More absurdities from my job at Big Defense Firm . When I started I didn’t get a computer right away. It took almost a week to finally get a machine. While waiting I read documentation and shared computers with my teammates; we were all contractors; only our manager was a full-time employee. When I finally got my computer, it turned out to be an outdated and underpowered machine. It was a Pentium…
In 2008 I started my second job at a big defense firm. Before that, I worked a couple of years at Mekensleep, a video game studio; it was fun, but I didn’t earn enough to cover my expenses. After the dot com crash there were few jobs for inexperienced software developers. The defense firm was notoriously cheap; they avoided hiring people with more than a few years of experience. The company was…
Air France’s pilot school was down to one working station; if it broke, a critical evaluation tool would be lost. They contracted my employer to build a replacement, and we only had a couple of months. The test was used to determine how pilot candidates performed under heavy mental pressure. The project started with a visit to Air France’s training facility to discuss the project. At the end of…
Last year I posted about aichat, an LLM command line shell. I talked about a wrapper built on it to spellcheck a portion of Unicode text. I use it daily with my text editors: Kakoune and Helix . Yesterday my OpenAI credits expired, so I switched to [OpenRouter][4], a unified API for many AI models. I had been using the openai/gpt-5-mini model for a while, and I figured it was time to update to…
Statisticians love the normal distribution ; it’s familiar, and reassuring. Its symmetrical bell shape reveals a world where most things are average, and only a small quantity falls outside the norm. When it applies, Normal distribution — also called Gaussian distribution — makes calculating odds and projections easy and accurate. A Gaussian curve paints a picture where developments are…
Via negativa is the idea that it’s better to solve problems by removing than by adding. I first learned about it from Nassim Taleb’s book: Antifragile . The via negativa concept is based on the mystical Eastern Orthodox traditions: apophatic theology. It is a spiritual approach that defines God by negation. Its thesis is that God’s true essence is beyond human intellectual comprehension. We can’t…
Ametora explores how postwar Japan absorbed, reinterpreted, and eventually elevated American style. It argues that Japanese designers, retailers, and consumers preserved forms of classic American dress that the United States itself ended up neglecting. Before WWII, Japan was an isolated country; it had its own culture and actively protected it from outside influence. Following the defeat in 1945,…
A mathematical mind isn’t a gift. It’s something cultivated from within. Mathematicians aren’t born, they are made. Mathematics is the by-product of our own power of imagination and intuition, a power we can learn and grow. David Bessis’s book is an excellent debunk of the notion that mathematical skills are innate abilities. According to him, mathematics is about intuition, not about logic. To…
This year I read 31 books. I finally got to read books that have been on my bookshelves for over 10 years. This was my most productive year in terms of reading. I delved into subjects like sociology, photography, history, science, technology, and philosophy. Like last year , here is the list of my favorite reads for 2025, starting with my favorites. The Dream Machine It’s the story of the genesis…
The Dream Machine narrates the creation of personal computers and the Internet from World War II until the early 90’s. It follows the life of JCR Licklider ( Lick as he liked to be called) and the other inventors, scientists, engineers, and visionaries that created modern computing. There’s an emphasis on two important organizations: ARPA and PARC. These environments fostered many innovations that…
I read a fair bit of Stoic literature like Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism is the school of philosophy that influenced me the most. I also got into Buddhist philosophy when I was a regular meditator. Stoic philosophy and Buddhism overlap in meaningful ways, with one important principle in common: low expectations. If we go through life with high hopes and lofty goals that can’t be…