Recent content on ☀️ Sunday Stopwatch ⏱️
A cool little trick I learned for the CPTS, but in general for bash (or shells in general? not sure). If a web app filters specific characters, a usual escape is ${IFS} for whitespace, %0a for newlines or in place of ; , ${PATH:0:1} for / and so on. However, some characters are difficult to get reliably, like | or & . If you have access to the place which defines the blocklist, then you can use dd…
The mosquito bucket of doom is a population control mechanism where you dissolve some Bti ( Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis ) into a bucket and allow the mosquitoes to lay eggs in these buckets. The larvae then feed on Bti and die. I tried this method, and it has been unexpectedly effective. Background I live in a really wooded area. It’s not swampy, but we have a lot of mosquitoes. I…
Charter cities are a great idea. You take a poor country, create a special zone in it where the country won’t exert its usual harmful influence, and allow that special zone to grow to a self-managed city. The idea is that if you just change governance, you can create real economic growth with mostly the same resources that the host country already has. The Charter Cities Institute lists…
People who use AI to outsource their thinking and communication are silently losing respect from a subset of their colleagues, potential business partners, clients, readers - and they don’t know it. When someone sends me a text that was clearly AI-generated, or even worse, when they send me “here’s what Claude told me about X”, in my mind, I just downgrade future…
As the title says! I used to run a WordPress blog. Then I switched to using a static site generator (Hugo). This blog is deployed from a Git repo which runs on Hugo. And it’s fine! For the last however many posts you can see underneath this one on the homepage, I’d just go to the repo, cd to content/posts , nvim name-of-new-post.md , and start writing there. With time, I started…
On 10 April 2026, I organized an ACX/LW/rationality meetup. Initially, I intended for it to be just our regular meetup, and “regular” for Zagreb is between 3 and 10 people having a couple of beers. Skyler of Rationality Meetups contacted me saying that Scott would be in Zagreb in April, and we coordinated so that the meetup could accommodate Scott’s schedule. At first, I thought,…
The premise of the Mac is that everything “just works ™️ “. It doesn’t. In my experience, a Dell XPS 13 with Fedora GNOME is closer to “just working” than my Mac (M3 Air). Workspaces have an animation that you can’t turn off. I have to watch the “sliding” animation, and there’s no way for me to speed it up, or remove entirely.…
Disclaimers This essay is me trying to figure out the “edges” of Singer’s argument in Practical Ethics . I’ve written and rewritten it several times, and it bothers me that I don’t reach a particular conclusion. The essay itself remains at the level of “musings” instead of “worked out, internally consistent philosophical refutation”.…
Theory building Programming is theory building 1 . There’s a mental process in which a programmer understands the problem, the context in which the problem happens, as well as the solution to it, codified by – code. In this framework, the code is just a byproduct of the understanding. Whenever understanding is more refined – either by better understanding the domain or by better…
There are other things more important than speed. Speed is important only once you work on the right thing. Work on the right thing. It’s not so over, we’re not so back. It’s never been over. We’ve never had to be back from anything. Everything is ok. You have time. You don’t need to rush. There’s nothing to escape. There’s no looming “permanent…
There’s just too much paper in my life. Papers from the doctor appointments from five years ago. Old receipts. Warranties. And none of it searchable, and my folders just keep growing in size. And I don’t want to put all this data into Google Drive or some other non-encrypted provider. And I also ideally don’t want to pay. Luckily, it’s possible to do just that. Here’s…
The Road by Cormac McCarthy was a difficult read. It’s one of the more bleak books that I’ve read. It’s really, really heavy. Some scenes I will never get out of my head, unfortunately. The sadness and rage that I was made to feel from the very start were… difficult, to say the least. It’s interesting how I can be shocked and terrorized to such an extent that at one…
This blog has moved from sundaystopwatch.eu to blog.d11r.eu. The old domain will expire in April 2026. The reason is I don’t feel like paying for two domains. That’s it. 🫡
First of, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a good book. I like it. It was a bit difficult to read because of Conrad’s style, but I don’t hold it against him, or the book. It’s better for it. I will skip the summary, and just share some of my observations, and notes. Also, obviously – spoilers ahead. What ideas?? Marlow keeps saying how everyone else talked about…
I’ve been wearing footwear of the wrong size, material, and shape for as long as I can remember, certainly at least 20 years. Only recently have I fixed this, and I come with great tidings: if you, too, hate wearing shoes, and the industrial revolution and its consequences, it is possible to be cured of at least one of these ailments. The problem is three-shaped, and is named as follows:…
There’s a thought that I sometimes hear, and it goes something like this: “We live in the best X of all possible Xs”. For example: Whatever criticism one might have towards modern society, we’re still living in the safest and richest time of human history. However poor one may be, if you’re living in the West, you’re still richer than 99.99% of all humans in…
If you have a developed system for finding the difference between truth and falsehood, and constantly think about rationality skills, and are always improving them, learning new techniques, and keep thinking about meta-level things: congratulations, your skills are useless. Well, they’re not entirely useless. There’s a theoretical world in which, were you to apply them, they would…
About half a year ago I started as a solo technical writer for my current employer, and I feel that my experience is different from working on a team. I want to write down some observations and advice that I would have given myself. Your job is now to decide, not write If a company has hired you as their sole technical writer, chances are they not only need someone to write, they also need someone…
This is a good book because it gives you numbers . It’s important to understand the quantities of things around you. I think that there’s a sort of deep understanding that you can have when you know the exact figures (or ranges) for many physical phenomena. This is something I hint at in being good at the basics . Smil’s book is a good introduction to such thinking. Energy in the…
Try the goddamned thing out OR, some Thoughts on Technical Writing, having to do with software writing Technical writing is a truth-seeking process. To say true things, you need to know the subject that you’re writing about. A technical writer is therefore more of an engineer who focuses on explaining things instead of building them. The writing is a secondary activity. As a technical…
Markdown is supposed to be easy. Sure, there’s a ton of standards and interpretations, but we mostly converge on the same set of plain text ideals. Why, then, is it next to impossible to produce a Markdown document when, for example, working with Google Gemini? Prompt: write a short article (around 300 words) about fusion reactors So far so good. You can’t just copy paste it, because…
This isn't completely thought out, but I wanted to get it on paper. My parenting philosophy is aimed at these goals: Create a good person. Create a smart person. Create a capable person. Create a resilient person. …roughly in that order of importance. 1. Morals I’m most uncertain about the intervention potential for this one. I’m sure you can impart some moral and ethical…
Some things I would like to improve in my life: The speed at which I do things. My management of projects, activities, and life in general. My memory of important and useful things. 1. Speed I recently re-read this very good blog post: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems . The prescription must be that if there’s something you want to do a lot of and get good…
Inspired by this post , I wanted to see if I could do the same thing. LDAP is cool. I started from zero knowledge, so here are the steps that will probably be obvious to experienced users. First, type realm list to get general information about your domain. The output will contain your realm-name , which we’ll set as example.lan for the purposes of this tutorial. Next: nslookup -type=SRV…
Maybe this title is a little bit insulting, but I don’t mean it this way. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videographers focused on videography itself. Casey Neistat is the most famous example, but there are many, many others. I’m talking about cinematic videos, with lots of editing, with lots of different angles, with a beautiful color grading. I’m talking about the type of…
Notes to myself, not always with the full reasoning explained (read the book for that!): Dominant thing to be prepping against is the “boring emergency”: things that happen to everyone, but aren’t in the news (accidents, falls, job loss, health issues.) How to prioritize action: probability of event x impact of event / cost of action. So, at the top are things of high…
A friend from work recently got into 75HARD, which I’ve written about here before . This inspired me to create a couple of new ones. I love those trashy infographics , like “Exercise Routines for Body Types” and then you’ll have shit like “BEAR”, “TIGER”, “WOLF” and it’s all just push-ups and squats with minimum variations, but they…
I’ve been thinking about whether or not I have low self-esteem. Sometimes I feel like a complete failure and am very, very unsatisfied with myself. Initially, you would think this is obviously a self-esteem issue. In my view, a self-esteem issue persists despite concrete accomplishments. In other words, whatever you do, you still keep thinking poorly of yourself. That implies that…
I would like to figure out my political worldview. I feel like I have a patchwork of various ideas and opinions, but no coherent worldview. I’ll read something and be like “huh, that makes sense”, and then I’ll read something else and also be like “huh, that also makes sense”. I’m sufficiently high openness that I can integrate various different ideas (or…
A little more than five months ago, I became a father. I was pretty apprehensive about the whole thing at first because I didn’t know if I’d do well. In fact, I had had doubts about my capabilities as a parent for years before, but I am glad to report that having a kid is awesome and fulfilling and you should have kids as soon as possible. Doubts Here’s a semi-chronological list…
People frequently hate Meadow Soprano more than Tony Soprano, and Skyler White more than Walter White. Yet these two are by all metrics much better people than Tony or Walter. Whatever failings they have, these must be lesser than the character failings of Tony Soprano or Walter White. What’s worse, being a hypocrite or a murderer? A popular explanation is societal misogyny, i.e. our common…
I have successfully signed up for cryonics. I have chosen Tomorrow Bio as my provider because they’re in Germany, and that’s close by. I have what’s called a “term life insurance”, which will expire in 2054. Basically I pay a premium every month to cover the costs of cryopreservation in case I die. If I’m still alive in 30 years, then I have to figure out how to…
I just got sent a link to an AI platform that can be used to generate videos. Their selling point is that you can make instructional videos by simply typing up a prompt, and they’ll generate a human-looking avatar who’ll say all the right things. People complain for a bunch of reasons around the use of AI, for example whether it’s ethical for companies to profit off scraping the…
Taste is an excellent proxy for quality. If someone has good taste, their decisions are of higher quality. This applies to all domains, both artistic and non-artistic. In fact, you could argue that they apply more to domains outside of art because art decision making is taste, so it’s redundant to even mention it. Within domains such as engineering or finance, taste applies a lot. If you…
(these are literally thoughts I had sitting in traffic and that relate to traffic, but you’re free to extract generalized life lessons from them if you want) When someone cuts you off in traffic, you might get angry, but their behavior, their cutting-off-other-people-in-traffic personality guarantees that you will never be stuck behind them, unable to go faster. The way to minimize killing…
I think that self-love and self-compassion are generally good, but there’s a right tool for the right job, and those are not right tools when the job involves a short-term endeavor that includes sacrifice and discipline. In other words, you should live a life of self-love, but you should not expect self-love to give you any results when you’re trying to force a change. Being a little…
In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, there’s a notion of being “good at the basics”, as opposed to “being good by knowing advanced techniques”. How you want to be good is a question of personal preference, but the idea is that these are the two ways, and most people do one or the other. I think this is a concept that applies outside of BJJ, and one that’s useful if…
Climate and environmental activists frequently complain how the technocentric approach to solving the climate crisis isn’t enough or isn’t good in some other way than “enough”. I agree that it is not enough. Policy probably plays an equally, if not more important role. Policy interventions are things you can do right away, while technological breakthroughs are not…
I have some thoughts on productivity. The number one is: productivity is important. I get that there’s a toxic way to do productivity, and that there’s even “productivity porn”, but these are all detractors from a general idea which is - good. It’s good to be productive. If you’re trying to achieve something, it’s better to achieve it by spending less…
IRL > online Real life is better than online. A simple proof: Real life is better online . People watch videos of other people doing things - in real life! Everyone uses the Internet to some extent, but being “terminally online” is bad for your health. It’s also bad for other things as well, such as: being socially adapted knowing how to do things normal human things Being…
Equal public funding for higher education is a bad idea for several reasons: Academic institutions are full of inefficiency; public funding is indirectly funding people who sit on a chair and collect a salary, similar to how landlords collect rent on “having” a piece of real estate (while “providing a service” is often a much smaller factor). Citizens should not be forced…
Thinking about weight loss: I’m currently at around 96 kg of body weight. For the last couple of years, this number has been steadily increasing. After trying out 100EASY , I decided to go back to counting calories as my main method of losing weight. 100EASY is really good for maintaining weight, but it didn’t help me lose it, and I did it for more than 100 days because of the in-built…
The world doesn’t need another app. It needs more heat pump installers, more civil engineers, more biotech innovation, more advanced materials, more nuclear and solar power, better supply lines, and just generally more in the physical realm, layer 0. Smart people that are good at rotating shapes take the easy route because the incentives make it that way. It’s much easier to scale a…
I feel like I stopped wanting to give people advice. And not in the fake way either: where you’re the “silent” type, but deep down you really want someone to get into a position where they ask for your advice or where your advice is expected. I’m just pretty indifferent to advice now. I don’t particularly like or dislike receiving advice, and I don’t…
“But when am I going to use any of this?” - every single kid in school ever. There’s an idea that project-based learning is more efficient than the traditional school curriculum. It makes sense, but so did the idea that learning styles are important, and that turned out to be false . Here are a couple of thoughts before I delve into the research: When I’m learning about…
The other day, I was walking home on an empty road and a bus drew past me. It got me thinking about the differences in our speeds. I could never compete with the bus on speed. Not only because the bus has a big engine, but also because of the context it’s embedded in. The bus lives in a world where the roads are made for it, and where fuel is available to it. Each of those two things - roads…
There’s a relatively popular workout/diet/self-development program called “75HARD”: This is the type of program that requires you to develop and use mental toughness. You have to be very intense doing it, and you have to maintain that level of intensity for at least 75 days — probably more because it’s likely you’ll fail at least once. When I look at transformation…
★★★★☆ I’m writing this on a fast computer, sitting comfortably on a comfortable couch while drinking my coffee which was imported probably from Brazil, made with purified local water, which was boiled using an electrical stove top that doesn’t emit pollutants into the air in my house. And the coffee mug is a very cheap, high-quality ceramic mug that has “Super Grandma” and…
I feel like it’s a good idea to list the mistakes I’ve made. Not because I dwell on them and can’t get over them, but because it’s intellectually honest to admit that not every choice was a great one, even if I managed to find its upside. Also, it might make other people think about their own situation from another perspective. I don’t think it will be very helpful…
One of the key skills I learned is various forms of discipline. A key discipline is the discipline not to look at my work chat when I’m not at work. The dangers are obvious: there are rarely any emergencies, so you’re always looking at stuff that can wait until tomorrow. But now you’ve looked, and now it’s in your head, and now you can’t stop thinking about it, and…