Cross the world four times
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
In 2000, the programmatic browser differences were perplexing, so I made a tool to help manage the problem. I started with something similar to ecomcon (see How JavaScript Works , Chapter 23). I would have special markers in the source that designated sections of code that would only be delivered to particular…
Today is my last day at IBM. If you’ve been following along, IBM bought my startup Resilient Systems in Spring 2016. Since then, I have been with IBM, holding the nicely ambiguous title of “Special Advisor.” As of the end of the month, I will be back on my own. I will continue to write and speak, and do the occasional…
Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.
This is a personal website, at the outskirts of the web, away from social media and publishing platforms.
I. The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief fora…
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
The primary goal of this site is to help people put victimhood behind them and craft a future of their choosing. "Living well is the best re...
This post started out as a long-form response to this tweet by Raj Kunkolienkar:
In the past, gods and demons allowed us to talk about phenomena that we didn’t fully understand. During the Enlightenment, we tried to kill them and explain everything in reductionist scientific terms. But it feels to me like we’ve come full circle. We’re back to using oversimplified metaphors to wrap our minds around…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Harry Truman was President and Sputnik was a word that only Russian language experts knew when Doug Engelbart first thought about displaying words and images on radar screens, storing them in computers, and manipulating them with levers and buttons and keyboards. For over thirty years, Engelbart has been trying to…
I recently received a message from a friend of mine, a young man named Mike. He told me that Digital Minimalism had changed his life. ... Read more
E very friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, 1 [1] you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”
On writing a technical book for experienced programmers.
Hash tag #cryptowinter
Epistemic spot checks typically consist of references from a book, selected by my interest level, checked against either the book’s source or my own research. This one is a little different t…
A function to return the number of digits in an input (natural) number provides many learning opportunities for a new programmer
An Oldie but Goodie From Boeing.
Download audio version
A summary of the legendary investor, Charlie Mungers talk on Psychology.
On the resilience of books in the face of apps, attention monsters, and an ad-driven online economy
Software rots. That is: Adapting mature software to new circumstances tends to take more time and effort than writing new software from scratch. Software people don't like to admit this, but open so…
I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why. I had to tackle a simple question do so:
In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of ci…
I speak very fast. It’s like the words are piled up in my mouth and I can’t say one without the rest tumbling out. Through my whole life people have told me to slow down, speak more clearly, and enunciate. I can do it if I concentrate but I quickly relapse into gushing out words. As I now give lots of conference…
How I make it work (or not)