Online home of Jeremy Scheff
Over the years I have executed some good pranks and other prank-like activities. In this post I am going to share my favorites. I also have executed some bad pranks. I'm just not going to talk about those here! So if you know me from college and are wondering where the lobster incident is, it's not here! These should maybe be separate blog posts, but I think I'll probably just procrastinate if I…
With Trump's attempt to appoint RFK to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a lot of people are talking about how our foods and medicines are poisining us. These days, the main food boogeyman seems to be seed oils. Yet if you try to figure out why people are so worked up, you'll find it's basically nonsense . Seed oils seem not particularly different than other oils, and there doesn't…
The 2024 election just happened, marking 20 years since the first election I voted in when I was 19 years old, the 2004 election. I thought it might be interesting to think back to my political views in 2004 and consider what changed. Does 2024 Jeremy still agree with 2004 Jeremy, or was 2004 Jeremy young and naive? Have we made any progress, or are we still fighting some of the same challenges…
Conspiracy theory time! This one is actually mostly true. Population counts from the census are used to determine how many electoral votes each state gets. In 2020, there were some weird results. Turns out those were mistakes. The Census Bureau even admitted it a couple years ago. In terms of electoral votes, the net impact of the mistakes was : **-2** EVs for FL **-1** EV for TX **+1** EV for MN…
People are worried about carbon emissions and energy usage and shit like that. But AGI is (probably) coming. And AGI doesn't just require software and hardware, it requires energy. Lots of it. Even if we had done smart things in energy policy, such as continuing to build nuclear power plants so that we were running almost entirely on clean energy now, we'd still be fucked just because of the…
ChatGPT. Cool stuff, right? Very fun. Kind of scary too. That's the naive impression you get from playing around with it, or reading about other people's experiences. It's cute until the easily-confused chat bot says "I will not harm you unless you harm me first" . But can a fancy Markov chain actually be scary? I mean it's just predicting the next word, right? Technically yes, it is just…
I am working on a side project that makes heavy use of the Canvas API and I came across OffscreenCanvas which seemed to have some compelling features. Wouldn't it be nice for performance to do all of my rendering in a web worker? Well I gave it a try, but wound up not going forward with it due to several reasons: 1. Browser support OffscreenCanvas originally was only in Chrome. Firefox recently…
There are three major hypotheses for the origin of COVID: Natural zoonosis - jump from animals to humans, such as at the Wuhan wet market Lab leak of engineered virus - leak of an engineered virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) through gain-of-function research Other WIV-related origin - non-engineered virus exposed to humans somehow through the activities of the WIV (such as a lab leak,…
Last week I gave a talk at PWA Summit 2022 which was a purely online conference. It was pretty fun. It was a lot of firsts for me: First talk on a non-science topic First talk at a programming conference First talk at a virtual conference First talk in many years! The topic was client side storage in web apps, which was of course motivated by my work on Basketball GM and other games which store…
I recently uploaded my wedding photos to Facebook. Why Facebook? Cause there are a lot of pictures with a lot of different people, and I remembered that Facebook has some nifty auto tagging feature that would save a lot of time. And after uploading the photos, what I found was that... I really haven't uploaded photos in a long time. Apparently they made the auto tagging opt-in in 2019 (of course…