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A science fiction obsession led me to psychological war
I've spent the past three years researching and writing a book about the history of psychological warfare in the United States. It’s called Stories Are...
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Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 473 posts.
272
Rabbit hole: stumbling across two Portuguese punched cards
Look, here's the thing, I don't like mysteries that involve technology. I think I hate them because I know that some other human created the...
273
The ü/ü Conundrum
I implemented search and filtering for entities on our product at epilot. The users were heavily using the feature, however, a unique issue surfaced: difficulties in filtering file names containing diacritical marks like umlauts (Äpfel, über, schön, etc.).
274
A primer on the current state of longevity research
4k words, 19 minutes reading time
275
Calendar types in watches
Mechanical watches that can show a date correctly are pretty rare, and the ones that do are very expensive (starting at $10k). But why? Let me explain.
276
The Surreal Magnificence of Fatherhood
His arrival, our survival, and many transformations.
277
Ribbonfarm Is Retiring
After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I've decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com…
278
Individualized Spaced Repetition in Hierarchical Knowledge Structures
Spaced repetition is complicated in hierarchical bodies of knowledge, like mathematics, because repetitions on advanced topics should trickle down to update the repetition schedules of simpler topics that are implicitly practiced (while being discounted appropriately since these repetitions are often too early to…
279
Small Things
The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 195.
280
The unstallable plane that stalled
The Cessna 185 Skywagon is a high wing, single engine aircraft: basically a Cessna 180 with six seats, a strengthened fuselage and a slightly more powerful engine. It’s a popular aircraft in remote…
281
It's called a dance floor
Pound-for-pound, Vogue by Madonna is one of the most remarkable examples of artificial stereophonic sound ever produced.
282
"My Bike Is Everything to Me"
Former NBA player and TV sportscaster Bill Walton died on Monday at the age of 71. He was a quirky dude and as someone who’s been known to veer off onto seeming
283
Use Your Potions and Scrolls
I find that when I play RPG games, I often hoard single-use items like potions and scrolls, saving them for some future critical moment. I finish games like Skyrim with a backpack full of unspent resources, reserved for a crisis that never actually arrives. What’s the point, then, of all these items? Just like I save…
284
Bridge to Nowhere
Taking a closer look at the opening act of a glioblastoma diagnosis.
285
Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
It was not easy or quick, and there were so many qualifiers that, for over a decade, I didn’t really think I “deserved” the label. But as I got older, those qualifiers started dropping off one by one, and today I’m convinced that I have perfect pitch. I describe my musical journey and thoughts on what perfect pitch…
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The Sphere
Las Vegas’ $2.3 billion immersive flagship takes a distressingly prophetic look inward.
288
How to graduate your PhD when you have no hope
a.k.a. Richard Hamming vs. Richard Feynman
289
I Used Netscape Composer in 2024
The story of a geeky twist on "Party like it's 1999".
290
Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's suicide
Genius is fragile. Success, even more so. What does it mean then for an artist to fail?
291
Four lines of code it was four lines of code
Four lines of code … it was four lines of code
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Just use fucking paper, man
I’ve tried Notion, Obsidian, Things, Apple Reminders, Apple Notes, Jotter and endless other tools to keep me organised and sure, Notion has stuck around the most because we use it for client stuff, but for todo lists, all of the above are way too complicated. I’ve given up this week and gone back to paper […]
294
Error Handling in Baby Toys
Electrical baby toys are interesting to disassemble and look at how it’s made. Not up to the …
295
Droste’s Lair
A swords-and-sorcery programming environment for building and counting mathematical structures
296
On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
297
Microwave spontaneously turned on by its LED display
My microwave oven started to malfunction at around five years old. It started to randomly power on the lamp, fan, and turntable. It progressively got worse over several weeks until it was mostly stuck on. The microwave oven is not usable when this happens: It behaves as if the door were open, causing the control panel…
298
What I've Learned in the Past Year Spent Building an AI Video Editor
Lessons from An Unexpected Year in AI
299
What made Dostoevsky's work immortal
How Dostoevsky’s Crafted Timeless Art
300
Personality Basins
Personality basins are a mental model that I use to reason about humans within their environment: from modelling why people are they way they are, how they change over time, how mental illnesses and addiction function along with how we should look for their cures, and how the attention economy optimizes itself to…