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The warmth of sunlight is not a reliable indicator of how quickly you will sunburn in a given situation. On one hand, you can still get sunburned on a cooler cloudy day, while on the other hand, the sun can feel scorching hot on your skin in the morning and yet you won't sunburn (very quickly). You probably knew this already, but it still feels unintuitive to me. I'm going to look at numbers and…
You find yourself at the beginning of an article. It's a place you've been countless times before, and probably will be again a few more times today. You pick up different articles for different reasons but one thing is certain: if you thought this was written by AI, you would stop reading on the spot . There's already too much to read, more than a lifetime's worth. The last thing you need is to…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I went from a traditional office job to a pure WFH job. Several years and jobs later, I'm still working remotely full time. Working from home has obvious perks, mostly downstream of getting time back from commuting. Time, money and a more flexible schedule are all types of optionality, a capacity for agency. Normally, you have to trade these things off against each…
Rationalists love to evangelize about lumenators and the mood/energy benefits of getting as many lux as possible. Give us more! But while I would never discourage someone from building a lumenator, I would hesitate to recommend it as a first-line treatment. Now, I do consider myself to be pro-lumenator. I made one two and use them daily in winter to stave off seasonal depression. But they were a…
I've been working as a professional programmer for a number of years, but I'm almost purely self-taught. Computers have been a lifelong interest of mine which has driven most of my learning. But looking back, I realized that my Mom played a big role in helping me take the first few steps on this path. In the early 2000s, I was in elementary school and Mom was working as a university lecturer. I…
Recently I was at a workshop on agentic programming, and the presenter mentioned a tool which was presumably itself developed with LLM assistance. Ironically it only works on Mac OS. It's a tool that promises to help you build whatever you want, but I guess nobody wants that on Windows or Linux. But actually, it's not so easy. Cross-platform development is at odds with vibecoding, which needs a…
It is said that everyone hates flying for their own unique reasons. I love flying though. No-one would deny that it has its bad parts. But I still look forward to it every time. I get to climb into a beautiful machine, find the seat which has been reserved for me, look over the buzzing tarmac and viscerally feel the plane take off. Once in flight, someone brings me a glass of coke, which I…