Recent
449 posts in the past 24h
This book is simply incredible — epic in its scale; a scale matched only by the darkness of the veil, the brief glimpses you get of its vastness. Like soft wan milky starlight illuminating the corners and edges of a building so enormous you can't quite comprehend its size. This is what Le Guin does so well. I read once that if you write 600 pages, somebody will read 600 pages. But if you write a thousand pages and edit it down to 600, they will read a thousand pages —...
I saw that there was going to be a Microsoft Windows Insider meetup in London. I registered for it, thinking ‘why not’. A while later, I got an invite to the event (probably due to someone else cancelling). I was unsure if I actually wanted to go (is it really the kind of thing I want to go to?), but I was free at the time of the event, so I confirmed my attendance (now thinking ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’). The event was a two-hour affair yesterday evening in...
“Saw these solar panels on the roof of a church in Missoula” - https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf/post/3moxvi5e3j22o
The view out of the rabbit’s run at dusk. Status: Heatwave started properly today and there’s no denying it’s hot out there. So far our brick terraced house is a sanctuary, at least downstairs, but that probably won’t last the week. Lots of experimenting with flannels and fans for optimum cooling. Rabbits are doing OK today but we might have to bring in over lunch tomorrow. While they have plenty of shade there’s no escape from the air temp for them. Not many links today....
[The car was purportedly on “Autopilot”, though Tesla claims otherwise.] Do you know where a vehicle really ain’t supposed to be? Inside of a brick home, causing the death of a 76-year-old woman, that’s where this Tesla wasn’t supposed to be.Link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/1-person-killed-tesla-autopilot-crashes-texas-home-rcna350982
I polled you, my social media peers, on what irked and irritated you when it came to paying for things on the web. This is what you said...
We spent a week exploring Franconian Switzerland, starting with a Lego exhibition and a visit to Nuremberg Zoo.
Mark Thompson introduced me to the The Bean Soup Theory: Feedback from outsiders can tempt you to reshape work not meant for them. Write a bean soup recipe for girls needing iron, and someone will ask, “What if I don’t like beans?” Then comes the temptation to tweak it. Replace bean soup with creative work and the principle still applies. My first product was an intermediate video course on unit testing. When I asked an ex-coworker for feedback, he asked: “Did you include...
In 2019, Andrew blogged about collinearity in Bayesian models. In the comments, he pointed to an example from Bayesian Data Analysis, 2nd edition (BDA2). I think it is a useful example to keep in mind when extrapolating from sample to population. Since folks (like me) may only have BDA3 on their shelf, I thought I’d talk thru it. Pretend it is 1980 and we are at the US Census Bureau. We just revamped the occupational coding system, and it’s so much better ! We want...
I went for a 9.39km run. It felt good. My average pace was 9 minutes 2 seconds per kilometre. In running terms that is quite slow but a huge improvement for me since starting this training journey back in January. Back then I was running 11 minute to 13 minute kilometres. So my pace is improving which feels really great. I saw this reel or YouTube short (fell back on it a few times this weekend) that in order to not get cut off for a half iron man you need a 3 min twenty...
Sorry, the blog post title is a lie. This blog post was not written at noon. It was written during June. But I decided to do a little word play. Weather The weather has been pretty nonsensical. As usual. More frequent is weather warnings for yellow-level thunderstorms, which then end up just being rain that happens suddenly and lasts for 10 minutes. Then the weather continues to be sunny. Yeah, various levels of nonsense continuing in the summer. I wrote that at like, the...
I have had exactly two conversations this week about denormalization, which is a sign that it is time to write a blog post. If you already know what denormalization is, you will likely find this blog post uninteresting. That is okay! It is meant more to be an artifact that I can point to when people who haven't been burnt by the fires of sad databases (or, perhaps, sad ETL pipelines) ask what I'm talking about. The well-behaved schema Imagine the data behind an art...
Just below the heart and just above the solar plexus, to be precise, is a temple in the valley of grace. And here, two fingers' width in front of your chest, to be precise, is a flame that does not burn but gives sweetness. It is like cotton spun from fibers of starlight. All triangles point here. All equations are balanced by the breath this space
House of the Dragon; OK, Season 1 was, in my opinion brilliant and highly watchable. Season 2 not so good. Treading water at times, decent action but only later on in the episodes, twists up to a point but looking back it was more of a placeholder than anything else. So now Season 3 became available to view on Monday, so we were up for it. It's been on about a two year break. Time and memory fade away.The first episode lasted an hour and ten minutes, was said to be full of...
Photo by kaleb tapp on UnsplashWhile the recent livestream interview with Anne Kadet was very warmly received, it’s been suggested that I should offer a text “takeaways” sort of post for those who aren’t really into video. (After all, both Anne and I prefer text. “I never watch videos of anything,” Anne announced early in our conversation. “I would never watch this video!”) So here, for you video resistors (but also for those who enjoyed the full convo and wouldn’t mind a...
If I could give someone younger than me one piece of advice, it would be… well, first of all, they’re not going to listen. I know this because I didn’t listen. I don’t remember taking a single piece of advice from an older person when I was young. I remember people giving me advice. I remember nodding. I remember saying things like, “That’s a really good point.” And then I remember doing exactly what I was going to do anyway. Actually, I’m not sure I listen now. Just last...
You can treat more compelling wants as a reward for having fulfilled less compelling needs. Inspired creativity keeping you up past your bedtime? Reward yourself with resuming your pastime at some point after a good night's sleep. Social media keeping you from starting your exercise regimen? Reward yourself with virtual engagement after having concluded your physical activities. An unclean home keeping you from hosting people and events there? Reward yourself with...
Lumi was off school early today because of the excessive heat. It is a pity that there doesn't seem to be a direct translation for the German "Hitzefrei" (which basically means "free because of heat"). I think she used her time very wisely.
Limiting myself to 9 because that's what the format was, but I could prolly go WAY harder Last week, the 9 Steam Games I Want to Spread page was going around all over socials and I wanted to do one, but instead of "make an image with it and social media post it" I kinda figured it would be great blogging vector since: I'm nothing if not verbose about shit I like and want to share with others The world is on fucking fire right now and we all could use some good vibes The...
Julius Caesar stood on the bank of a shallow river called the Rubicon. It was 49 BC, and he was out of options. The Senate, marshalled by his rival Pompey, had ordered him to surrender his command in Gaul and return to Rome as a private citizen, which in practice meant prosecution, ruin, and probably either exile or death. The river was the legal edge of Italy, and Roman law forbade any general from leading an army across it. To cross with his legion was treason - an open...
Raymond Chen writes about a man whose work affected us all: I recently learned of the passing of someone whose work nearly everybody knows, but nobody knows his name. Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported the game Chip’s Challenge to Windows for the Windows Entertainment Pack.¹ But that’s probably not the code he wrote that touched the most people. Tony worked on Word 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, then on Word for OS/2 and Word for Mac, then returned to Word...
I always meant to have some major epic planned for today’s post, but alas. What I have instead are some shorter, compartmentalised thoughts on the whole debacle. Why Brexit? There’s a fair bit I could talk about: The evolution of the European Communities to the European Union, worries of the EU overruling domestic decisions, immigration concerns, or decades of weird fearmongering and lies from the press. I could talk about our role in Europe, centuries of foreign policy...
With moonward fist measured steps I make to silence the voice that delights in pity
Humans suffer two big but under-discussed biases, which together make us overly favor people we see as prestigious and sincere. First, humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution, wherein we copy each others’ behaviors, and this wouldn’t work if we copied from random others. So it couldn’t get going without our first big clue on who to copy: prestige. Which has become so entrenched that we greatly over-emphasize prestige even when better alternatives are now...
Punk songs tend to be very, very short and fast. But, one day, the NOFX guys said "fuck that" and decided to make something a bit longer, and here we are, with an 18-minute punk song written in '99. To be honest, it feels more like multiple songs glued together than a "whole" song with changing theme/style. I never listened that much to NOFX or bands like them, they were not "culturally relevant" for me growing up, but they (and bands like that) did influence some of my...