Frivolous Musings

It feels extremely boring to talk or write or think about AI now, when everyone is doing so, when there is so much AI hype and nonsense around.

Made some holiday greeting cards for Purim, and used AI to make an image.

I use Doom Emacs (as discussed previously), and I love it.

Background The custom of reading a passage from the Prophets, the haftorah, is ancient and obscure.

I often use SPC / in Doom Emacs for +default/search-project.

In yeshiva study one of the principles that is emphasised is חזרה, revision.

A common catch for Pandas users is that the default DataFrame.to_csv option is index=True.

The world is split about ChatGPT, and I’ll throw in my two pennies.

Scott Alexander has a post about nerds and hipsters and “authentically” liking stuff and what makes art actually “good”.

I was listening to a podcast about the topic of politician’s salaries, which I think are too high almost everywhere because of the obvious, but hard to mitigate, moral hazard issue.

Something that should be easy but weirdly isn’t is sharing text or files between two of my devices, say a laptop and a phone.

Problem: I have an app I like.

I recently came across a blog post reviewing the long-awaited book of a certain anonymous blogger who disappeared from the internet about a decade ago (after being doxxed).

You may know that the solution for each day’s Wordle puzzle is in its source code.

Populism is hard to define.

I was listening to a podcast (about metaphysics in the social sciences, very interesting but not the topic of this post) and the guest mentioned as an aside the principal-agent theory of political corruption, pretty common in economically-inclined poli-sci

Kevin Lewis’ daily Findings blog at National Affairs is a great way to stay on top of social science news, presenting a daily themed collection of abstracts of recent papers.

About six months ago I downloaded the Arch ISO and stuck it on a thumb drive.

(This guide assumes familiarity with Vim, git and command line, but no prior knowledge of Emacs.

I recently asked a French friend why that country produces so many brilliant mathematicians and scientists - not really expecting a good answer.

There’s a great quote from Douglas Adams’ posthumous final novel, The Salmon of Doubt: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

I recently read the book Just for Fun, a lot of which focuses on Linus Torvalds’ battle for his operating system, Linux, to be “Open Source” software.

In The Will to Believe (Is Life Worth Living?

There’s a funny xkcd cartoon about the tar command: How does one remember those ridiculous single letter commands?

I’ve just finished a book on Nonviolent Comunication and thought it would have made a good pairing with one I read last year, Never Split the Difference, as a lesson in effective communication.

I almost always have earphones in, filling up the time in which I’m not actively focusing on something else with a steady patter of podcasts or mildly interesting books.

Thanks to this explanation (coding it out in Ruby made it clearer to me, but it’s really the verbal explanation that worked).

Someone tweets: I like mushrooms.

In general my view on podcasts is the shorter the better.

You could tell a story in which the West is in decline, and China (and perhaps India, Africa, whoever) is rising to take its place.

Haven’t written anything in a while, and so this post seems appropriate.

I like to think that I’ve taught myself to become a better conversationalist.

It’s common to think of rhetoric as a gloss on top of ’true’ thinking, mere packaging for the intellectual content of our ideas.

An anecdote from Richard Rhodes’ book The Making of the Atomic Bomb: Out of curiosity in 1940, while visiting Berkeley to deliver a lecture, Enrico Fermi attended a seminar one of [J.

There are elections now, and people here are deeply cynical about the slate of candidates.

Back in my yeshiva days, I struggled with the concept of prayer.

A few years ago, a lot of people were sharing an Aziz Ansari bit about feminism.

A very overdiscussed topic lately is political correctness, and if there’s too much of it.

There’s a “salon” here where people get together once in a fortnight to discuss a topic.

I’ve been working at home this week, and leaving the windows open, as I like doing in all but the hottest weather.