2024-04-25: Income taxes are bullshit In the news recently: Elon Musk’s US tax bill: $11 billion. Tesla’s: $0. Elon Musk has repeatedly …
2024-04-25: Non-competes are getting outlawed in the US I’ve referenced the excellent Money Stuff newsletter before, and I continue to absolutely …
2024-04-25: Birds are insane Birds are crazy creatures! In October 2022 a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record that …
2024-04-25: A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept Random find of the day: “A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept” …
2024-04-19: The hidden world of repairing underwater internet cables The Verge has a really good – though very long – article on the maintenance of the …
2024-04-18: The Wisdom of James Mickens I am here to talk to you non-believers about The Wisdom of James Mickens. At least those of you who …
2024-04-18: Weird things you can buy online My favorite internet find of the day: Ten weird things you can buy online (and why you would) TLDR, …
2024-04-15: Arguing against accessor functions One of the unpopular opinions I’ve long held in programming is that accessor methods (getters …
2024-04-15: Religious psychology in Dune Have you seen Dune: Part 2 yet? I think it’s well worth watching in the cinema, it’s an …
2024-04-11: Games are about power fantasy The Heart of Gaming Is the Power Fantasy is an essay on the nature of gaming. I have played computer …
2024-04-04: Making fun of the Silicon Valley The Silicon Valley is such a weird place. I’ve never been, but from everything I hear, many …
2024-04-04: What makes the passage of time feel fast Do you get the feeling that time goes by so fast? “The days are long, but the years are …
2024-04-04: Amazon's high-tech stores were, in fact, low tech, and shut down Amazon Ditches ‘Just Walk Out’ Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores, because, as it turns out, it …
2024-03-11: Humans Need Not Apply Humans Need Not Apply was a YouTube video by CGP Gray published in 2014. It talks about how …
2024-03-11: Implementing order books in C++ and Rust - part 3/3 In the previous part we have started working on our Rust orderbook re-implementation of the C++ …
2024-03-07: Configuration knobs considered harmful (Abseil blog) I found the recent Abseil article Performance Tip of the Week #52: Configuration knobs considered …
2024-03-04: Graphs are hard The Hunt for the Missing Data Type (discussion on Hacker News) is an article exploring why are graph …
2024-02-26: Implementing order books in C++ and Rust - part 2/3 In the previous part, we have sketched out the structure of implementing a simple order book in C++, …
2024-02-24: This is why we keep getting scammed and phished In Thanks FedEx, This is Why We Keep Getting Phished (discussion on Hacker News) the author is …
2024-02-17: Implementing order books in C++ and Rust - part 1/3 A fairly standard programming problem in the world of trading is building an order book. In this …
2024-02-08: Advice is disproportionately written by defective people You don’t have polyamory, you hate people who write books makes some very good points, in …
2024-02-03: Explaining politics with trauma The Psychopolitics of Trauma by Scott Alexander is a very interesting essay to read. It talks about …
2024-01-24: Pastor runs crypto scam, blames God As you know, I’m a sucker for hilarious finance news, and therefore for Matt Levine’s …
2024-01-17: Rust oddness: integer literal references? I’m following Rust by Example to finally get into Rust properly, after several years spent as …
2024-01-16: AI sleeper agents A fascinating summary of recent AI research: AI Sleeper Agents A sleeper agent is an AI that acts …
2024-01-11: Passing a struct of 3 or more words is slow on AMD64 I did not realize that the AMD64 ABI specifies a silly calling convention rule that forces structs …
2023-12-21: Words and labels, on the powers of Nobody has seasonal affective disorder describes that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is one of …
2023-12-20: C++ hack: explicitly hiding names Sometimes you’ll encounter situations where a variable is still in scope, but cannot legally …
2023-12-20: Why chess bots are virtually unbeatable A really interesting video with some details about how the Stockfish chess engine works and what …
2023-12-17: Good and evil genies: the AI alignment problem I feel like that as much hype as AI has gotten, rightfully so, the people advocating for caution and …
2023-12-17: Measuring work performance In The value of your work I have talked about how in a job, work is useful for your individual …
2023-12-15: As usual, XKCD is dead right and manages to entertain at the same time: DateTime. I have had the …
2023-12-15: Genetically modified bacteria to end tooth decay? This will be huge, if true: A genetically modified bacterium that outcompetes bacteria causing tooth …
2023-12-14: The frame pointers strike back Interesting: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will enable frame pointers by default, following Fedora which made the …
2023-12-14: The value of your work 2023-12-14 Work is valued if and only if it is something that management (or whoever evaluates your …
2023-12-09: How do all-you-can-eat restaurants stay profitable? All-you-can-eat buffets are so not so widespread in Europe (as best as I can tell), but apparently …
2023-12-03: Towards understanding AI models As much hype and attention that the machine learning / artificial intelligence field gets, and in …
2023-11-22: Recovering from segmentation faults This is brilliant: Cleanly recovering from Segfaults under Windows and Linux (32-bit, x86). I do not …
2023-11-22: C++ vs Rust: performance vs safety I was reading Why I think C++ is still a desirable coding platform compared to Rust on Low Latency …
2023-11-20: C++ language philosophy C++ is one of the oldest mainstream programming languages in use today, and also easily one of the …
2023-11-20: Simultaneous multi-threading: priority signalling I’ve encountered a statement today in a random blog post about the IBM PowerPC 600 series that …
2023-11-10: Earning interest rate on Interactive Brokers cash balance For my investments I normally use Degiro as a broker, because their app and website is quite …
2023-10-26: The state of self-driving: Cruise suspended I was reading California suspends Cruise’s autonomous vehicle deployment, which is about a …
2023-10-24: The Nike smart shoes tragicomedy Did you know that Nike has smart sneakers, since like 2019? I certainly have not, and I am having …
2023-10-24: The EU's stagnating economy vs the USA Economically and financially speaking, the USA is much more attractive than pretty much anywhere in …
2023-10-19: Coordination problems vs the Techno-Optimist Manifesto I’ve come across The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and, well, I have thoughts. (I know, it was …
2023-09-15: Who is Afraid of Charles Darwin? (Homo Deus) I’m continuing to read Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, which, by the way, is …
2023-09-15: Liking What You See: disabling our perception of beauty? Beauty is the promise of happiness. (Stendhal) I’ve been reading Ted Chiang’s short …
2023-09-06: Scott Alexander's Presidential Platform of Satire My Presidential Platform by Scott Alexander gave me a good series of chuckles. It’s a truly …
2023-09-02: The attack of the AI-generated mushroom foraging books And so it… begins? Continues? Let’s say continues to begin: Mushroom pickers urged to …
2023-09-01: NCleanstall: the NVIDIA driver installer we don't deserve Installing NVIDIA Graphics drivers have become annoying. For one, they bundle this GeForce …
2023-08-27: The paradox of historical knowlage (Homo Deus) As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. I …
2023-08-26: Zen Story: Maybe I came by this story the other day: Zen Story: Maybe. Since it’s very short, I’ll just …
2023-08-24: Language-learning ability: children vs adults A long, long article summarizing lots of research on language-learning ability, and whether the …
2023-08-24: Progress without brakes, for good or ill (Homo Deus) I’ve been reading Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. In the first chapter The new human …
2023-08-22: A guide to error-handling Error-handling is a heavily debated topic. Generally speaking, the following mechanisms exist to …
2023-08-20: The technology of Maglev trains I’m a big fan of traveling by trains, and it always pains me how impractical it is in most …
2023-08-13: The Carrot Problem: sharing the secret of your success The Carrot Problem seen via Hacker News: In World War II, the story goes, the British invented a …
2023-08-13: Everything you need to know about light therapy Here is a comprehensive guide to light therapy by a renowned and practicing psychiatrist. In short: …
2023-08-12: Sometimes setting yourself on fire sheds light on the situation In today’s “so that is a thing that happened” column, found in a completely …
2023-08-12: Designs vs the world A fun short article I found today: Fantasy Meets Reality One of my favorite things to notice as a …
2023-08-11: I didn’t know, but apparently iPhone 14 and later offer Emergency SOS via satellite: …
2023-08-11: I recently encountered this on Hacker News: Kenton’s House I used to own a house optimized …
2023-08-07: The Relative Age Effect: How Your Birth Month Impacts Your Success The key insight behind the Relative Age Effect is that schools and all types of education all over …
2023-08-07: Modern movies on human bodies: everyone is beautiful and no one is horny An interesting, thought-provoking, and well-written article: Everyone is beautiful and no one is …
2023-07-27: Why is online dating terrible? It’s not exactly controversial to say that online dating is awful, at least for those seeking …
2023-07-26: PRQL: it's like SQL but actually makes sense I have never had to write particularly complex SQL queries, but I’ve written and seen enough …
2023-07-25: It's turtles all the way down: from high-level programming to CPU microcode It’s turtles all the way down: The following anecdote is told of William James. […] …
2023-07-22: US lawmakers trading and stock ownership Senators to propose ban on US lawmakers and executive branch members owning single stocks, once …
2023-07-22: Financial news and moving the markets Daring Fireball wrote about the Apple GPT news. I think the news itself is pretty uninteresting: …
2023-07-15: Out-of-memory while trying to free it: into virtual memory I recently came by this fun story on getting an out-of-memory error on Linux when trying to free …
2023-07-15: Brought down by the font Oh wow, now this is something: A Microsoft font may have exposed corruption in Pakistan: The …
2023-07-12: Writing a popular blog must be dreadful In Why do I suck, Scott Alexander is analyzing why his earlier articles (from 2013 - 2016) were much …
2023-07-08: Regulation, unexpected consequences of (Sesame edition) Matt Levine writes the amazing Money Stuff newsletter for Bloomberg. I’ve been a reader of his …
2023-07-06: The Twitter-killer? Meta's new Threads app Facebook (err, sorry, Meta) is launching their Twitter competitor today in the US in the form of a …
2023-07-04: Quantum immortality Quantum immortality is a thought experiment that runs roughly like follows: If the many-worlds …
2023-07-01: Light and fun fiction: Idol Words At this point my blog has been alive for a few days now, and so it’s high time I mentioned …
2023-06-30: The Three Body Problem I’m very excited for the upcoming The Three Body Problem series! I’ve read and …
2023-06-30: Inside the AI factory: the human element of AIs A fascinating deep-dive from New York Magazine and The Verge into how AI models – including …
2023-06-29: Tech Erosion: the effect of technology (and AI) on our lives StillDrinking has a lot of great essays. He has a way with words that makes reading his articles …