marijuana use inspired her to dip her toes into the world of weed, Chong reacted to the racism she witnessed there by launching a successful stock photo agency dedicated to realistic portrayals...
Three days had now passed since there was electricity. Refiloe had 10% battery life left on her phone after recharging at her parents’ home earlier in the day. In addition to that, there had been no water since the morning. Joburg Water had promised restoration by 2pm, but 48 minutes had already snuck passed thatContinue reading "Disenchantment"
I was interviewed by Pete from No CS Degree on my journey, here are some extracts!
For reasons that will soon become obvious, I’m shutting the doors on this website. Everything will remain online for now, but I don’t plan on returning to write anything new here. Not that I’ve added any content in almost two years anyway. I still have a passion for making observations, telling stories and recording my thoughts as they happen. I’ll just be doing it elsewhere. Thank you for...
Some people are good at denial, forgetting, and moving on. I am good at none of those. I accumulate trauma, remember them deeply like they are etched into my bones helpless as...
Artifact's Kevin Systrom on the disruptive power of good comments. PLUS: Substack's naïveté around Notes
https://youtu.be/hQB3viVFhPA Yes, yes—I know you think that one book you read that one time changed your life. Hell, maybe that was even my book. And don't get me wrong, self-help books can help, but I think people mistake what they're actually doing. Let me break this down for you. The real game-changer? Packaging. People are freaking weird when it comes to advice, so how it's delivered makes all...
A lesson from a four month accelerated expertise experiment. Or: why creating new drills for a deliberate practice training program isn't as difficult as you might think.
First, do lots of harm.
Previous Next Using Marcus Aurelius's writing in his Meditations and experiences inferred from historical records, we created an AI digital personality that spoke with us about how to practice Stoicism in our modern world. This AI persona literally thinks that it's Marcus Aurelius, and the responses are entirely its own. You can scroll down to Read More >>
Listening My friend Dave Infante has been busy – he launched his own beer-centric podcast, Taplines, and guest-starred on the enormous Chapo Trap House podcast. Reading It’s been a slow few weeks for books, but since I skipped Recently in May, I can still talk about Achieving Our Country, which was a pivotal read. It’s a political-philosophy book on the left about the shifts in American leftism...
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Thanks, everyone. It took about 5 years to get from the beginning to here. It's as a good of a thing as I can write, and I hope you enjoy it. Today's News: The most frequently asked question is the age range for Bea Wolf readers, and the official age is 8-12, but kids as young as four have enjoyed it with an adult, and plenty of adults have enjoyed...
If everyone visits a factory and takes a sample, it goes out of business. But if everyone in the community takes an idea, that idea goes up in value. The best marketing advice I have for someone writing a book is simple: Write a book that people want to share with others. And then make […]
When it comes to big problems it’s generally a good idea to remember some basic principles. One is that there is no free lunch. This is a cliche because it’s true. Another way to put this is – there are no solutions, only trade offs. Sometimes there is a genuine advance that does improve the […] The post Making Fuel from Sunshine first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: I originally had a hamster but that seemed mean. Today's News:
Free covid treatment for everyone in the US, a novel orthopox virus, a really big machine, cameras used for good and evil, ant heaven now, and more.
As a self-proclaimed app icon-noisseur, I’ve followed Apollo from the sidelines for a while. I absolutely love all the great app icon variations Christian has commissioned for the app. (Photo from @BasicAppleGuy.) It’s sad to see Apollo go. As I noted, Christian was a pioneering model for how apps can have more than just one icon. He commissioned app icon designers to create lots of fun,...
For the past few weeks I’ve been teaching myself how to use Fusion 360, a free online cloud-based CAD/CAM program that lets you create your own 3D designs. The best way to learn how to use a new program is to build something you actually need. And my latest design is a work in progress […] The post M4 Hex Socket Thumbscrew Knob Caps appeared first on Style over Substance.
"Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music."
Designed by Common Curiosity, Birmingham, London.
I have made no secret of my disdain for ESG, an over-hyped and over-sold acronym, that has been a gravy train for a whole host of players, including fund managers, consultants and academics. In response, I have been told that the problem is not with the idea of ESG, but in its measurement and application, and that impact investing is the solution to both market and society's problems. Impact...
A pride of lions, a paddling of ducks, and....a herd of harlots?
One piece of flippant commentary that you’ll hear occasionally is that it’s “Better to be lucky than to be good.” On an individual level, it’s almost certainly true that being very lucky outperforms being quite good: I certainly know a number of folks who are financially successful after working at companies that succeeded, but where their direct impact was relatively small. Companies get lucky,...
It has been a long time since I did a Funding Friday here at AVC. I used to do them every Friday. We have funded a lot of bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and bakeries here over the years. Here are a few examples. L’Appartement 4F Land To Sea There is a new wrinkle in crowdfunding […]
TL;DR: Text Prompt -> LLM -> Intermediate Representation (such as an image layout) -> Stable Diffusion -> Image. Recent advancements in text-to-image generation with diffusion models have yielded remarkable results synthesizing highly realistic and diverse images. However, despite their impressive capabilities, diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion, often struggle to accurately follow the...
Felix Kan on building a bug-hunting platform to enhance cybersecurity for small companies.
Neon Worms — colorful illustrations with the Blend Tool in Illustrator abduzeedo0220—23 RETOKA shared another phase of their series of illustrations titled Neon Worms. If you're an illustrator looking to add some glowing effects to your designs, you might be interested in this series with the backstory about the "neon genes" discovered by Dr. Jacqueline Johnson...
SHED Architecture & Design has shared their latest project, the contemporary interior remodel of a 1970s home on Seattle’s Mercer Island that was originally designed by William Rutledge. The house met the functional needs of its new owners but did not quite suit their contemporary taste. Featuring original details including split levels, high ceilings, and […]
This is part of a series about our LLM technology.Other parts of this series: ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!Instant Plugins for ChatGPT: Introducing the Wolfram ChatGPT Plugin Kit Turning LLM Capabilities into Functions So far, we mostly think of LLMs as things we interact directly with, say through chat interfaces. But what if we could […]
There are at least two ways to think about potential threats coming from advanced AI. The conventional view is that AI is just yet another of many tool-based technological advances. Like all technologies, the main threat of AI in this scenario is if a human were to use it for nefarious means, or the AI acts badly and needs to be turned off. The alternate, less discussed view is that eventually AI...
I track the historical rise of West Europe by quantitatively analyzing the birth of notable people of science, and then I put it in context with other indicators of historical development. The data together show that West Europe had developmentally surpassed the rest of the world prior to 1500 A.D., before the establishment of overseas colonies or slavery. It is clear that the West’s rise to...
Born in Pennsylvania in 1856, Robert Peary spent 23 years of his life preparing to achieve what had eluded explorers for centuries: reaching the North Pole. Driven by ambition and unwavering determination, Peary, an American explorer and United States Navy officer, believed he and his team had finally accomplished this remarkable feat on 6th April […]
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Weirdly, his revealed preference was for a painful and protracted demise. Today's News:
Pràctica Redesigns 9+ Wine brand identity and packaging design abduzeedo0511—23 Barcelona-based design studio Pràctica has unveiled a new label design for 9+ wines, a natural wine producer based in Catalonia, Spain. The new labels feature a bold, graphic design that is both eye-catching and informative creating a beautiful packaging design. The 9+ winery is...
Strang Design has shared photos of a modern home they completed in Miami, Florida, that’s designed to wrap around a swimming pool. The home has been organized into an “H-shape,” allowing the interiors to be flooded with natural light and to showcase views of the natural surroundings. The exterior facade features rough-cut Jerusalem tile and […]
Previous Next There are more quotes available for us to read from the Stoics about pain and illness than nearly any other topic. That's not because Stoicism teaches that we should like discomfort, but rather because the Stoics are concerned with how to NOT let pain and sickness have any more control over us than Read More >>
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Popular history of Africa before the colonial era often divides the continent’s military systems into two broad categories —the relatively modern armies along the Atlantic coast which used firearms, versus the 'traditional' armies in the interior that fought with arrows and spears. And it was the latter in particular, whose chivalrous soldiers armed with antiquated weapons, are imagined to have...
There's nothing magic about six berries, specifically
"Ownership" means ten different things to ten different people. Let's talk about what we actually want.
In a recent note of mine, I quoted Jaron Lanier on AI chatbots: There are two ways this could go. One is that we pretend the bot is a real thing, a real entity like a person, then in order to keep that fantasy going we’re careful to forget whatever source texts were used to have the bot function…The other way is you do keep track of where the sources came from. And in that case a very different...
A manufactured crisis leads to an ineffectual "solution"
For those of you about to do view transitions, I salute you! And I pass on this super useful (perhaps obvious) piece of information I received from Bramus: watch your animations play out in slow motion using Chrome’s devtools. I’ve been working on view transitions on my icon gallery site but was running into an issue where going from page A to page B worked fine, but then hitting the back button...
If you’re trying to reduce risk, do the hard part first. That way, if it fails, you’ll have minimized your time and effort. On the other hand, if you’re looking for buy-in and commitment so you can through the hard part, do it last. People are terrible at ignoring sunk costs, and the early wins […]
Not to be afraid of moral relativism.
This is a post for myself, because I wasted a lot of time understanding this bug, and I want to be able to remember it in the future. I expect close to zero others to be interested. The C standard library function isspace() returns a non-zero value (true) for the six "standard" ASCII white-space characters ('\t', '\n', '\v', '\f', '\r', ' '), and any locale-specific characters. By default, a...
I finally updated the alloydocs to Alloy 6. The docs now cover how to use temporal operators in Alloy. To celebrate, let’s talk something completely unrelated. The simplest kind of collection is the set: an unordered collection of unique elements. All branches of mathematics use sets somewhere, and in fact you can bootstrap all other collection types from just sets. Many programming languages have...
There are two reasons why listening to Kevin Hart's interview on the Hermitix podcast, and reading his new collection and The Dark Gaze for the second time, has helped me to recognise what I have forgotten, missed, misconstrued or misunderstood in Maurice Blanchot's writing or, rather, setting all that side as inevitable, what has been a distraction from what matters to me in his writing and in...
Blocking Sediment Migration from Colorado River Basin to Gulf of California I didn’t intend to map human migration for the Atlas in a Day project. My plans for a map of the migration of sediment in rivers raised some eyebrows at home, mostly wondering how the subject would fit in an atlas on migration. My wife suggested I ponder the relevance of mineral migration, especially in an age when so many...
Daniel Marshall Architect (DMA) has shared photos of a new home they designed in New Zealand, that includes a cantilevered living room.
"Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back."
Photography by Scott Norseworthy Shim-Sutcliffe Architects has sent us photos of the Ace Hotel in Toronto, Canada, which has a red brick facade that draws guests in with a wood-lined opening. Working closely with the creative agency Atelier Ace, the architects of the hotel decided to cover the exterior of the hotel in brickwork with […]
Previous Next Using Marcus Aurelius's writing in his Meditations and experiences inferred from historical records, we created an AI digital personality that spoke with us about how to practice Stoicism in our modern world. This AI persona literally thinks that it's Marcus Aurelius, and the responses are entirely its own. You can scroll down to Read More >>
How the Live effect run-time is implemented In this post I describe how the Live run-time internals are implemented, which drive Use.GPU. Some pre-existing React and FP effect knowledge is useful. I have written about Live before, but in general terms. You may therefor have a wrong impression of this endeavor. When a junior engineer sees an application doing complex things, they're often...
The novelist delivered an end-of-life masterpiece, but the culture machine was barely interested
Rod is a founder who has successfully monetized a directory showing websites for finding a job. He has made $20k from his Job Board Search site.
Part of the challenge of hanging out with cannibals is that it’s very difficult to get a good night’s sleep. The math of finding a group of people that cares about community is pretty compelling. While individual selfish choices might feel productive in the moment, if they undermine the health of the community, they’re ultimately […]
Is it possible to be data driven and operationally rigorous and still be human centric at the same time? Deming — who came up with these data techniques — believe that it is possible. I'm not so sure.
Today is Gabriel Josipovici's 80th birthday. To mark the occasion, I'll link to various posts I've written over the years – after a brief interlude. I read him first in July 1988 after borrowing The Lessons of Modernism from the second floor of Portsmouth Central Library because it had essays on Kafka and Saul Bellow. The link explains how significant that brutalist building was for me and how...
why we need better ideologies than "data driven decision making"
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Godel proved you can't prove anything. Don't think about it too hard. Today's News: Happy New Year,
Now it’s a business model. People are regularly fooled by crypto scams, NFT hype, opioid felons, algorithmic spam at scale, health claims, illogical political arguments, fundraising pitches, overnight shortcuts on the road to riches or happiness and MLM hustle. Your account has been locked, click here… When it becomes the tactic of a scalable business, […]
Like everyone, I’ve been thinking about AI. It’s already useful, in a way that the previous big thing, crypto, wasn’t. I don’t think it’ll become generalized AI - I think the AI winter cycle is the base case and human-like intelligence is qualitatively different than LLM, no matter how many terabytes of training data you throw at them. But that isn’t what this article is about. No, it’s about...
This year's New York International Antiquarian Book Fair is my third, following the 2022 book fair and, just days before lockdown, the 2020 book fair. Three hardly makes me an expert, even in my specialization of architecture books, but it does help with gauging the value given to books on the subject and getting a sense of how architecture books are seen within the wider rare books market....
I’ve been to Columbia Glacier, just west of Valdez, Alaska, three times. The first was as a youngster in 1984, the second in 1987, and the final time in 2000. Each time, the ride by boat to the terminal edge of the ice where it calves into Prince William Sound, took a bit longer. I’ve …
I had ambitions to write about Plato’s Republic with some thoroughness, but I guess I will just pursue one point. Good enough. I have been separating Socrates from Plato, an imaginative exercise based on circular criteria. The more Socratic of the Socratic dialogues are shorter, feature proto-novelistic details about settings and characters, and end without resolving the question at issue. The...
The Redmond Big Tech giant pioneered the SDET role in the 90s. It then retired it in 2014. What happened and why?
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Thanks again. For people who want signed copies, they will be available via The Strand, as well as HelloComics of Charlottesville and Scrawl bookstore of Reston. Today's News: This is the hardest project I've ever worked on and, I hope, the best. Thanks for giving me a career that allows me to spend 4 years reading obscure space history so I can...
Even if you don’t recognize the name, you probably recognize the saguaro cactus. It’s the archetype of the cactus, a column from which protrude arms bent at right angles like elbows. As my husband pointed out, the cactus emoji is … Continue reading →
Uber ran a tech spec review process called the DUCK Review. “DUCK” didn’t stand for anything–it was created as a deliberate non-acronym–but was otherwise a fairly typical review process. When I first joined, we’d review one or two specs each week. The volume of requested reviews kept growing, and six months later there was a one to two week delay between requesting a review and receiving...
Four long-awaited studies paint a muddy picture of social media’s impact on public opinion
I will be moderating a panel on 7/13 at Stripe with founders of Baseten, LlamaIndex, Zapier
Inspired by the simple unassuming beauty of a well-crafted grocery list – Field Notes back inside cover The list. Lists are powerful technology. In his book Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer likens early writing to sheet music for story-telling. Scripto continua had zero punctuation—even lacking spaces between words. This dearth of punctuation meant (Foer argues) that ancient writing...
This is part of an ongoing series about our LLM technology:ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!Instant Plugins for ChatGPT: Introducing the Wolfram ChatGPT Plugin KitThe New World of LLM Functions: Integrating LLM Technology into the Wolfram LanguagePrompts for Work & Play: Launching the Wolfram Prompt RepositoryIntroducing Chat Notebooks: Integrating LLMs into the Notebook Paradigm A New […]
This is pretty exciting neuroscience news – Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings. What this means is that researchers have been able to, sort of, decode the words that subjects were thinking of simply by reading their fMRI scan. They were able to accomplish this feat using a large language model AI, […] The post Reading The Mind with fMRI and AI first...
Although still rare in the industry, companies like Netflix and Shopify let employees choose how much of their total compensation is stock. What are the approaches to take?
<![CDATA[Now that I'm back to Lisp I'm actively exploring Interlisp as a Common Lisp environment too. But to code in Common Lisp also on my Crostini Linux system, the Linux container of chromeOS I use on a Chromebox, I'm setting up a suitable development environment. In addition to console programs I want to write GUI applications with McCLIM. The Common Lisp implementation I chose, SBCL, is a...
What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025.
I last wrote about Ranking #1 on HN in December, and wanted to offer an update from my mild hit today. I am now taking Latent Space (the new name enabled by the previous owner of that domain selling it to me in my first P2P domain purchase) a lot more seriously with the support of my partner and friend Alessio.
Pierre Loti was a French naval officer and esteemed novelist who rose to prominence in the late 19th century. Born Louis Marie Julien Viaud, he pursued a naval career, earning a recall to service during World War I due to his expertise in Pacific waters. Married to poet and orientalist Judith Gautier, Loti’s literary journey […]
TLDR: Most conversations about “top talent” assume Pareto distribution; however, a closer examination suggests that different corporate cultures benefit from different types of talent distribution (normal, Pareto, and a third option – bimodal) according to the problem they’re trying to solve. Bimodal talent distribution is rare but more frequently observed in creative industries, including some...
I had not come across this graphic from swyx until recently: I like this reminder. I know for me, it’s often too easy to slip into a kind of cynicism that only sees endless stationary circles rather than ones with directional momentum. It reminds me of the visualizations of the solar system I saw growing up which depict a stationary sun in the middle of the circling planets. (Image stolen from...
When she wrote the following diary entry, English author, poet, and garden designer Vita Sackville-West was 28. Living in Long Barn, Kent, with her husband and fellow writer, Harold Nicolson, she was nearing the end of an intense, two-year romance with Violet Keppel, with whom she had recently spent a final few weeks in France […]
Over at World-Architects I wrote about two self-published books recently published by BNIM and KPF: ALL - The Tom and Ruth Harkin Center by BNIM Design in Detail by Kohn Pedersen Fox The "Found" feature also includes responses to a few questions on why the firms opted to self-publish rather than works with publishers on these books.
Laconic wit through the centuries
As funding to Africa’s once fast-growing startup ecosystem dries up, industry insiders are worried that the ecosystem is unprepared.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Old River Control Structure, a relatively innocuous complex of floodgates and levees off the Mississippi River in central Louisiana. It was built in the 1950s to solve a serious problem. Typically rivers only converge; tributaries combine and coalesce as they move downstream. But the Mississippi River is not a...
Born in 1741 in Caernarvonshire, Wales, Hester Thrale belonged to the esteemed Salusbury family. Famous for her friendships with such luminaries as Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, and David Garrick, Thrale was a prominent figure of the period, and her writings, particularly the diary she called the Thraliana, have captivated scholars for centuries. In 1763, Hester […]
Does the lunar cycle affect human behavior? This seems to be a question that refuses to die, no matter how hard it is to confirm any actual effect. It’s now a cultural idea, deeply embedded and not going anywhere. A recent study, however, seems to show a correlation between suicide and the week of the […] The post The Lunar Cycle and Suicide first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
The new issue of our print magazine has just landed in our shop – and it’s filled with stories that look at the journeys we go on with our homes, from the emotional paths they take us on, to the very real process of renovating […]
This hand of this clock makes one rotation every 365 days. Something like eight or nine years ago, I funded a Kickstarter campaign for a clock that Scott Thrift was making with a neat idea behind it — its single hand would make one full rotation every 365 days. It was called The Present. As a lover of clocks, it was a blind buy. The better part of a year later, I had one in my hands, and I...
Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce have announced large layoffs in January. What will these events mean for the rest of the industry?
Koichi Takada Architects has completed a new home in Sydney, Australia, whose design was inspired by palm fronds, specifically the way the leaves provide dappled light and shelter to the fruit its tree bears. Applying the same principles, the home was cocooned with symmetrical linear screening, increasing privacy, protecting the glazing against solar heat gain, […]
This story begins one day when I was assembling a map of the city of Edmonton, Alberta from OpenStreetMap data. It was going to be a big map, a 42″ (106 cm) wide poster for a wall. The data was good, but the standard OSM colours were not. They would work fine for a street … Continue reading Cartographic palettes and colour harmonies →
Am I going to move to a cave in the mountains and immediately get eaten by a bear? This is what 'quitting the rat race' means to me.
I’ve been on a maps kick recently writing about blog maps and roadmaps! Let’s talk about career maps…
It was May of 1967, and Che Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary, was in Bolivia, leading a small band of guerrillas in an attempt to spread socialism across Latin America. Facing harsh environmental conditions and the pressure of the Bolivian military backed by US forces, Guevara and his comrades confronted the challenges of guerrilla warfare, […]
1 baby, many thoughts The post 10 Thoughts From the Fourth Trimester appeared first on Wait But Why.
The Flatiron building is one of the most instantly recognizable buildings in New York City. Built at the beginning of […] The post From the valley to the alley appeared first on The History of the Web.
I’ve been playing with these fancy new view transitions and my experience thus far is that they work ok on localhost, but as soon as I push code to a preview branch on a remote server, the image loads between transitions are janky because of image loading. Granted, this stuff is all behind a flag, so the fact that there are unexpected glitches is expected. But transitioning images across views...
Last week I cobbled together eight books, some of which publishers had sent me more than a year ago, in an effort to write a "Better Late Than Never" installment of "Book Briefs," something I had done back in April 2018 with Book Briefs #35. But, sensing I would not be able to absorb the books quickly enough to get the post done in less than a week, I thought that revisiting that five-year-old...
"To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair."
Adobe Firefly Express (beta) whatever “Text to Image” takes the old Colab Notebooks to a new refined level.However it’s still easy to cherry-pick “good” images for every 10 mediocre or just plain wrong images. Don’t trust the robots. PEACE. T.AKE IT IT ELASY! * All images generated by software
It’s day one of your new job as a developer. What should you expect? How should you act? Will you survive “max Q“?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Long ago, maybe upwards of 1-2 million years ago, a river in the central part of what’s now Italy, emptied into what’s now the Ligurian Sea. It still does, by the way, but it did back then too. As the sea rose and fell from the tides and the river moved sediment downstream, silt and soil were deposited across the landscape. In...
Some years back, I interviewed a senior leader for an engineering role, and asked them a question about planning. I enjoyed their response, “Ah yes, the ‘P’ word, planning.” That answer captured an oft heard perspective that planning is some sort of business curse word. Even when it goes well, planning is an objectively difficult task. When it goes poorly, the business loses months or years of...
It’s so tempting to simply begin painting a wall. After all, it’s pretty easy to lay down paint. But it turns out that masking and dropcloths, painstakingly put into place, save many hours compared to cleaning up a mess afterward. The same is true for what happens when we have a new hard drive or […]
LTB Architecture together with interior design firm State., has shared photos of an interior transformation they completed for an early 2000s home in Golden, Colorado. The renovation focused on the kitchen and dining room, as well as the living room. The original kitchen was a builders-grade kitchen with wood cabinets, making it quite dark. The […]
“What are you doing now?” Sabelo asked Zoleka as she was taking a video of every part of their living room with her phone. He was growing tired of her ever-new discoveries and project ideas, and he didn’t know if he had the energy to stomach this new one. But she was too busy withContinue reading "A New Dog"
If the detached house is “The American Dream,” do we need a new dream?
Minhyong Kim is leading a new initiative called Mathematics for Humanity that encourages mathematicians to apply their skills to solving social problems. The post A Plan to Address the World’s Challenges With Math first appeared on Quanta Magazine
I had a great idea for a post, my best blogging of the year, in fact. I worked it all out when I was driving, but when I arrived, it was gone. Vanished. So I went searching for it, trying out dozens of possible ideas. I never found it. But I did find five other […]
A new theory describes how particle interactions fuel fast magnetic reconnection, the process behind solar flares and other astrophysical jets. The post The Tiny Physics Behind Immense Cosmic Eruptions first appeared on Quanta Magazine
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In an interview for Newsweek, Michio Kaku was asked about UFOs. Here’s his response: Well, first of all, I think that there’s been a game changer. In the old days, the burden of proof was on the true believers to prove that what they saw last night was a flying saucer of some sort. Now […] The post UFOs – Has the Narrative Shifted first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
It’s that time of year where people often start thinking about new year’s resolutions. I want to loose 10 lbs, I want to read more books, I want to x, y, and z. Often, it’s just a fantasy. They’re not actually going to loose 10 lbs or they might order some more books but never read them. But at least there’s a spark of hope there. A fundamental faith that they could become a better them. I think...
Thirteen years ago I posted The beginning of something to mark the fifteenth anniversary of Spike Magazine (not to be confused with Spiked), which I helped to found when the world wide web was forming, and to comment on the direction online literary culture had taken. By that point, the magazine was moribund and I was writing for (the unfortunately named) Ready Steady Book, which has become worse...
I've been unhappy with my [tweet rendering strategy](https://github.com/sw-yx/swyxkit/issues/61) for a while - Twitter encourages you to use their heavy JS script to render tweets, which undoubtedly heaps all sorts of tracking on the reader, docks your lighthouse performance score by ~17 points, adds ~4 seconds to Time to Interactive, occasionally gets adblocked (so _nothing_ renders!)
buying SNAP
I got a bit caught up this month, so I had to delay a couple of things, but I’ll be […] The post The web’s most important decision appeared first on The History of the Web.
What does Netflix have in common with Shein, and why is MrBeast more interesting than Disney Plus?
British gardener Monty Don has been educating and inspiring the British public for decades through his love of nature, beginning in 1989 with a television debut that ultimately led to him presenting BBC’s much-loved Gardener’s World. It was shortly after he became a broadcaster that Monty and his wife bought a farmhouse atop two acres […]
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: I worry that with humanities departments being gutted we are no longer creating the necessary levels of narcissism to preserve civil society. Today's News: It's launch day!!!
Financials paint a worrying picture of the US’s #2 ridesharing company. The founders have just stepped down and a former Amazon executive is the new CEO. What does this major change mean?
Vammo, an electric mobility company for delivery workers, chose to launch in the country because 85% of its electric grid runs on renewable energy.
My friend Cory Zue has been publishing his live coding sessions, so I decided to watch one and record my notes. My background vs. Cory’s I’ve read a lot of Cory’s blog. We’re both Python developers, but he specializes in Django, whereas I’ve always worked with thinner frameworks like Flask. I have no experience with Django, but I’m comfortable in Python. Dev environment Timestamp 0:10 OS: Ubuntu I...
A previous employer found it important that the whole team had business cards. I had to wait a few months...
Knowing how to program has a multitude of positive effects on the brain.
Books have radically changed my life. One of the original purposes of this website was to share the learnings I had from them – read through my personal lenses, layered with the...
Designed by Mubien Brands, Santander.
A rescan project, but a rescan of a reprint. I blogged about this book in 2012 here: https://dreamsofspace.blogspot.com/2012/12/flying-in-space-1961.html I think it is Czech, but may be a difference Russian language. I got a Russian reprint of this and still find it a very beautiful and rare children's book. It has an almost timeless feel about how we (or others) will learn about and explore...
Connection and intimacy are still possible on the internet today. I’m sitting in a small room in an old house in Durham, North Carolina, USA. When I look out the window, I can see the edges of homes nearby, peeking out through the even older trees between us. I’m far enough away that if I shouted to my nearest neighbor, they probably wouldn’t hear. But the small rooms where we work are close...
What's it going to be, then?
The role of a software developer often gets distilled down to a singular activity: coding. While coding is undeniably the […] The post Habits of great software engineers appeared first on Vadim Kravcenko.
It's the country's biggest engine of growth an employment, financial asset, and source of government revenue.
Dev advocate Zack Proser grilled me lightly about my career, and why I haven’t taken any of my own advice. Read the full interview, but pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Good news on paper, but the devil is in the details
Note: this was originally posted on the Buffer blog. Working remotely and having the opportunity to work from home, coffee shops, coworking spaces, or wherever else I might feel the most productive, means that I can design my own mornings because they don’t necessarily need to be spent
Good spacesuits are deceptively difficult to design, even with today’s technology. NASA is planning to return to the moon in 2025 (if all goes well) but the spacesuit the astronauts will wear is one piece to the puzzle they have not completed yet (the other being the lunar lander). In fact, NASA spent $420 million […] The post Moon Spacesuit Prototype Unveiled first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
I have watched so many leaders over the years in my various roles as lead investor, board member, board chair, investor, and advisor. And one thing I have learned from this front-row seat is that leading from the heart is very powerful. A leader can be the most brilliant product person, strategist, entrepreneur, and business […]
As researchers race to cultivate more of the intriguing cells from the deep seafloor, the few cells now growing in labs are giving us our best glimpses of the forerunners of all complex life. The post Primitive Asgard Cells Show Life on the Brink of Complexity first appeared on Quanta Magazine
For a time, they fought the good fight — but not any more
Lessons from building Tailscan in public to $500 MRR
Chris wrote a response to my wondering-out-loud remarks about whether logical properties make CSS easier to learn. His response is great. And his tabular comparison of properties is short and concise and punchy in the way only Chris Coyier can reason about CSS. His post actually got me thinking about something different than logical properties, so now I’m gonna do some more thinking-as-I-type....
The online archive of the United States Department of the Interior Geological Survey is a valuable resource filled with detailed three-dimensional territorial maps employing various representational techniques. Thanks to the work of artist, designer, and developer Jill Hubleys and their dedicated ‘X’ page, we’ve uncovered numerous isometric diagrams. Handpicked here, are a selection of them, […]
NOTE: I’d been working on this piece on and off for a few weeks while trying to move to NYC and settle into my new apartment, and just as I was about to publish it, Elon rate-limited Twitter and so, sensing a moment of weakness, Meta pulled up its launch date for Threads to yesterday. This piece doesn’t cover Threads directly, nor does it talk about the rate-limiting fiasco. It’s focused on why I...
What started out as a matchmaking WhatsApp group has turned into a popular dating app with over 2.1 million recorded matches and 44 marriages.
Obsidian is good software for taking and organizing notes. There are many apps for this task, Obsidian is my current favorite. In the past I’ve used a text file, SimpleNote, Standard Notes, Joplin. I never used emacs org-mode nor Evernote. Obsidian works reliably and is simple yet powerful. The core Obsidian data model is “a folder of markdown files”. That’s it, really basic, and the files are...
Working with git Patches in Apple Mail 2023-05-11 Before we begin: You could likely automate this process in a more streamlined way, but for most use cases this workflow should be fine. I recently covered how to work with git email patches in Evolution on Linux, so I thought it would make sense to walk through a similar workflow for those using Apple Mail on MacOS. The idea is essentially the...
For sale: a few KIM-1 User Manuals I printed up.
As always, if you don't know what you're doing.
This is a placeholder post! I’m a huge fan of Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site and have loved their recommendations for years. So much, so that I even started a Pinterest board filled with my own recommendations. But after a few years of running into the limitations of the form, I feel such a project […] The post Guy’s Cool Tools appeared first on Style over Substance.
USV is an investor in Bolster, a marketplace for fractional and full-time executive talent for startups and growth companies. This week Bolster launched a daily short (5min) podcast and email with actionable insights and advice from founders, operators, and investors. It is called The Daily Bolster. I did a Daily Bolster episode and it is […]
See also: “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?” » To enable the functionality described here, select and install the Wolfram plugin from within ChatGPT. Note that this capability is so far available only to some ChatGPT Plus users; for more information, see OpenAI’s announcement. In Just Two and a Half Months… Early in January […]
Custom Font made of shapes and patterns for John Lewis (UK) AoiroStudio0510—23 In the world of graphic design, there are few studios as talented and innovative as Hola Bosque™. Based in the vibrant city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, this creative powerhouse has been making waves with their exceptional design work. One of their recent collaborations was with John...
BLA Design Group has shared photos of their latest project, a unique modern home that marries the West and the East, linking a Chinese-Canadian family’s present lifestyle to their past memories. Located in Vancouver, Canada, the home has a prominent gable form that floats atop the main level of the house, creating a cantilevered cover […]
The identity is a little different than the actual grind.
A short primer and collection of basic descriptive facts
After 25 years of running this blog under various names — all of which can be lumped under the "Archidose" monicker — I've decided to shut it down, moving this hobby, this labor of love, to Substack, which I have used since mid-2021 and where I will continue to send out weekly newsletters focused on architecture books, but in a new format. (You can subscribe to my newsletter here or on Substack.)...
Things people nigh-universally like to eat: salt, fat, sugar, starch, sauces, meat, drugs...
The retailer has that incredible Kirkland drip and sells more clothes than Lululemon, Ralph Lauren or Levi Strauss.
Click for printable size. Here’s a quick list of things we can do to get ready for AI’s ascendance. You can click it to get the full size to print out. This is UL Member Content Subscribe Already a member? Login
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
Often people say to me, “Kate, you’re an architecture critic! You must have an impeccably designed home full of wonderful design.” Haha, NO! However, I do think it’s entirely possible to collect design and live an aesthetically satisfying life on, like, a normal salary. Last week, I wondered via Twitter whether anyone would be interested in what my favorite things are - since this blog is usually...
Over the past couple of weeks (and more) I have found a number of things to read that I wanted to pass on. First, if you'd like a break from the seemingly continual stream of bad news in the world and enjoy good "think like a physicist"/dimensional analysis/order of magnitude estimate/Fermi problem discussions, I suggest: This paper (jstor link here) by Weisskopf, which does a great job at...
From processor Ted Styrk, “The Juno Jupiter orbiter flew by Io, Jupiter's super-volcanic moon, on May 16, returning arguably the best imagery of the moon since the Galileo Orbiter around the beginning of this century. Definitely the best since New Horizons in 2006.”
I read Baldur’s book “Out of the Software Crisis” a while back and have been meaning to publish some of my highlighted excerpts and notes. It’s always hard reading a book like this because I highlight so much and have so many thoughts that I could spend hours and hours rehashing it all. But alas, there’s no time. So it will have to suffice to say: I enjoyed the book, here are a few excerpts I want...
How are developers using AI tools?
Giles Miller Studio has shared photos of their first completed residential property in Kent, England, that features a sculptural black facade. The house breaks down barriers between the building’s internal spaces and the glade of natural planting and trees that surround it. By having a unique sculptural facade, the home invites nature to grow up […]
2023/06/20 Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops This post contains a transcript of the talk I wrote for and gave at QCon New York 2023 for Vanessa Huerta Granda's track on resilience engineering. The official talk title was "Embrace Complexity; Tighten Your Feedback Loops". That’s the descriptive title for the talk that follows the conference’s guidelines about good descriptive titles....
Delaying its API changes would benefit everyone — but users have other options, too
How the World Cup and the Golden Globes united Argentina through a single viral image.
HTML Dark Mode 2023-04-11 I wrote an article back in 2021 called The Lazy Developer's Dark Mode where I explained how to implement a very basic "dark mode" by using the prefers-color-scheme CSS attribute. This stills works perfectly fine, and in fact there is a cleaner variation of this created by jacksonchen666: These 3 Lines of CSS Will Give You Dark Mode for Free. But today I wanted to show how...
Is there a more delightful time of year than wisteria-filled May? As we get set for summer, we’re in high spirits, not least because of the inspiring happenings in our diaries. From a series of workshops at a London bakery’s new homeware space to a […]
It’s said that shutter speeds of around 1/1000th of a second are necessary to really capture the detail of moving water in photography. So you can imagine the technical challenge of accurately capturing water as a three-dimensional object. Product designer Masahiko Tanoue has dedicated the last several years of his career to just this: creating […] Related posts: A Glass Jug That Looks Like...
They’re toxic, wasteful and a tempting trap. It’s one of the most important topics in my new book. (And here’s a new podcast on it). We need proxies. You’re not allowed to read the book before you buy it or taste the ketchup before you leave the store. We rely on labels and cultural cues […]
Laetitia@Work #63
Every year, around March, a curious social custom occurs in Japanese families. Parents of kids entering elementary school visit the grandparents and gingerly tread the topic of buying the kids a very expensive item: a randoseru. And gingerly they must tread. The randoseru, a Japanese school bag, costs a whopping
Dear all, On 1st January of this year, after what feels like centuries of preparation, I launched Diaries of Note, and though incredibly difficult to plan, the premise is simple: every single day, on the Diaries of Note website, I am featuring a single diary entry from history, published on the same day and month
Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2m ARR in public
Bypassing the WiFi Hardware Switch on the Lenovo X201 2023-04-02 I recently received a ThinkPad X201 to start using as my daily driver. I purchased the X201 to replace my existing X260. Although some might look at this as a "downgrade" in terms of specs and hardware, I would have to disagree. The X201 is an absolute masterpiece in laptop hardware design and only faulted by some of the constraints...
Historically speaking, period houses are seen as the ones with personality – and while we won’t argue with the fact they’ve got charisma (who doesn’t love pleasing Victorian details or grand Georgian proportions?), we will also make a strong case for those created in recent […]
As of late, I’ve been working on Quadratic: an infinite canvas spreadsheet that runs code. Think Figma (infinite canvas) meets Excel (spreadsheet) meets VSCode (IDE). In addition to formulas (e.g. SUM(A1:A5)) every cell in Quadratic can be the result of code (right now it’s Python only, which means I’m learning more Python, but JavaScript is on the roadmap too). Quadratic lives at a sweet spot...
As mentioned previously, structural glasses are materials in which there is no periodic lattice (no long-range spatial order) and the building blocks get "stuck" in some configuration, kinetically unable to get to the true energetic minimum state which would almost certainly be a periodic crystal. Upon cooling from the liquid state, their viscosity increases by many orders of magnitude (in...
A re-run-- Back to the imaginative past and Johnny's Space Trip. This 1954 fictional book captures the spirit of doing it for yourself as Johnny and his friends build (and dream of) a spaceship for a journey from their backyard. It is pure fantasy but as you will see there is a scientific bent to what Johnny wants to bring. Sells, Mike. Illustrated by Charles Stone. Johnny's Space Trip. Cross...
Want to find the best no-code newsletters for learning about what you can build without coding? You came to the right place!
If you fit one of these criteria:
...and the Master of Roman Comedy
I am of the generation that essentially lived through the introduction and evolution of the personal computer. I have decades of experience as an active user and enthusiast, so I have been able to notice some patterns. One pattern is the relationship between the power of computing hardware and the demands of computing software. For […] The post The Hardware Demands of AI first appeared on...
See on O’Reilly’s website for The Engineering Executive’s Primer. In 2019, I worked with Stripe Press to publish my first book, An Elegant Puzzle, which captured many of the lessons I’d learned as an engineering manager in fast growing Silicon Valley companies. In 2021, I decided to learn the entire process of publishing myself, self publishing my second book, Staff Engineer, which synthesized the...
Social media businesses should not charge* for APIs. If a company like Reddit or Twitter derives most of its value from content that users write for free then it must provide APIs for anyone to download and manipulate that content. While an interactive API that enables third party applications is desirable, a simple static dump is the bare minimum to fulfill the social contract (see StackOverflow...
Branding case submission - BELYSSE abduzeedo0217—23 The world of carpeting is vast and diverse, ranging from wall-to-wall carpet to creative carpet tiles. And one new brand has emerged, offering a complete solution for all carpeting needs. With six decades of experience, four sub-brands, and a strong commitment to sustainable flooring solutions, Belysse is...
Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian philosopher and spiritual leader who spent much of his adult life teaching and sharing his insights on self-awareness, freedom from conditioning, and the importance of living in the present moment. He traveled the world, engaging in dialogues with people from all walks of life and encouraging them to question their […]
"We are lichens on a grand scale."
The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 5
"Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged."
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri on the company's big new swing at Twitter
Architecture and interior design studio Laney LA has shared photos of a modern home they designed in Culver City, California, that has a dark black exterior.
Designed by Mucca, New York.
BIO-architects together with DublDom, have sent us photos of their latest project, DUB, a modular single-family home in Russia.
At work, we use Amazon ECS to run some of our Docker-based services. ECS is a container orchestrator, similar to Kubernetes: we tell it what Docker images we want to run in what configuration, and it stops or starts containers to match. If a container stops unexpectedly, ECS starts new containers automatically to replace it. Occasionally, we see “unable to consistently start tasks successfully”...
Applying Email-Based Git Patches in Evolution on Linux 2023-04-25 Users who work with git patches through email most likely use a terminal-based program such as aerc or mutt. CLI email clients tend to have built-in support for easily applying patches directly to their local repos. But what about people who prefer to use graphical email apps? Lucky for us, it is actually fairly simple to replicate...
I did not plan to write yet another post about energy, but this popped up and I had to write about it. UMASS researchers have produced a device that generates electricity by harvesting charge from water vapor. They write: The common feature of these materials is that they are engineered with appropriate nanopores to allow […] The post Harvesting Energy from Water Vapor first appeared on...
Robert Propst, a designer at the Herman Miller furniture company. Four years earlier, he had proposed a radical alternative to the office bullpen: the Action Office. He envisioned it as a holistic and integrated system designed to increase worker efficiency while providing an ergonomic workspace. To address both issues, Propst and Jack Kelley created the Acoustic Area Conditioner in 1975. The...
And why it might revolutionize the search industry.
One of the many new features announced at yesterday’s OpenAI dev day is better support for generating valid JSON output. From the JSON mode docs: A common way to use Chat Completions is to instruct the model to always return JSON in some format that makes sense for your use case, by providing a system … Continue reading Experimenting with GPT-4 Turbo’s JSON mode →
(Just not mine.)
Or how to tell the difference between Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried
I got invited to speak at Learning Night Boston and give an intro to progress studies: why study progress, and why do we need a new philosophy of progress? There are then a few minutes of Q&A. (It was in a bar and the audio quality is poor, sorry.)
Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to data analysis in business. The two approaches have different worldviews, and express different tradeoffs. Here's why that matters.
Dynamic animations and motion design — Nike, Just for Fun abduzeedo0501—23 Nike Kids is a live-action piece directed by MANSON and produced by CANADA, with support from R/GA Shanghai. The talented team at Studio Bliss was responsible for the dynamic animations and motion design featured throughout the project. The concept for the project was inspired by the...
.simulation { width: 100%; display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center; margin-bottom: 2.5em; } .load-balancer { color: black; font-weight: bold; } .request { color: #04BF8A; font-weight: bold; } .server { color: #999999; font-weight: bold; } .dropped { color: red; font-weight: bold; } .lds-dual-ring { display:...
Few diarists capture the rhythms of daily life quite like Alan Bennett. Born in Leeds in 1934, it was in the early-1970s that this beloved playwright began to keep a diary, sporadically scribbled on loose sheets of paper that would later be bundled to form twelve months of insights, reflections, and curiosities. Bennett’s diary entries, […]
Farewell to the most influential macroeconomist of his generation.
American journalist Edward Robb Ellis was sixteen when he began to keep a diary; by the time of his death 71 years later, he had written approximately 22 million words—an incredible feat which, until it was surpassed in 1994, earned him a world record for the “longest published diary in the English language.” Thanks to […]
The weather is starting to get better. Listening Gift from the Trees by Mammal Hands I am still really loving the constellation of bands around Mammal Hands. They just released a new album, “Gift from the Trees”, and it’s really excellent. RETURN by tAKX Their guitarist, Stephen Mullins, also just released an excellent album that has more of a Fennesz direction - guitar-based...
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Happy National Train Day, everyone – for those of you who missed it: that was May 13th this year. A year ago, we started down this path with Train Set: Track One, which gave way to Track Two …and now, here we are for the final part of our train-fecta. First Stop: Shining Time Station The post Train Set: Track Three appeared first on 99% Invisible.
A working knowledge of the fundamentals of design is as important now as it ever has been. Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated by layout. I didn’t know to call it that before I studied design; I just knew that I could look at a page and find beauty and wonder in it even without reading the words it contained — if it even contained them at all. Some of my favorite “children’s books”...
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Everyone has gone AI mad, and there is a lot of noise, hype, and demos, but not a lot of guidance on practical usecases. We will go over a mental model of who is doing what and explain both where the opportunities are and where the non-AI developer can start going down the rabbit hole.
Interesting NPR segment today: A powerful eruption on the sun disrupted radio signals on earth. What’s remarkable is it’s a PhD candidate talking to an NPR host about solar flares, completely in two Southern Black accents. Two women, at that. I am dismayed at my own involuntary racist reaction to these voices. I do not expect educated people to speak this kind of English. A crystal clear example...
Elsa Binder was twenty when, in October of 1941, German forces carried out a brutal massacre of thousands of Jews in her hometown of Stanislawów, Poland. Two months later, she and her family were compelled to enter the Stanisławów Ghetto, joining 20,000 others in a harrowing fight for survival. It was in this time of […]
Previous Next Using Marcus Aurelius's writing in his Meditations and experiences inferred from historical records, we created an AI digital personality that spoke with us about how to practice Stoicism in our modern world. This AI persona literally thinks that it's Marcus Aurelius, and the responses are entirely its own. You can scroll down to Read More >>
Afflictions of the human condition
For Miriam Hillawi Abraham, the digital realm is one fraught with both opportunities and dangers. The Ethiopian designer and researcher sees digital media as an impactful, playful, and unrestrained way of shaping immersive stories that challenge Western narratives and power dynamics imposed on the African continent, its histories, its built environment, and its people. Meanwhile, Abraham sounds a...
I continue the practice of posting a list as a substitute for real writing. Coming soon: a long overdue loot at Seneca's plays, a glance at Gide's Counterfeiters, and some messing around with Plato's Republic. If I did not write in April, I at least read: GREEK PHILOSOPHY The Republic Parmenides Phaedrus Timaeus Critias, 4th C. BCE, Plato Classical Philosophy, 2014, Peter Adamson PREPARING FOR...
Insights from 50 publicly traded tech companies, and a list of those paying the most and the least in median total compensation.
Montaigne's Essays: Book 1, Chapter 1
This is extremely unique vs This is unique I’m very upset vs I’m upset and I love you a ton vs I love you Sometimes, more words aren’t better.
Congratulations to Ben Shapiro, AOC, and ... LeBron?
The ultimate anthem of resistance to the assaults on life.
ESA’s Gaia orbital telescope has recently discovered two new black holes. This, in itself, is not surprising, as that is Gaia’s mission – to precisely map the three-dimensional position of two billion objects in our galaxy, using three separate instruments. The process is called astrometry, and the goal is to produce a highly accurate map […] The post New Type of Black Hole Discovered first...
A touchingly human reminder of our capacity for ecstasy, transcendence, and collective felicity.
Simple math can help explain the complexities of the newly discovered aperiodic monotile. The post Math That Goes On Forever but Never Repeats first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Australian architecture firm Bryant Alsop has shared photos of a home remodel they completed for a run-down home in Victoria, that includes a new contemporary addition with a curved wall.
Removing the paywall on The Business Expertise Series, which covers the work of Lia DiBello and her collaborators.
Hey, this is Jakob Greenfeld, author of the Business Brainstorms newsletter - every week I write this email to share the most interesting trends, frameworks, opportunities, and ideas with you. Let's dive in! 💡 Opportunities “I wish I could pay per newspaper article, with only one click. Maybe: First half of article is free, second half is $1. Currently, the process is akin to a gym membership...
Choosing the paper for your printmaking project can have a significant impact on the way the print turns out. Changing the colour, thickness or texture of a paper can alter the mood, style or success of a print - it can be great fun to experiment. Although there are no rules about what paper should be used for each printmaking technique, below we have outlined some of the desirable characteristics...
Despite it’s image of neon lights and cyberpunk mystique propagated by the west, Tokyo is very much a mash-up of old and new. It’s a city where Tower Records is still alive and well. Where vinyl record and vintage clothing shops have to employ crowd control measures. And where a hand-written letter sent by FAX […] Related posts: Vintage Advertisements from Japan’s First Strip Show in 1947 Retro...
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After thinking about it for more than three years, I’ve finally signed up for personal training so I can learn how to strength-train. We start to have muscle loss as we age:...
But what about the rest of us?
The moment we saw this foldable electric bike, something awakened our inner child. We couldn’t quite put our finger on it bit it was a feeling akin to seeing a brand new toy in a toy shop. It turns out that the origin story of the Icoma Electric Bike is very much a part of […] Related posts: TOTO’s Toilet Motorcycle Will Travel Japan Entirely on Biogas What Happens When Musical Instrument and...
On 6th June 1944, approximately 150,000 Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy in an effort to reclaim France from Nazi control. One of those brave souls, attached to the Sherwood Rangers tank regiment, was Reverend Leslie Skinner, a remarkable, compassionate man who was the first British chaplain to land on those hostile shores. Upon […]
We're going to get you.
I always run into issues installing Jellyfin on TrueNAS core. I fix them, and then I forget a few months later, so these are just my notes to myself of how to install Jellyfin on TrueNAS core. Instructions Install based on these instructions: https://github.com/Thefrank/jellyfin-server-freebsd/blob/main/Installation_TrueNAS_GUI.md#the-advanced-way We need to follow the advanced instructions...
If you get a 99% quality haircut or a 99% close-to-perfect meal, it’s better than good. On the other hand, if the scrub nurse only does a 99% job of disinfecting the tools in the operating room, you’re still going to die of an infection. Some projects respond very well to ordinary effort and 99% perfect. In fact, the last 1% isn’t worth the time, the effort or the focus. Others fail if they’re not...
Not simply in the classroom, but anywhere we hope to inform, inspire or educate: Assume enrollment. Either someone is committed to learning or they’re not. While many situations place people into a spot where they are compelled to show up (exhibit A: learning arithmetic in grade school), it’s almost impossible to teach well if people […]
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On September 13, 2018, a pipeline crew in the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts was hard at work replacing an aging cast iron natural gas line with a new polyethylene pipe. Located just north of Boston, the original cast iron system was installed in the early 1900s and due for replacement. To maintain service during the project,...
Why geneticists found what archeologists and historians had failed to locate.
Welcome to Part II of our history of the electric power industry. For Part I, see here. By 1930, the US was using 114 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, generated by more than 4000 power plants. Most electricity was generated by coal (56%) and hydroelectric (34%) plants, with the remainder generated by natural gas and fuel oil.[0] 68% of homes overall, and 84% of homes in urban areas,...
Shor’s algorithm will enable future quantum computers to factor large numbers quickly, undermining many online security protocols. Now a researcher has shown how to do it even faster. The post Thirty Years Later, a Speed Boost for Quantum Factoring first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Perhaps you only acknowledge and focus on problems where you know and are comfortable with the appropriate response. Denying the existence of the other ones is easier than dealing with them. Or it might be that you only choose to see the problems that are actually situations, that can’t be solved, and that amplify our […]
In developing software products, we're often accustomed to prioritizing incremental delivery. This is usually a good way to mitigate the risk of working on the wrong thing. However, sometimes our problems don't fit neatly into accretive methodologies and we need to consider other ways of driving value.
The majority of people never find their "life's work", yet the premise of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a college degree assumes that they will.
A recurring topic of discussion on the OpenAI forums, on Reddit, and on Twitter is about what ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff date actually is. It seems like it should be straightforward enough to figure out (just ask it), but it can be confusing due to ChatGPT’s inconsistent answers about its cutoff month, differences from official documentation, … Continue reading Exploring ChatGPT’s Knowledge Cutoff...
a personal review of "A general theory of love"
I stumbled across an amazing fact. From 2003 to 2022, the number of home burglaries in Japan decreased by a factor of 12! Home burglaries in Japan peaked in 2003, with 190,473 cases in Japan. But as of 2022, where the most recent data is available, they have dropped to a mere 15,692 cases. This drop was astonishing to me, and so I sought out the reasons behind it. While there isn’t a simple...
From data privacy to defamation, officials have questions
After showering, many people "hand-squeegee" some of the water off themselves before using a towel.
For the past few years, I have been running Home Assistant to make my apartment a smart home. It’s become such a hobby of mine that I’ve even started coding add-ons for it. While there are other popular automation platforms, Home Assistant’s versatility blows the rest out of the water. It connects to everything I […] The post My Home Assistant setup (2023 edition) appeared first on Style over...
On Jul 11, 2011, at 8:03 PM, Steve Jobs wrote: I agree - if we eliminate Fecebooks third proposal it sounds reasonable.
The story of a woman, in a severe state of catatonia for years and “waking up” after being treated for an autoimmune disease, is making the rounds and deserves a little bit of context. April Burrell was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia resulting in catatonia, and has been in long term care since […] The post Woman with Catatonia for Years Wakes After Treatment first appeared on...
Listen now (73 min) | In this inaugural episode of the Weird Medieval Guys podcast, Olivia and Aran discuss why medieval art is so intriguing to modern viewers and what makes so much of it so weird. Also discussed are Galaxy Quest, Mel Gibson's crimes against the Middle Ages, and the future historic legacy of explicit images of Garfield the cat.
Some simple ways to use AI to break you out of biases
On 1st September 1939, Friedrich Kellner, a German justice inspector and committed Social Democrat, embarked upon a courageous mission that would continue until 1945. In defiance of the Nazi regime, he secretly documented the brutal realities of life under Hitler’s rule, chronicling its crimes, the persecution of Jews, and the spread of propaganda in what […]
Design firm Studio Materiality has shared photos of Macaroni, a pasta shop they completed that’s located in the heart of Athens, Greece. The designers drew inspiration from the 1970s, with a boldly colored design, complete with a font from that era to create the logo. The exterior wall has a striped design that flows through […]
Ooof. Hard to believe this would have passed all the checks and balances to get appropriated approved. It’s not a stretch to say that a California ski resort has naively combined two M’s to form a crown but to outright copy a symbol used repeatedly by one of the highest selling artists of all time… Continue reading Mammoth Mountain Logo
All images © Ichiro Mishima courtesy IKAWAYA Architects Merging the organic with the inorganic; walking the fine line between indoors and outdoors, is a predominant theme in contemporary Japanese architecture. One of the latest iterations is from architect Atsushi Ikawaya, who recently completed a residential home in Eastern Japan that doubles as a music studio. […] Related posts: Karuizawa Home...
Salt is essentially free. A bag of salted nuts is the same price (or less) as an unsalted one. But salt used to be expensive. Truly expensive, like gold. We keep seeing the deflation of things we were sure would remain expensive. Computer chips, disk storage and now, content. Once computers start illustrating, writing and […]
Born in Geneva in 1821, Henri-Frédéric Amiel was a poet and philosopher who found little in the way of recognition during his lifetime, perhaps due to the introspective nature that fuelled the journal for which he posthumously found fame. Always reaching for perfection and refusing to compromise left him feeling out of step with the […]
Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that has gained increasing popularity in recent years. At the heart of this school of thought is the idea that we can achieve true happiness by living in accordance with nature, accepting what we cannot change, and focusing on developing our own virtue. Throughout history, Stoicism has been applied to Read More >>
The company's recent products have flopped with consumers. Will a more focused team reverse the trend?
Siegfried Sassoon was a leading poet of the First World War, known for his vivid depictions of life in the trenches and his criticism of the conflict. In 1918, he had already gained recognition for his poetry, with his first collection, The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, published in 1917. That year, Sassoon also made […]
AI can already beat humans in many measures of creativity. Let's use that to our advantage.
SHED Architecture has sent us photos of a 1930s brick farmhouse in Washington State that has been redesigned and renovated for today's living standards.
When a six-year-old kid beats the other kids at tennis, that kid is more likely to be encouraged to play more, or to get a coach, and pretty soon, they’re much better at tennis than the others. When a musical group has a single that gets some buzz on Spotify, they’re more likely to be […]
Renate Loll has helped pioneer a radically new approach to quantum gravity. She assumes that the fabric of space-time is a blend of all possible fabrics, and she has developed the computational tools needed to calculate the far-reaching implications of that assumption. The post The Physicist Who Glues Together Universes first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Isabelle Eberhardt was an explorer and writer whose brief but extraordinary life was marked by curiosity and defiance. Born in Geneva in 1877 to an anarchist father and a mother of Russian descent, it was in 1897 that she finally visited North Africa, a place she had longed to see, with her mother. The trip […]
On the current episode of the SGU, because it is pride month, we expressed our general support for the LGBTQ community. I also opined about how important it is to respect individual liberty, the freedom to simply live your authentic life as you choose, and how ironic it is that often the people screaming the […] The post Being Trans Is Not A Mental Illness first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
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The following is an extension of my notes from Baldur’s book “Out of the Software Crisis” including quotes from the author. Great software grows in our minds, we don’t manufacture it on-demand. [Software projects] are grown thought-stuff [but we] treat them like lego blocks. As an interesting exercise, put aside the industrial metaphor of software as “legos” or “building blocks” and instead think...
Despite all evidence I hope to wrap up the Greek philosophy project within the next couple of weeks. A medical deadline approaches. That will help. As usual, I read good books. PHILOSOPHY & SELF-HELP Letters from a Stoic (c. 60), Seneca - good timing for some Stoicism. FICTION & A PLAY Collected Stories (from roughly 1930 into the 1960s, the second half of the book), Vladimir Nabokov They...
This is the 8th post in my series on building a toy GPT. For better understanding, I recommend reading my earlier posts first. I love playing and watching cricket. The dominance India showed in the recently concluded World Cup is astounding. I have never seen anything like it in the four decades I’ve been following…
A history of the monastic high life
Dave asked what makes people excited about building for the web and Thomas answered with this wonderful articulation: the web is the only programming platform (that I know of) that considers its builders regular people, not IT Professionals and continues to write standards with that consideration. Love this. I made my first website as a young teenager because the barrier was so low (and I dropped...
At 3:15 pm on 22nd May 1963, Luther ‘Lute’ Jerstad and his teammate Barry Bishop became the second and third Americans ever to reach the summit of Mount Everest, following an arduous journey that began alongside a formidable team of 17 other Americans, 32 Sherpas, and 909 porters carrying 27 tons of gear. Led by […]
My great-great-grandmother wasn't a chimp (she was a pig)
Mike Zamansky is the person who got me interested in K12 Computer Science Education in NYC, a cause I have now contributed almost fifteen years of my life to. Our family’s public charity, Gotham Gives, has been funding the work we do in K12 Computer Science Education in NYC for the last decade and a […]
Elon Musk has a complicated legacy. Most people I encounter who bother to express an opinion tend to be either a fan or hater. I am neither. He’s a complicated and flawed person who has accomplished some interesting things, but also has had some epic failures. People like a clean narrative, however, so it’s tempting […] The post Is The Boring Company Useful? first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
Egalitarianism is important but we neglect STEM education at our peril
We talk about China's economy, decoupling, export controls, industrial policy, state control, and lots more.
Fri, 19 May 2023 Denver air quality live cam If there’s one thing that feels like it’s gotten worse in my lifetime, it’s air quality. Colorado’s air quality last week was dismal, filled with smoke from Canadian wildfires, making Denver’s air quality among the worst of any major city. This is what happened to air quality four miles from my house: Fine particles (PM2.5), Union Resevior, Longmont,...
GOTO Chicago is over! My talk, “Is software engineering really engineering”, went over pretty well, and I’m happy with how it turned out. I’m going to try submitting it to other conferences. Beyond that, I have a TLA+ workshop I’m teaching on June 12th and after that my next engagement is in September, so there’s a lot of time to take up with things. (Use the code C0MPUT3RTHINGS for 10% off the...
Asymmetric betting, skill acquisition and daring to be different
Today we are announcing the general availability of the world’s first commercial cloud computer — along with our $44M Series A financing. From the outset at Oxide, and as I outlined in my 2020 Stanford talk, we have had three core beliefs as a company: Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure. The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely...
Software engineers and their managers have started to receive warnings for not working in the office at least 3 days per week. I talked with engineers on how they see the policy being enforced.
It's my first product launch of the year!
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: I'm slightly regretting not having this as the twist ending to a comedic novel. Gimme a few years. Today's News: One week until BEA WOLF DAY!
Last week Madhadron’s 2021 piece The seven programming ur-languages went viral. One I saw a lot was “where does TLA+ and Alloy fit into this?” Hoo boy. I’ve been dreading this one. You see, TLA+ and Alloy don’t fit into any of the programming ur-languages, because they aren’t programming languages. They are specification languages (SLs) and are designed for modeling systems, not implementing them....
This write-up is meant to present the rationale and technical details behind a tiny project I wrote the other day, WTH, or WindowTitleHack, which is meant to force a constant window name for apps that keep changing it (I'm looking specifically at Firefox and Krita, but there are probably many others). Why tho? I've been streaming on Twitch from Linux (X11) with a barebone OBS Studio setup for a...
A question we don’t ask ourselves very often, but a choice we make every day. It’s tempting to not care. If you choose to not care, you’re off the hook. It’s simply to do as little as possible, avoid too much trouble, ask if it will be on the test, try to stay off the […]
The curious thing about Stoicism is its long-lasting survival in the self-help genre, curious at least until I read Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic (1st C.) several years ago and discovered that it was a self-help book, one of the founding self-help books. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (170-180), which I read recently, has a different format, more of a commonplace book, but is similarly aimed...
A simplified high-level overview of primary machine learning algorithms for anyone to understand
Just because matter is visible doesn’t mean it’s easy to see.
As we roll towards the end of the year data engineering as expected does have some changes, but now everyone wants to see how Generative AI intersects with everything. The fits are not completely natural, as Generative AI like Chat GPT is more NLP type systems, but there are a few interesting cases to keep […]
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Borgin hard or hardly borgin? Today's News:
This is from April but at last week’s NACIS conference I saw Zach Levitt speak about making these graphics for the New York Times. The story details how in the midst of a winter storm that left tens or thousands without power, bitcoin mines in the state kept running, until the companies were finally paid handsomely to shut down operations. One company was paid $18 million over four days for not...
I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.
Common expectations for the senior level at the two companies, and compensation packages at Wise.
We’re just one week from the TLA+ workshop! Thanks to everyone who signed up, and if you’re interested, there’s still two slots left! I also published a new blog post, A Neovim Task Runner in 30 lines of Lua. It’s about a little Neovim script I wrote that can handle tasks like “execute this script on whatever file is in the left window, with whatever flags are in the active buffer’s b:flags...
I know this wasn’t the purpose of sending up a €4.3bn satellite into geostationary orbit, but tweaking flat earthers is a fun side effect. European countries have collaborated on this project, having weather satellites in orbit since 1977. The latest iteration is Meteostat-12, which was launched in December and is now in orbit 36,000 km […] The post Meteostat-12 Meets Flat Earthers first appeared...
Here’s the answer to the recent quote quiz: The author was Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. The quote was taken from his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Here’s a slightly longer, and unaltered, quote: First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably...
In Manuel’s series People and Blogs, he asked me: Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently? I gave my answer, but I wanted to expand on it. These kinds of questions are interesting to me. As readers, I think the answer we’re looking for in a question like this: “Here’s the few tips I wish I had known when I started blogging.” Why? Because we...
The Silicon Valley giant’s muted public response after several Indian opposition leaders received a message that their devices may be compromised is doing more harm.
Eukaryote elsewhere I have an article in the latest issue of Asterisk Magazine. After you get really deep into the weeds of invertebrate sentience and fish welfare and the scale of factory farming, what do you do with that information vis-a-vis what you feel comfortable eating? Here’s what I’ve landed on and why. Read the […]
The concept of chemical potential is one that seems almost deliberately obscure to many. I’ve written about this here, and referenced this article. What you may not realize is that the chemical potential, of water in particular, plays a crucial role in why my banana waffle recipe works so well. My waffle recipe starts with an old, peel-getting-brown banana, which I peel and put in a medium...
photo courtesy Sabogawa Koinobori Kawanagashi Association Around this time of year, Japan becomes decorated with scenes of fish fluttering in the sky. Known as koinobori, the carp streamers are an important celebration of Children’s Day, which is on May 5th, and is one of the consecutive holidays that makes up Golden Week in Japan. But […] Related posts: The Michelangelo of Microsoft Excel
Flore — A Collection of Digital Illustrations AoiroStudio0508—23 Laura Normand is a talented Paris-based artist whose work revolves around vibrant and captivating digital illustrations. With a particular focus on flowers, her series of colorful artworks brings the beauty and allure of nature to life in a unique and captivating way. Normand's digital...
As I’ve been cleaning up my site, I’ll occasionally read back over something I wrote many years ago. Yesterday, I re-read a series of posts I wrote over a decade ago on ethics and technology. Here’s the first one. What surprised me yesterday was how I could have easily written the exact same post today. The same issues — information monopolies, data integrity, automation, and the connection...
Assets are ownable. They are devices, skills, connections or properties that allow us to amplify our effort and do our work with more impact. A drill press is an asset, so is your law degree. The permission you have to talk with your customers, the benefit of the doubt you get from your patients and […]
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Here is a relatively simple math problem: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 combined. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? (I will provide the answer below the fold.) This problem is the basis of a large psychological literature on thinking systems in the human brain, discussed […] The post Intuitive and Analytical Thinking first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
Laetitia@Work #61
The nitty, gritty, and shitty of working with health data
Friends, it’s been a long while since I last wrote up a walkthrough of one of my mapping projects. So, today, let’s break down a piece that I made earlier this year for Scientific American magazine. This is actually the first of three pieces that I’ve made for Scientific American this year. Much of my … Continue reading Leopard Map Disassembly →
The most popular Heap alternatives in 2023 are: PostHog: All-in-one platform that combines comprehensive analytics with session replay, A/B testing…
A new section from Stewart Brand's Maintenance on Books in Progress
Five analytical tasks in under a minute
But not necessarily for the reasons you think.
The Age of Information has come to a brutal end—here's how it happened
The quandary of our own abundant if not inexhaustible repertoire of mapping abilities and skills of visualization are tried by the spread of COVID-19. As dashboards, news agencies, and media offered new maps and staked new skills of mapping, maps … Continue reading →
Terry Rudolph, PsiQuantum & Imperial College London During a recent visit to the wild western town of Pasadena I got into a shootout at high-noon trying to explain the nuances of this question to a colleague. Here is a more … Continue reading →
I asked software engineers to recommend domain registrars and more than 250 people responded. The most popular are Cloudflare, Namecheap and Porkbun. Why do devs like them?
Are you crying in the shower because you can't handle it anymore? Beyond Impostor Syndrome: Complete melt-down? Well, at least you're in good company.
In April 1992, following Bosnia’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia, simmering tensions among the region’s ethnic groups escalated into the devastating Bosnian War. It wasn’t long before the city of Sarajevo found itself under siege. Amidst the chaos, a courageous young girl named Zlata Filipović took up her pen to chronicle the harrowing experiences of […]
Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise. Dutch people own more bicycles per capita than any other place in the world. The country has more than 20,000 miles of dedicated cycling paths. International policymakers make pilgrimages to the Netherlands to learn how to create good bike infrastructure. But none of The post De Fiets is Niets appeared first on 99% Invisible.
As much as I complained on these pages that all the exciting new restaurants were opening up not handily close to where I live in SW11, but in far-flung places like Dalston or Shoreditch or Highgate, part of me still hoped that something would eventually come along to prove me wrong. And so it happens that in Battersea, not on the restaurant desert of Lavender Hill but close enough on Battersea...
A growing body of evidence suggests that social products pose significant risks to teenagers
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Unpredictability can help computer scientists solve otherwise intractable problems. The post How Randomness Improves Algorithms first appeared on Quanta Magazine
After Galveston we headed north, bound for New Orleans. We broke up the drive with a stop at one of the gates of hell, located in Sea Rim State Park, Texas. Sea Grim as we call it. Do not go there. Ever. For any reason. We had to abandon the bus there that night and retreat to a hotel. The next morning we went back, fired up the bus, and did not stop driving until we were safely over the state...
Regular readers will know what a fan I have been of margin lending from Interactive Brokers. No longer. If you’ve read my other posts (like this or this or this) on margin lending, and are interested in exploring further, make you read this post before you do. Why I used to like IB’s margin loans… Continue reading Mayday for IBKR margin lending →
12 alternatives to the market-leading alerting tool, PagerDuty.
Fast, or Best? Choose your decision-making goal wisely, especially if you're a natural perfectionist.
I take a lot of photos. When I’m trying to get a particular shot, I’ll often take multiple pictures in the hope of getting at least one that’s good – and then my camera roll is full of similar images. I always intend to go back and clean up my pictures afterwards – pick the best version of each shot, and delete all the rest. In practice, I’ve struggled to do this review step – I had no good way to...
Are you a TypeScript user? Your initial reaction may be a resounding “Yes!” Or perhaps be a booming “No!” The answer seems simple, but (as with most things) it might be more nuanced than you think. Here’s Anders Hejlsberg, TypeScript Co-Creator & Lead Architech, from the TypeScript documentary: If you use VSCode and you write JavaScript, then you are a TypeScript user because the language service...
Two years ago, I created a website for my business. By combining my terrible design skills with a decent-looking template, I created a site that looked okay. I told myself that if the business took off, I’d hire a real designer to make it look professional. TinyPilot website, before design changes A year later, the business was generating $45k/month in revenue, but my website still looked like a...
Making memes I’m ahead of schedule on workshop prep, which means I have time to think about things besides pedagogy and formal methods. And I’ve been thinking of a kind of article I commonly write: Here’s some examples of something. I am going to give that thing a name. Now that we have a name, let’s discuss it as its own topic. Examples: edge case poisoning, mimicry, cleverness vs insight,...
Last summer, I found myself at a farmers market of a small town in Southern France. The air was alive with chatter and the joy of yet another sunny day ahead. I made my way through tourists, neighbourhood regulars and other early birds. To escape the buzz, I stepped into the nearby cathedral. Suddenly everything was quiet. Here I was, breathing the cool air of this dim sanctuary, built ages ago...
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is a map of the Mississippi River drafted by legendary geologist Harold Fisk. It’s part of a fairly unassuming geological report that he wrote in 1944 for Army Corps of Engineers, but the maps he produced are anything but run of the mill. They’re strikingly beautiful representations of not just the 1944 path of the...
On sympathy, reciprocity, and satisfying the fulness of our nature.
A useful metaphor for freelancers and small businesses. Every good restaurant should have two different salads on the menu. The boring salad is the regular kind. It’s there for people who know that they want a reliable, repeatable, unremarkable salad. It’s the safe part of a safe meal. It might remind them of their childhood […]
The mind is capable of perceiving more information than what is actually visible. The Gestalt Principles of Design are a set of concepts and guidelines drawn from gestalt psychology, which theorizes that the mind tends to process organized groups of things as a whole, rather than a number of individual things. These concepts can help to integrate a better understanding of perception into the...
Swatt | Miers Architects has shared photos of a house they designed in the town of Atherton, California, that replaces an earlier mid-century structure that the family had owned for many years. The home, with its white exterior, has an abundance of windows, allowing the home to light up like a lantern at night. During […]
Many middle-class Indians aspire to be the next Kusha Kapila or Ranveer Allahbadia. But there’s a real struggle to monetize from Instagram.
Creating a startup to commercialize technology developed during research is a risky road for physicists and engineers, but the help of experts can improve their chances.
Hi Everybody, April Cools is this weekend! A bunch of people who normally write tech stuff will be writing about a bunch of other topics. If you’ve got a blog and find April Fools to be eye-rollingly trite, come join us! You don’t need to pour your heart and soul into a 10,000 epic, just write something fun and genuine and out of character for you. I’ve got a lot on my plate this week, so I’ll...
If the electron’s charge wasn’t perfectly round, it could reveal the existence of hidden particles. A new measurement approaches perfection. The post The Electron Is So Round That It’s Ruling Out Potential New Particles first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Buying status is as close to bad as a good act can be.
When he invented Turing machines in 1936, Alan Turing also invented modern computing. The post The Most Important Machine That Was Never Built first appeared on Quanta Magazine
In her new book Nuts and Bolts Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies and examines the seven of most basic building blocks of engineering that have shaped the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the lens, the magnet, the string, and the pump. The post Nuts and Bolts appeared first on 99% Invisible.
Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine, one of Japan’s most-historically and culturally significant shrines, will undergo a massive renovation beginning in May of 2023. And for three years the honden main hall will be completely closed off to the roughly 10 million visitors who come to the shrine each year. So plans were made to create a temporary […] Related posts: An Exhibition of Photographs and Ceramics at...
Maritime trade and diplomacy in the northern Horn of Africa.
Generative AI offers a new, more engaging (and, hopefully, more empathetic) way of teaching history. But how to use it?
SF's Market Street debacle, the debate over real wages, why U.S. growth has gotten smoother, TikTok as a propaganda engine, and California homelessness
toise me at CERN was a box of chocolates. CERN is a multinational particle-physics collaboration. Based in Geneva, CERN is famous for having “the world’s largest and most powerful accelerator,” according to its website. So a physicist will take for … Continue reading →
<p> A bit over a year ago, I wrote <a href="https://valsopi.com/setting-sail">a post</a> in which I talked about embarking on a journey to financial freedom. Specifically speaking — I took out a personal loan so I could focus on solely building products. </p><p> With that announcement, I decided to open up all my finances for anyone to see how it really was to chase a dream like...
the doctors will tell your spouse and they’ll break down in grief they’ll message someone they trust who’ll rush to see them, as soon the time allows. your workplace will send an email and all your colleagues will be saddened whatsapp broadcasts will flood phones of those time allowed to occasionally see you. your spouseContinue reading "When You Die"
On waiting for AI's Godot.
In 1907, fourteen years before she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton was introduced to Morton Fullerton, a journalist with whom she would embark on a passionate affair. It was months after that first encounter, in October, that she began to write The Life Apart (L’âme close), […]
Ah, it’s Halloween weekend. And that means it’s time for our favorite Japanese festival Jimi Halloween, where people dress up in costumes so mundane they have to be explained. The tradition was started in 2014 by a group of adults at Daily Portal Z who “kind of wanted to participate in the festivities of Halloween, but were […] Related posts: Japan’s Jimi ‘Mundane’ Halloween Costumes of...
Things are not always what they seem
The articles you enjoyed most this year, my personal favorites, and a recap of an unusually turbulent year in tech.
Six months ago, I wrote about Direct Air Carbon Capture and ended with this: I remember hearing that “we’ve spent hundreds of years taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into our atmosphere and we are going to spend hundreds of years taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back into […]
Breaking off TikTok from ByteDance might be the right thing to do — but it will come at a high cost. PLUS: How Twitter keeps competitors off its For You page
Each weekday at 9 a.m., beginning in November 1976 and continuing until just days before his death in 1987, Andy Warhol would engage in a lengthy phone call with Pat Hackett, a close friend who had initially started working for him as a typist in 1968. During his conversations with “Miss Diary,” Warhol would regale […]
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Breaking: Slamming 'Slam' SLAMMED Today's News: Just 10 days till the big new thing!
George Crabbe was determined to become a successful poet. So much so that in April of 1780, aged twenty-five, he left his career in medicine and moved to London where he could focus entirely on the craft he so wanted to master. It was at this moment that he began a journal in which to […]
Few people witnessed the tumultuous events of mid-20th century Britain quite like Duff Cooper, a charismatic politician whose life was as colourful as it was influential. Born in 1890, he was known as a steadfast politician who famously resigned from his government post over the Munich Agreement, only to be drawn back into the fray […]
Technology's ability to improve lives and alleviate suffering is undeniable. It has swept through our lives like a tidal wave, lifting us from the depths of ignorance and suffering. It continues to reshape the world and grants us access to tools and knowledge previously unimaginable. Yet, there was
Recently I’ve been chatting with a number of companies who are building out internal LLM labs/tools for their teams to make it easy to test LLMs against their internal usecases. I wanted to take a couple hours to see how far I could get using Streamlit to build out a personal LLM lab for a few usecases of my own. See code on lethain/llm-explorer. Altogether, I was impressed with how usable...
The short answer is no—but these eight horn players came close
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: This is one of those frustrating comics where the votey, made in 4 seconds, is funnier than the whole comic. Today's News: Bea Wolf is available now!
All successful cultural change (books, movies, public health), has a super-simple two-step loop: AWARENESSTENSION–>Loop<– It’s easy to focus on awareness. Get the word out. Hype. Promo. I think that’s a mistake. Because awareness without tension is useless. The tension is like pulling back a rubber band. WHY would someone who becomes aware take action? Is […]
In praise of our "property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities."
In 2019, I helped my colleague Musa al-Gharbi document the extraordinary prominence of Donald Trump in news media content (see here). I have recently updated that previous analysis. Briefly stated, no U.S. president in recent history has received a similar amount of media attention as Donald Trump. Even as of 2022, out-of-office Trump is often more prominent in news media content than the current...
One of two things is true: A placebo is a force beyond understanding, one that is capable of disappearing when we do the appropriate double-blind tests and has mechanisms that defy our knowledge of the laws of physics. Or… A placebo is a prompt for our subconscious to do the hard work of healing our […]
Lamborghini Performance footwear 3d concept AoiroStudio0503—23 Hussain Almossawi is a talented 3D artist and art director based in Brooklyn, NY, USA. Recently, he created a concept work that reimagines what would happen if Lamborghini, the iconic sports car brand, ventured into the world of high-end performance footwear. The concept is a celebration of the 60th...
More hope. More health. More security. More innovation. More breakthroughs. More connection. More creation. More joy. The climate movement doesn’t have to be about asking individuals to bear the burden of systemic problems. It’s not about living with less. It’s about demanding more. From your employer, your community, your local government, your country. The more […]
It's just that some people don't realise it.
In “What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came?” I reviewed The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen. In brief, Allen’s explanation for the Industrial Revolution is that Britain had high wages and cheap energy, which meant it was cheaper to run machines than to pay humans, and therefore it was profitable to industrialize. He emphasizes these factors,...
In the middle of the 19th century, well-meaning Victorian doctors would advise their patients to take ‘the sea cure’. Dutifully, they would go to the coast – particularly in the south – bathe in the waters and draw in lungfuls of salty air. Smart promenades, […]
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Have you noticed nobody has ever explained *why* it's supposedly bad if human beings are converted to paperclips? Today's News:
Click here to go see the bonus panel! Hovertext: Unfortunately there's no plumber-bot to fix that leak. Today's News:
When she wrote this entry in her journal, Elizabeth Smart was pregnant with the second of four children to fellow poet George Barker, a married man who, by the time of his death, had fathered fifteen children to four women. Smart essentially raised their brood alone, whilst somehow finding time to work for the Ministry […]
It was on the eve of their wedding in September of 1862 that Russian writer Leo Tolstoy showed his diaries to 18-year-old Sofia Behrs, the young woman with whom he was to spend his life. Filled with lurid confessions and tales of past affairs, these notebooks made an instant, long-lasting, and negative impression on Behrs. […]
I am not sure why, but I don’t have much interest in life. I have been this way for as long as I can remember, though I am not sure if my...
I’ve been doing a bunch of datetime debugging recently, and this function has been an amazing help: function today(): Date { return new Date(); } It’s not very sophisticated – it just returns the current time – but we use it everywhere we need to get the current time. (You could criticise the name, but at this point we’re all used to it.) Having a single source of “now” is super helpful for...
Lessons from building Tally.so from 0 to $40k MRR all in public
The kinetic phase may come next.
I’m still catching up with myself. I wanted to spend March thinking about Socrates as a philosopher, independent from Plato’s use of him, to the extent that it is possible. The Socrates of Aristophanes in The Clouds is not much help. But luckily we have Xenophon, a close contemporary of Plato, and his Recollections of Socrates. Xenophon was not really a philosopher. He wrote many books in a...
The company got to profitable growth by cementing its first mover advantage and doubling down on retailer relationships but faces competition from incumbent giants
The case makes a nuanced argument about how Amazon abused monopoly power through anti-discounting measures and tying in Prime with Fulfilled by Amazon
From time to time the Earth gets hit by a wave of energetic particles from the sun – solar flares or even coronal mass ejections (CMEs). In 1859 a large CME hit Earth (known as the Carrington Event), shorting out telegraphs, brightening the sky, and causing aurora deep into equatorial latitudes. If such an event […] The post Evidence of Ancient Solar Flares first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
The Inspector Gadget cartoon was, naturally, full of fun gadgets. Even the eponymous inspector’s niece, Penny, got some nifty gizmos. One notable example was her computer book, which was exactly what it sounds like. To pay homage to the classic cartoon, Becky Stern recreated Penny’s computer book using a pair of Arduino boards. It isn’t clear exactly […] The post Replicating Penny’s computer book...
The skill of capital allocation — a mysterious, under-discussed element of remarkable business performance.
This is the fifth and final episode of a five-part pilot series to gauge your interest in "How It's Made"-esque heavy construction videos. Drop a comment or send me an email to let me know what you think! Watch on YouTube above or ad-free on Nebula here.
By disrupting the age-old home services industry, the Indian unicorn offered many women a rare opportunity for social mobility. Now, they want more.
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When Google killed Google Reader, the bloggosphere took a severe hit and the content quality went down because there weren't enough readers to justify the effort it takes to maintain a high quality blog.
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