Shaddy's

Running a Puyo Puyo Tetris tournament at work, I learnt that for some reason not everybody knows all the intricacies of the different versions of Tetris and how they differ.

Oliver Sacks was an extremely popular writer in 20th century psychology, maybe the most celebrated medical storyteller of his generation.

I like tiling window managers like Hyprland or Niri on Linux, and I use them on all my personal machines.

Anki, the spaced repetition software, has recently transferred ownership to AnkiHub.

Doing laundry is an annoying chore, but needs must, and so we do it.

Quoting Matt Freeman on The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast (lightly edited for readability): The feeling of loving other people is one of the best things in the world.

I have written about Newcomb’s Problem before.

If you don’t know Anki, a learning app for flashcards and spaced repetition, I recommend checking it out.

The usual goal in Wordle is to guess the target word in as few attempts as possible.

As you gather more dev projects on your disk and keep recompiling stuff, a lot of artefacts and dependencies tend to accumulate and take up disk space.

A couple of months ago in a context I don’t quite remember, I had the idea of a little challenge: writing a coherent narrative, where each word starts with the next letter of the alphabet, beginning with “a”.

Newcomb’s problem is one of these philosophical thought experiments that I come across every now and then, most recently on the Very Bad Wizards podcast.

I grew up in a German Christian household, so I got to know the one or other German church song.

Git commits have an id that is computed as a substring of a hash over the content of the repository at this point in time, the commit author, message, timestamp, and related metadata.

Everybody “Knows” things, but how well do you know the things you know?

anthropic claude has the amazing artefact feature, which allows it to generate a web app and immediately display it next to the chat for you to interact with. it is phenomenal for prototyping or just iterating quickly on solving a specific problem. unfort…

i am not a web dev – hell, i’m barely a backend dev. but i still occasionally need to debug a website that is misbehaving (surprisingly often, in fact). that is usually simple enough: open the dev tools and look at the console errors and web requests. but…

on the two’s complement podcast, there was recently an episode on technical debt, where they try to really dig into what technical debt actually means and how it can be measured. one of the hosts, ben rady, has since turned the idea into a more fleshed-out

i recently learnt about how people implement auto completion in distributed systems. basically, when i search “shaddy is”, the system should suggest for example a result like “shaddy is very very smart and clever and a great guy in general”.

I really like working with jj, and I wouldn’t want to go back to pure git.

We’re going a bit more niche today.

Given a sample of your writing, Claude is pretty good at guessing your nationality.

When sending messages as bits across the web, you need a way of deciding where one packet ends and another begins.

since these affluencers have built their platforms on mocking ostentatious displays of wealth, some cast them as critics of the 1 percent. however, if these memes were really exposès aimed at shaming the ultra-rich, they’d probably be created by disapprov…

Greenwashing is a valid concern.

The problem is that the bad consequences of underconfidence and under-ambition are severe but subtle, whereas the bad consequences of overconfidence and wishful thinking are milder but more obvious.

Quality over quantity.

I wonder whether everyone would be better off if they automatically reversed any tempting advice that they heard (except feedback directed at them personally).

“There are the engineers who have read 1+ books on a given topic, and sometimes on several topics, and they all come off as extremely competent.

I have come to believe that by and large “best practices” are doing more harm than good.

If you love what you’re doing now and don’t ever want to change jobs, great: you’ve reached the end of your career, even if it plays out over many decades.

Every day, thousands of Cease and Desist letters are issued, telling people to stop what they’re doing (Looking at you, David Chang).

The distrobox project, inspired by the similarly-named toolbox, is a tool to easily switch to different environments like, as the name implies, different linux distros.

Scott Alexander quotes a friend in an article about recognising AI art.

If you’re a casual consumer of pop linguistics, you’ve probably heard the opinion that language change and drift is natural, and so you shouldn’t prescribe how people should speak or write correctly.

It’s a 1/n chance and I did it n times, so the odds should be… 63%.

Aella’s writing about How to be respected as a teenage girl. as a girl, like a young girl, maybe you get the impression that boys are cool in a way girls aren’t. people praise and laugh at boys for doing high risk things. boys do all the good thinking and…

I have, a while ago, started putting small tools that I developed with LLM assistance into a tiny little website.

I just came across this old Paul Graham essay about how to disagree on the internet.

Jujutsu worktrees are very convenient!

Hello World Following the example of my blog hello-world, I figured I’ll start with a hello world note.

fickle direnv Nix submodule syntax In trying to chase down a bug, I was trying to run a very old commit of a project of mine.

If you’re following AI news and discussions, you might have heard about that little game with Gandalf trying to protect a password.

In my post on The Divisible Numbers Challenge, I mentioned a trick for determining in your head whether a number is divisible by 4.

Are you overwhelmed by the vast amount of content on the internet?

When I was a kid, maybe around 10 years ago, and my father and I were readying for some trip I don’t remember, I noticed something weird.

After recently having handed in my Master’s Thesis for my Computer Science Degree, I have found myself looking for a job.

You have found Shaddy’s, a place where I may or may not be writing about things.