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The Intellectual Obesity Crisis (2022)
Information addiction is rotting our brains
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Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers
Brick Technology’s new video features increasingly powerful Lego machines designed to topple ever stronger towers. I love their iterative engineering videos (an
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David Chang on the long, hard, stupid way
I recently came across a great quote from David Chang, “Just because we’re a casual restaurant, doesn’t mean we don’t hold ourselves to fine dining standards. We try to do things the right way. That usually means doing things the long, hard, stupid way.” David has elaborated on this quote: When your back is turned […]
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Using a list to manage executive function
I use a fairly well-developed todo list system to manage my workload during the day. Some of the details are unusual, so I thought it would be worth sharing.
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Aristotle – How to live a good life
2400 years ago Aristotle found out how to be happy. His Nicomachean Ethics is an operating manual for a good life: What is good? First of all, what makes a thing a good thing? A good…
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2023 Letter
A walk-and-talk; Crumb; running and tangping; Knausgaard; Elon as Palmer Eldritch; memelords; Chicago as a megacity; Norton; and a pause.
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Button Stealer
Steals buttons from the websites you visit. Do your usual online stuff and watch the collection of stolen buttons grow.
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The most talented person in the world
Jodie is a cross-functional 3D designer and blogger. She has special interests in open source 3D printing for R&D and has spent a lot of time at different projects across the globe to learn more about 3D printing. Most of what she has learned is from hands-on experience.
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An RNG that runs in your brain
Humans are notoriously bad at coming up with random numbers. I wanted to be able to quickly generate “random enough” numbers. I’m not looking for anything that great, I just want to be able to come up with the random digits in half a minute. Some looking around brought me to an old usenet post by George Marsaglia…
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Fogus: Things and Stuff of 2024
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2024. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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The Zombocom Problem
Welcome to zombocom… you can do anything at zombocom… anything at all… the only limit… is yourself…
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How to be a good listener
The secrets that will make you much better at listening to a degree that your relationships are significantly more successful, peaceful, gratifying, intimate, and trusting, have to do with what you…
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Blog Writing for Developers (2023)
Writing is one of the most powerful forms of communication, and it’s useful in a multitude of roles and contexts. As a blog-writing , documentation-authoring , twitter-shitposting DevEx engineer I spend a lot of my time writing. Recently, someone paid me a very nice compliment about a blog I’d written and asked how…
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Do Skis Get Blunt?
Last winter, I rode a ski lift alongside a guy who claimed to be a retired Olympic ski tuner. Ski tuning, he said, was all a scam. If you keep your skis dry between days out they’ll stay sharp for their entire lifetime. Don’t get him started on waxing. His specific claim was that skis get blunt from corrosion, and all…
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Winning a hackathon, losing my sanity
A few weeks ago, my friend Ben and I won JumboHack , a hackathon at Tufts University. Our entry generates a Spotify Wrapped-like summary of students’ dining habits by scraping Tufts’ meal plan portal. Through some clever promotion on Ben’s part, we managed to get hundreds of students to use it in just a couple of…
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Why to Not Write a Book
A discussion of why I don’t intend to turn Gwern.net into a book, and how trying to write a book can harm writers.
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FOSDEM 2024: my experience, some notes and tech tips
I'm sleep-deprived, completely exhausted, but incredibly excited about the whole experience. Here are my notes, impressions and a lot of pictures about FOSDEM 2024.
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South Pole Water Infrastructure
Fresh water from snow, at 70 below!
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Things I don't know about AI
The more I learn about AI markets, the less I think I know. I list questions and some thoughts.
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Ten years of remembering every day that passes (2022)
I began this process on 17 December 2011 and let the tenth anniversary pass without comment, so the time has come to reflect. Firstly, I con...
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You must read at least one book to ride
The first is going to sound bad in a culture where engineers are encouraged to apologize for existing while it is totally acceptable for a grifter that can't code to insist that they're a "thought leader". It is that, in my immediate professional environment, I am consistently acknowledged to be one of the best…
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Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal
There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the…
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Visiting the annual Braun collectors fair
The Braun+Design Börse is an annual event and fair focusing on Braun products. Braun might not be the design icon it was 40 years ago, but starting in 1955, it profoundly impacted the design world, starting with its cooperation with the Ulm School of Design. With Dieter Rams as
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What Monks Know about Focus
It’s Never Been Easy to Battle Distraction. Reviewing Jamie Kreiner’s New Translation of John Cassian in ‘How to Focus’
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Losing two jobs in one year
and learn to accept imperfection
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How I prepare a talk for a tech conference (2022)
By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, which starts at $1/month! My 🌶️ spicy take 🌶️ is that I don’t like seeing tech talks live. I get very little out of 95% of…
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No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)
Garbage in garbage out