Entropic Thoughts

In the theme of NixOS enabling fearlessness, here’s a way I use Nix on other Linux distributions to sleep better at night: managing dependencies of simple scripts.

Something funny happened a little while ago: I read about FreshRSS, and it sounded nice, so I installed it on a server and started using it.

James Shore posits that each person-month spent writing code results in 10 days of maintenance in the first year, then 5 days every year after that.

I have written before about my Swedish Colemak hack, but I never explained what makes it so good.

I have long struggled with predicting when peace will occur.

I have decided to start donating a small amount of my fun money to open source projects.

I have a weird setup for my laptop.

I have a small project where I needed to label commits as either “maintenance” or “new development”.

Since people keep asking how this blog is made, and I don’t want to share the awful, terrible code that it is taped together with, I’ve decided to start explaining parts of it piecewise.

When I trained the previous AI comment classifier, I used partially personal private data to do it, and built it on a somewhat shaky foundation, so I couldn’t share the code or data.

Here’s a comment I read in the code I was working on.

I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago: I make edits in my text editor, I switch over to a terminal window and I run a command to compile and execute the code.

It is common for promotional pamphlets aimed at children to contain a themed variant of snakes and ladders.

I have never done any time–frequency transformations.

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book.

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book.

When we tried to get an intuition for the differences in distribution functions, we learned that children subjected to a treatment had greater variation in their score than the reference group.

Imagine every person in a country is assigned some sort of score, and a higher score is better.

Alternative titles: … earns you a high-risk pregnancy … earns you an ascent of Matterhorn … earns you 10,000 km on a motorcycle … earns you two BASE jumps … earns you a day on the frontline in Ukraine These are all about equivalent to the risk of one year…

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book.

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book.

I’ve heard some buzz around the new GLM 5.2 open-weights model.

Lucas Costa has written a good article on how to build systems that can handle code-generating robots.

TL;DR: My new prior is that top-of-the-line LLMs working on easy tasks generate code that is maybe 10 % more complicated than necessary.

A Formula One driver triggered my fact-checkitis.

William Sealy Gosset was great.

People assume all sorts of wild stock market returns when they make their financial calculations.

TL;DR: Instead of labouriously computing \(c = \sqrt{a^2 + b^2}\), we can mentally calculate using the alpha-max plus beta-min algorithm, by estimating \[\hat{c} = \mathrm{max}\left(a, 0.9a + 0.5b \right)\] and this will be very close to the actual \(c\).

In the Henley Royal Regatta two teams at a time propel their boats up a river and compete to be first to go a distance.

Since about three years past time immemorial, the RSS feed for this site has been very anaemic.

Some decade ago I read a good implementation of fizzbuzz.

Some time ago I read an article on what makes a good tutor.

Spaced repetition is best introduced in the words of Gwern: it is a mechanical golem that will never forget, and never let us forget whatever we chose to.

Ada is incredibly well designed.