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Noticing You're Confused
And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry’s art to notice that tiny note…
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Assange Hearing Day 14
Monday was a frustrating day as the Assange Hearing drifted deep into a fantasy land where nobody knows or is allowed to say that people were tortured in Guantanamo Bay and under extraordinary rendition. The willingness of Judge Baraitser to accept American red lines on what witnesses can and cannot say has combined…
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How does Brown University know where you are?
In September 2020, Brown University accused students of lying about their location; e.g.:
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Writing to the Framebuffer (2018)
I’ve been thinking about cross platform GUIs, and one question led to the next and eventually I was asking: how do pixels end up on the monitor? A pretty neat stack overflow response answers:
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My Favourite Diff
I want to tell the story of one of my favourite diffs I’ve ever committed. It’s probably not the “best” by any objective measure, but it’s a personal favourite and makes for a good story to boot.
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Mastering Jq: Part 1
This is the first part of an ongoing series on mastering jq. jq is a valuable tool that every fast coder has in their tool chest. It contains depths of immense power. In part 1, we'll start off with the basics.
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1.1B Taxi Rides Using OmniSciDB and a MacBook Pro
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Using a self-rewriting README powered by GitHub Actions to track TILs
I’ve started tracking TILs—Today I Learneds—inspired by this five-year-and-counting collection by Josh Branchaud on GitHub (found via Hacker News). I’m keeping mine in GitHub too, and using GitHub Actions to …
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The Slack Social Network
Slack lost to Microsoft head-to-head, but has smartly shifted to a horizontal strategy that the vertically-oriented Microsoft can’t match.
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Porn, Zen, and .vimrc
Vim is a customizable text editor geared towards writing code. But open-ended configuration possibilities lure users into wasting time while chasing after perceived minute gains in productivity. This article describes my Vim journey, starting from heavy personal customization and ending with a renewed love for…
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A Nix terminology primer by a newcomer
Maybe I just haven't been paying attention before, but in the last year or so, there seems to have been an increase in discussion around the Nix package manager. This is also what got me to finally try it, and I'm very happy with the results, even if the road is a little bumpy.
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The Case for Bayesian Deep Learning
The Case for Bayesian Deep Learning Andrew Gordon Wilson Abstract Bayesian inference is especially compelling for deep neural networks. The key distinguishing property of a Bayesian approach is margin
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Emotional Blocks as Obstacles to Learning
My goal was to come up with a system for reading a book. I eventually identified that as the wrong goal, but came up with a pretty great system for doing the much better goal of “how do I answer a …
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Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles (2012)
Adaptation, Algorithms and Ambience
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Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020203 points237 commentscited by 39History & Retro Computing details
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
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How I lost control of our bank accounts to a phone scammer
Yesterday, instead of having a productive afternoon at home, I had the privilege of sitting at the bank for a couple of hours, resolving a problem completely of my own doing: I fell for a phone scammer. My wife and I had to close our accounts—which were in excess of 25 years old—and set up new ones. I then spent hours…
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Old bills in Yemen are worth 10% more than new ones
I often write about odd monetary phenomena on this blog. Here's a new contender, Yemen's dual banknote system. Yemen uses the Yemeni ri...
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Tracking users via CSS
I try to be a friendly citizen of the web. I try to keep my site in good shape. It should load quickly, track nothing beyond your basic server logs, not hassle you about cookies, GDPR or my newsletter. I do have a newsletter but it won't pop up in your face here. I try to stay firmly on the side of friendly and a good…
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If you use GNU grep on text files, use the -a (--text) option
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…