I’m getting married pretty soon, and I figured it’d be fun to make my own rings. I’d seen a Nile Red video where he made purple gold , and the process seemed simple enough: Make a mold, pour some molten metal into it, and voila you have metal in the shape of the mold. It turns out that the devil is in the details. Since I wanted the ring to fit my finger precisely, and I wanted it to be pure gold,…
I recently purchased a Mazda Miata . This car is interesting because instead of running on electricity, it is powered by a combustible liquid called gasoline. The vehicle has an engine that mixes the gasoline with oxygen from the air, ignites the mixture, and uses the resulting combustion to push the car forward. I don’t fully understand the details of how it works, but this difference in…
I’ve been reading Scott Alexander since the days of his LiveJournal and Lesswrong posts (over a decade ago). Scott is an amazing writer. Over the years he has provided countless thoughtful and informative posts on a wide range of topics. He is also one of the nicest and most charitable people I have encountered. And the New York Times has endangered his safety and his livelihood for no good…
Richard Stallman has had a rough month. This article is a decent summary of the events. In short: Stallman made some technically-correct-but-utterly-tactless comments on a private mailing list, mostly in defense of his late friend and colleague Marvin Minsky . Someone leaked those comments to the public. He was then forced to resign from pretty much every position he held. He had to step down as…
I just re-read the Unabomer’s manifesto. … It is a slightly crazy document… but the truth is that it is better reasoned and modulated than half of what I see on Twitter. And this is from people with blue check marks by their names and large followings. I don’t know what it means to be able to honestly say that half the people on Twitter seem less hinged than a man who was sending bombs in the…
A couple years ago, I used an old Thinkpad while my MacBook was being repaired . I enjoyed the experience so much that I ended up getting a Thinkpad X62 (an X61 chassis with modern internals). Last September, the maker of the X62 announced that a 3rd batch of X210s would be made . I ordered one and received it in January. China has a bunch of laws that make it hard to move money across borders, so…
Every vertical pixel used for the UI bar signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. — Fakey Fakerson 1 Here’s a screenshot of Red Hat’s OpenShift Console viewed with Firefox on stock GNOME Shell: You might notice a problem with this user interface: The top third of the screen is permanently occupied with stuff I don’t care about. 2 This…
If you wrote your own systemd unit to lock your laptop on suspend, you might want to double-check its behavior. The top two Google results for “systemd lock laptop on suspend” both provide examples that lock on resume , not suspend. 1 This is a security risk. How did I discover this? A few months ago, I switched to Sway , a tiling window manager similar to i3 . 2 Like i3, Sway requires a…
There’s been a lot of debate about free speech lately, and I’ve noticed that people on both sides often misunderstand why it’s a good idea. It’s commonly assumed that freedom of speech is about the right of the speaker to express their ideas, but if you read early formulations of the concept, you’ll find a totally different justification: Free speech is good because it benefits the audience,…
A useful way to recognize status quo bias is to ask, “What things wouldn’t be allowed if they were introduced today?” Here are some examples. Drugs The obvious ones: alcohol and tobacco. These are highly addictive and clearly harmful. Tobacco is responsible for ≈20% of premature deaths in the US. 1 Alcohol is responsible for 10% of working-age deaths. 2 Had these substances been discovered today,…
Back in January, I used an old Thinkpad while my 12” Macbook was being repaired. I found myself really enjoying some aspects of it. This nudged me down a path that ended with me modding a frankenpad built by some enthusiasts in Shenzhen. Using my old X61s left me frustrated with current laptops. Sure, the X61s was old and slow, but that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was just how much…
Previously . On lower-DPI displays, I like to use bitmap fonts in my terminals and text editors. I was surprised to see that Gnome Terminal still antialiased and hinted my bitmap font: Here’s a close-up: The red text is obvious, but you can also see tinges of blue and red on the white text. Not pretty. Other platforms make it easy to get the desired behavior. Both Terminal.app and PuTTY have…
In his book Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth , Robin Hanson briefly discusses software rot: As software that was designed to match one set of tasks, tools, and situations is slowly changed to deal with a steady stream of new tasks, tools, and situations, such software becomes more complex, fragile, and more difficult to usefully change (Lehman and Belady 1985) 1 .…
What’s the oldest laptop you could reasonably do your job with? 3 years old? 5 years? 10? And if asked the same question 10 years ago, would your number be higher or lower? Thanks to a failing battery in my 12” MacBook , I discovered my answer. For the 10 days it took to repair my MacBook, I had to use my backup laptop: This is a ThinkPad X61s . Despite being made in 2007, it’s been fine for work.…
A few days ago, Andrew Gallant (AKA BurntSushi) released ripgrep , a search tool similar to to ag . To coincide with the initial release, Gallant wrote a blog post comparing various search tools . In it, he discusses both the advantages and shortcomings of a half-dozen tools, including ag. He finds bugs, pathological performance cases, and unexpected ways in which these tools can be sped-up. If…
When setting up a new computer, one of the first things I do is disable cursor blinking in the terminal. For the past decade, the Gnome team has worked diligently to make this as hard as possible. The story begins in 2006. Back then, Gnome Terminal had a checkbox in its settings. Here’s a screenshot from Ubuntu 6.06: Unchecking “Cursor blinks” would stop the cursor from blinking. It was simple and…
Back in June, I read Robin Hanson ’s book: Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth . I found it fascinating. Two months later, the book’s ideas still pop into my mind daily. Nothing else I’ve read in the past year has done that. This post is a summary of the core ideas in Age of Em , followed by my observations and critiques. The Author I expect my analysis to be relevant for a…
I recently rode the Idaho Hot Springs loop with my dad & my uncle. In nine days, we traveled 510 miles and climbed 37,000 feet. It was rather enjoyable. Read my dad’s write-up for all the details. You can also view my photo gallery of the trip . For those who care to see where we went, I tracked the entire route on Strava: Day 1: McCall to Warm Lake Day 2: Warm Lake to Stanley Day 3: Stanley to…
When talking about near-future technologies, much of the discussion surrounds stuff like self-driving cars and CRISPR . Rarely do people notice the more modest things that are both closer to fruition and more likely to be brought to market. Allow me to provide some examples. VR with Eye Tracking VR is becoming commercially feasible, but few have paid attention to how it can be improved with…
Imagine a world in which the police needed a warrant to dust for latent fingerprints. That is, after a crime is discovered or reported, the police have to go to a judge and demonstrate probable cause that person X is involved. If the judge agrees, a fingerprint warrant is issued. Only then can the police dust the crime scene for fingerprints, and the only information they’re allowed to use is…