There's a software directory called "zero data" that aims to catalogue software/sites/etc. that allow you to completely own and control your data in respect to their usage: https://0data.app/
You put words onto page with which given a thousand I could not have equaled. We will all follow, in time.
"I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social center, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlors, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colors and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing - for myself alone - wispy songs I compose while waiting.
Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I'm given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not entertained, that's fine too."
I cannot strongly recommend enough the documentary Icarus, which starts out with the premise of "how hard is it to ask for steroids" and spirals into completely insane territory from there.
If someone wants an entertaining and approachable dive into the insanity that is datetime, Kip Cole did a great talk at ElixirConf in 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VfPvCI901c
John Ousterhout also was leading a project called RAMcloud (I thought was interesting) that the article doesn't mention - [1], [2]. Also, he has a book on s/w design [3] which is short and nice, and is more of a collection of ideas rather than an approach, which I highly recommend.
For anyone looking for an introduction to the Riemann Hypothesis that goes deeper than most videos but is still accessible to someone with a STEM degree I really enjoyed this video series [1] by zetamath.
I understood everything in Profesor Tao's OP up to the part about "controlling a key matrix of phases" so the videos must have taught me something!
It's honestly a breath of fresh air to simply read a book that explains clearly how Unix works, with self-contained examples, and which is comprehensive and organized. (If you don't know C, that can be a barrier, but that's also a barrier reading blog posts)
I don't believe the equivalent information is anywhere on the web. (I have a lot of Unix trivia on my blog, which people still read, but it's not the same)
IMO there are some things for which it's really inefficient to use blog posts or Google or LLMs, and if you want to understand Unix signals that's probably one of them.
(This book isn't "cheap" even used, but IMO it survives with a high price precisely because the information is valuable. You get what you pay for, etc. And for a working programmer it is cheap, relatively speaking.)
One book that really resonated with me was "The Deepest Well" about the epidemic of childhood trauma and its deep and measurable impact on health outcomes for adults. I learned that resolving childhood trauma would help on the order of curing cancer in terms of health outcomes in our society
Well written article, nice and to the point. Do recommend.
Decades ago I declared myself too stupid to use shared memory with threading; I have learned to avoid this whenever possible, or abstract away the memory access under a safe layer as soon as possible. One of the greatest decisions of my career.
Memory model semantics is one of the parts of systems programming that is generally poorly understood; I have had long discussions with senior programmers who have spent their careers carelessly threading their code without realizing what is happening under the hood. Not only did some of them not properly understand the acquire/release model, but they were not even aware of its existence.
For a more in-depth explanation, I recommend Sutter's excellent talk "Atomic <> weapons": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8eCGOqgvH4. It is a two hour lecture, but it will be worth your time.
Huge selection including obscure styles and finishes. Nuts, bolts, screws, hardware, etc.
One of the best things about them is that they sell small lots including single screws if that is all you need.
Another great thing is that they ship quickly and if your order is relatively small it arrives in your mailbox instead of needing to be delivered by UPS or another shipper. They ship orders in packages appropriate to the order, unlike Amazon.
They also add products to their inventory if customers need something they don't normally carry.
Prices are also reasonable.
I found them years ago and now they are one of my main suppliers. McMaster Carr is another.
I start pretty much every new electronics project with the question "Which M5Stack product handles 99% of the use cases?" and I start iterating from there
Well laws of physics is what gave us radio in the first place.
Some of my favorite video documentaries are on how it was theorized and then slowly developed over years and decades until they finally got to spark-gap transmitters.
But just imagine listening to spark-gap morse code radio broadcasts for years as amateur and then suddenly someone does a broadcast test of actual voice (violin!) That must have been incredible to hear wirelessly.
24 December 1906 Reginald Fessenden, that was the leap that eventually gave us wifi
This was really sad news; his Security Engineering probably did more than any other single textbook to influence my career and making me a better engineer in the process.
All the examples of bright people having made systems which turned out to be more brittle than the designers assumed really drove home the point that even 'simple' tasks are HARD.
One of my favorite math/graphics YouTube creators Freya Holmér did an excellent intro to Geometric Algebra not that long ago [1]. If you have any interest in 3d graphics (especially but no limited to splines/Bezier curves) then be sure to check out all of their videos.
I personally have always struggled with linear algebra and I tend to find these Clifford Algebra approaches much more intuitive.
The Moon Machines episode "The Navigation Computer" focuses a bit on Charles Draper's system based on gyroscopes and accelerometers. The show includes a segment on the software-development issues that led to Tindallgrams. I never thought to look them up. Thank you.
It looks like Vector Networks is based on Boris Dalstein's work (https://www.borisdalstein.com/research/phd). He even has a startup (VGC) for Vector Graphic Editing tool based on these concepts. It is pretty cool!
P.S. I have no affiliation with his work, although I did contribute 10$ to his Kickstarter Campaign back in the day.
I've just recently re-read the Alexander chapter in Molly Steenson's book Architectural Intelligence. It's the most cogent and useful short reading I've found of Alexander. Well worth a look for the unfamiliar. Which you are not of course, but this comment is to help other folks find a good onramp.
For anyone interested in the structure of the software that ran Ingenuity (and some hardware design aspects, such as the use of commercial off-the-shelve parts), there is an awesome and critically underwatched video of Timothy Canham explaining everything:
One massively overlooked way to improve spaced repetition is to make easier cards. It's surprising just how easy an effective card can be.
I started out using Anki to learn French vocabulary. I'd make pairs of cards, with English on one side and French on the other. This started out easy, but became utterly brutal and depressing with several hundred cards in my deck. Too many near synonyms.
I eventually took a hint from Katzumoto's Japanese advice, and started making cloze cards. I'd copy and paste an entire paragraph from an ebook or a web page, and hide just one word. These cards were easy, but also effective.
Then I got lazier.
I'd only hide half a word. Or I'd just boldface a word, and mark the card as a "pass" if I could sort of remember that word in context.
And somehow, these cards actually worked better.
Then I got lazier still. If seeing a card made me grown "Oh, not that card", I'd just delete it. If I missed a card 3 times, I configured Anki to permanently suspend it. If I actually needed to know a word, no worries, I'd see it again soon in a more helpful context. And my French vocabulary continued to grow by leaps and bounds.
I don't think that biggest improvements will come from better spaced repetition algorithms. I suspect the biggest wins will come from improved card formats. And it's surprisingly hard to make a card too easy to be useful.
(Source: 35,000+ Anki reps across three languages.)
It's a bit scary to think how much depends on the expertise of this company and their ability do produce those machines.
I recently got recommended the video "Imaging at ASML" [0] and it absolutely blew my mind. If you decide to watch it, don't ditch it before you see the animations of the light waves and the problems that need to be solved.
If this is interesting to you, you should check out the interesting work that karlicoss and others have done with "Human Programming Interface" [0] / [1].
I've been kicking this idea around for quite a few years and have gone through multiple iterations before finding HPI and tossing out or adapting all my work in favor of building off theirs. Mine is a bit more service / cloud oriented in how it runs (shocker... at one point I made it into a product) while HPI is heavily local-first for obvious good reasons.
HPI is a great platform to build your own stuff off and benefit from all the work that has already been done because imo building a good foundation is the hardest part. Sean Breckenridge's HPI-API is super interesting and useful, could likely be worked into this search engine concept, quite sure Sean actually has both newsboat and Firefox modules already made.
I wrote modules of my own and made an authentication wrapped HPI-API and a GraphQL instance but currently in the middle of an infra move so nothing super cool to show off. At one point I had a dashboard powered by it but we all know how these one-off internal-use-only projects end up. :)
I think the most interesting thing I've written for HPI is my ActivityWatch syncing. It's been happily churning away for years and during my infra move, I discovered that it had about 20GB of activity data stockpiled. Multiple years of down to the second cataloguing of everything I did and saw on the computer.
Lots of interesting stuff in collecting and leveraging your data. If any of this stuff catches your eye, I highly encourage browsing karlicoss' exobrain [2] because there are some interesting things in there.
I post all of this to hopefully save someone (or many people) time because I recall how dejected I felt having spent multiple weekends chipping at a problem someone already solved better. I think this previous discussion was where I discovered it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26269832
There is an really impressive recent site here https://polyhedra.tessera.li/ with a 3d viewer, it even has interactive animation where you can see how they transform into each other, for example an icosahedron gets changed into a diminished icosahedron and back.
This video is a great primer on the state of the art of display technology right now and seriously changed how I view each tech. Seems like there is a lot of convergence between the main technologies and they all borrow from each other in different ways in their pursuit of the ideal display.
I hate most philosophy, but I read Parfit's technical Reasons and Persons and genuinely enjoyed it. Did you ever think teleporters could be the basis for an argument against souls? Parfit thought so. Plus, his writing is optimized for being understandable -- no flowery bullshit. You don't need any special knowledge to appreciate his work.
"Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event,
not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict
whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not
irrational to have high hopes."
If you're interested in this kind of general book in this this genre; I'd also recommend The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester. It's flawed in the back third but the balance of the book is an entertaining read. https://www.biblio.com/9780062652553
From 1965, talks about how it was actually constructed and tested, showing, for example, the factory machinery and people who constructed the read-only rope memory (Gentle warning that there's some anachronistic language where they refer to women working on the hardware as "girls")
I loved Robert Wills talk about the AGC, linked by @leetrout elsewhere in this thread
