Beating the Averages
No, Humans Are NOT Causing A "Sixth Mass Extinction"
CBS "60 Minutes" sacrifices its credibility in selling apocalyptic pseudoscience
Permissionless public infrastructure | Paul Dowman
Many people today believe that open source software is positive for our society, but fear the logical next steps: open state, open execution, and open…
Data Availability Sampling: From Basics to Open Problems - Paradigm
Paradigm is a frontier technology investment firm that builds and invests in crypto, AI, robotics, and across new frontiers from the earliest stages.
There's Just Too Many Damn Elites
And not enough high-status cushy jobs to go around
Earendil: an uncensorable decentralized network (1/3)
The coolest thing I'm currently working on at Mel is probably Earendil, a prototype decentralized, type-II censorship resistant communication and payment network, which will be a foundational building block in Mel's off-chain composable ecosystem.
Why Hoon? • Blog
The promise of Urbit lies in its reimagination of the digital world using components that are as constrained and limited as possible.
Staring at walls to improve focus and productivity
I came across a video by Simple Lucas describing a routine to improve focus and productivity.
The routine was basically:
Don’t use any screens/entertainment when trying to focus on work.
When you start to feel mentally drained, sit and stare at a wall for x minutes to recover focus.
I’ve been trying it, and it’s a very effective (but hard) routine.
The Last Quiet Thing
Your possessions came alive. Now they won't stop talking.
Right Thinkers #6: Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821)
“In the sensory as in the higher order, the law is the same and is old as evil: THE REMEDY FOR DISORDER WILL BE PAIN.” -the Count in The Saint Petersburg Dialogues, by Joseph de Maistre…
No-engine gamedev using Odin + Raylib
Games can be made in many different ways. Many games are made using big, general purpose game engines such as Unity and Godot. I enjoy using the Odin Programming Language combined with Raylib.
Odin is a C-like programming language and Raylib is library for drawing graphics, checking input and playing sounds. So it’s just a program that uses a simple library, no engine!
There are no objectively best ways to create games.
Stop Putting Secrets in .env Files
Your .env files are a liability. Two simple patterns for injecting secrets from 1Password or macOS Keychain so credentials never touch disk as plaintext.
Lofi girl protocol
Phoenix's Web Corner! - The Rise of Sanityware
Personality Change among Newlyweds: Patterns, Predictors, and Associations with Marital Satisfaction over Time
The early years of marriage are a time of significant personal and relational changes as partners adjust to their new roles, but the specific ways that spouses’ personalities may change in early marriage and how these changes are associated with ...
A cheat sheet for why using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
Arm yourself with knowledge
The Origins of Wokeness
The yaml document from hell
As a data format, yaml is extremely complicated and it has many footguns. In this post I explain some of those pitfalls by means of an example, and I suggest a few simpler and safer yaml alternatives.
Small Products that Improved My Life
Each of these products solved some problem in my life and took a long time to figure out.
NON-ZERO-SUM GAMES
~ a world-help site ~
If We Build It, Everyone Lives
Why AI doomers are Catastrophically, Spectacularly, and Dangerously wrong
Cross-subsidies
12 Months of Mandarin
Estimates for achieving intermediate fluency in Mandarin Chinese range up to spending years and around 4000 total hours (2,200h classroom hours, 1,800 outside). I did it in 1500 hours total and less than a year.[1]
1. There is a lot of disagreement on language proficiency estimates. They are unreliable and inaccurate. My rough best estimates:
Mean: 2,200h classroom + ~1800h outside - 50% pass ILR 3 - true average level is ~ILR 2+
My journey: 150h classroom + 1350h outs
A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
In many discussions where questions of "alignment" or "AI safety" crop up, I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magic...
continuous deployment with SSH and tailscale
A guide in implementing continuous deployment with SSH and Tailscale
Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
How tech companies make money and why it's important
Icons in Menus Everywhere — Send Help
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
Optimize for momentum
Progress comes from motion. Momentum is the invisible engine of any significant work. A project feels daunting when you face it as a blank ...
~fpereiro
We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed 189 bugs
It’s Friday at 4pm. I’ve just closed my 12th bug of the week. My brain is completely fried. And I’m staring at the bug leaderboard, genuinely sad that Monday means going back to regular work. Which is weird because I love regular work. But fixit weeks have a special place in my heart.
What’s a fixit, you ask? Once a quarter, my org with ~45 software engineers stops all regular work for a week. That means no roadmap work, no design work, no meetings or standups.
Instead, we fix the small things that have been annoying us and our users:
an error message that’s been unclear for two years a weird glitch when the user scrolls and zooms at the same time a test which runs slower than it should, slowing down CI for everyone The rules are simple: 1) no bug should take over 2 days and 2) all work should focus on either small end-user bugs/features or developer productivity.