6/22/26 Gil's LotD: Finding the Best Dog Treat with Statistics https://www.wespiser.com/posts/2026-06-19-best-dog-treat.html How to find the globally best dog treat from head-to-head comparisons. gil Mon, 06/22/2026 - 8:21pm Tags statistics dogs
AI Predictions I'm putting these down on paper, let's see how I do: Model intelligence has plateaued. The scaling hypothesis was rejected years ago, but labs and true believers keep it around like a ghost to keep people hopeful. We've mostly seen gains from improved tooling and chain of thought techniques. Chain of thought is useful but it shouldn't be counted as improved model intelligence: if…
Why did the United States invade Iraq? Kitty Saddam Hussein There's a half-remembered folk history of the lead up to the invasion of Iraq that's shaped the war's modern understanding in the United States. Here, I'll lay out in brief the several contributing factors that made the invasion happen. [1] They Thought It Would Work This is sort of silly to bring up because it applies to most everything…
Copying my VPS to a new disk I've been a customer of TornadoVPS since 2011. The VPS came with an ext3 formatted filesystem which was at the time the default filesystem in the Debian installer. In the meantime the kernel's ext3 driver depreciated and eventually removed prompting me to do the in-place upgrade to ext4 . However, at some point I wanted to get a new, clean filesystem with bigger…
2/2/25 Gil's LotD: McDowell Nature Preserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDowell_Nature_Preserve The McDowell Nature Preserve is an urban park with hiking trails in Charlotte, North Carolina. gil Sun, 02/02/2025 - 8:08pm Tags Wikipedia nature
5/24/24 Gil's LotD: Big Rock Nature Preserve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rock_Nature_Preserve The Big Rock Nature Preserve is a park known for its "very big and quite significant rocks." gil Fri, 05/24/2024 - 8:27am Tags Wikipedia nature
Taylor Swift albums as Linux distributions (Manjaro Linux will surprise you!) Taylor Swift s/t - Amazon Linux 2 Taylor's self-titled release came out in 2006. As an unknown talent she had to spend several years prior practicing her songwriting and slowly putting together what would be a chart-topping debut album. Everyone's familiar with it, most enjoy it, but it's rarely someone's favorite.…
The RESTRICT Act Banning or regulating TikTok has been discussed for years but now Congress may actually make a move towards it with the RESTRICT Act. Lawfare has the history of TikTok regulations and a brief summary of the RESTRICT Act and gives some useful analysis, although I wish they'd write more on it given the popular attention the bill's had so far. Vox also has a summary without a lot of…
Features I'd like in PostgreSQL I’ve put in my fair share of time with PostgreSQL. It has no shortage of functionality and I believe its expansive feature set drove a lot of its growing popularity in the 2010s. As my time with the database has worn on I’ve come up with a handful of features that I wish the database had. Some of these are ideas borrowed from other systems, some are inventions of my…
CIA Reorganization Ed. note - This is the transcription of a memo written to President Kennedy that explores the CIA's bureaucracy, explains its cultural problems, and suggests organizational reforms. It is dated June 30, 1961, not long after the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961. The author, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., was a "roving reporter" who reported directly to the President.…