the jsomers.net blog
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could [ ]
When I first started writing for a real publication, I taught myself reporting with a simple self-made curriculum unfolding over six or seven articles. The first two pieces I wrote from my head, with reference to things I already knew or to books I d read. For the third, I actually got out of the house, [ ]
On podcasts it's pretty common to hear something like this: So Alexander Hamilton has just finished law school, and he's trying to make a name for himself. He's only been in New York a few years. So he takes on this case... The problem with the past tense ("Hamilton had just finished law school, and [ ]
The game of Five'Em was invented by two friends of mine, Ben Gross and Rich Berger, to combat Hold'Em fatigue. The rules are simple: You're dealt five hole cards instead of two, and after each round of community cards comes out (starting with the flop), you discard one of these extras. After the river is [ ]
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a justified true belief [ ]
For years I’ve wanted a writing machine that would combine the best parts of a typewriter and a word processor. After months of tinkering, a friend and I just finished building one. We call it the DocWriter. It’s a typewriter that sends its keystrokes in real time to a Google Doc.
The standard way to run a book club is to have everybody finish the book before meeting to talk about it. You have one meeting per book. The discussion goes on for one or two hours before it runs out of gas, and then the group picks the next book, and you agree to meet [ ]
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more. The converse is true, too. If every time you write [ ]
If you ve ever typed anything into a Google Doc, you can now play it back as if it were a movie like traveling through time to look over your own shoulder as you write. This is possible because every document written in Google Docs since about May 2010 has a revision history that tracks [ ]
The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you've never heard of, or whose sense you're unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word -- like example, or sport, or magic -- because all you'll learn is what it means, and that you already know. Indeed, if [ ]
