Recent content on Frivolous Musings
It feels extremely boring to talk or write or think about AI now, when everyone is doing so, when there is so much AI hype and nonsense around. But it also feels hard not to, because AI is also genuinely transformative and unprecedented. I'm dumping some more half-formed thoughts here: With apologies to Mitch Hedberg, I used to be an AI sceptic. I still am one, too. However, sceptic doesn't mean…
Made some holiday greeting cards for Purim, and used AI to make an image. Tried a few styles: first a 1930s cartoon style (which my better half rejected as “weird”, though I quite liked it), then a classic kitschy carnival one, which we liked, then finally a different version that was more minimalist and monochrome for our B&W printer. The art was nice. Not mind-blowing, but good…
I use Doom Emacs (as discussed previously ), and I love it. If you don't know what that is, this post is not for you. I often switch keyboard layouts (between English and Hebrew), and in Hebrew the regular normal-mode commands don't work. So I wanted to add a layout indicator to the modeline. How hard can this be? Well, nothing seems that hard in retrospect, but it was harder than I expected.…
Background The custom of reading a passage from the Prophets, the haftorah , is ancient and obscure. The Talmud deals with it 1 but does not elaborate on the source or the reason for the custom. According to one early source 2 , it is no less old than the custom of public Torah reading itself, traditionally held to have been instituted by Ezra. This post will not shed any light on these questions,…
I often use SPC / in Doom Emacs for +default/search-project . I also often use C-x v ~ for vc-revision-other-window to compare a file in another branch in version control. I noticed the other day while searching my project that it was finding a whole lot of matches in files I had compared with another branch, which look something like file.h~staging~ . But I had closed them, so why were they…
In yeshiva study one of the principles that is emphasised is חזרה, revision. One who reviews his studies one hundred times is not comparable to one who reviews his studies one hundred and one times ( Chagiga 9b ) But revision is hard. We are naturally more interested in novelty, and time is limited. It is more tempting to learn new topics, and after all one can study only in a place that his heart…
A common catch for Pandas users is that the default DataFrame.to_csv option is index=True . Indices are often significant in Pandas, but perhaps just as often a simple range of integers $0..n$ adding no new information. You can see some expressions of annoyance about it in this thread , where Joris Van den Bossche (a Pandas core contributor and GeoPandas maintainer) notes that GeoPandas went with…
The world is split about ChatGPT, and I’ll throw in my two pennies. Firstly: I am something of a hater, for technological and philosophical reasons. The idea that just taking a statistical next-word maximiser and scaling the hell out of it leads to eerily good results doesn’t make sense, and ChatGPT is better than it has, in my mind, any right to be. That of course does make me doubt…
Scott Alexander has a post about nerds and hipsters and “authentically” liking stuff and what makes art actually “good”. I’ve been interested in this topic for years and it doesn’t seem to have gotten much clearer, but I will try gather my scattered thoughts in this post. Scott has an amusing classification of tiers of hobbies, or “things to build an…
I was listening to a podcast about the topic of politician’s salaries, which I think are too high almost everywhere because of the obvious, but hard to mitigate, moral hazard issue. Maybe it’s best just to think of money wasted on inflated salaries as an inevitable extra tax that pays for political stability? But just for fun, let’s pretend the issue was managed fairly and…
Something that should be easy but weirdly isn’t is sharing text or files between two of my devices, say a laptop and a phone. There are lots of sometime solutions for this - if you have a Macbook and an iPhone on the same account, you have a shared clipboard, and KDE Connect is also designed to solve this, but unfortunately its support for macOS is experimental and doesn’t seem to…
Problem: I have an app I like. I want to make a trivial change to the text in one screen. Emailed the developer, he said I could just edit the file in the assets folder and sideload it (although he failed to see the point of the edit…) Background: an APK is just a zipped archive, you can unzip it and edit the text files, then zip, rename to a .apk extension and try install it (easiest is…
I recently came across a blog post reviewing the long-awaited book of a certain anonymous blogger who disappeared from the internet about a decade ago (after being doxxed). It reminded me that around that time I had kept up a correspondence with a friend over some of the big issues - what is the ideal political system? what makes some art better than other art? or the meaning of some common terms…
You may know that the solution for each day’s Wordle puzzle is in its source code. Is there a way to grab it from the command line? Naturally. Start with grabbing the source and outputting to stdin (may as well add -q , we don’t need the output): wget -q -O- powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/main.e65ce0a5.js Next we just grab the solutions list (look for Var La , then note the index of the…
Populism is hard to define. It can be associated with both the political left and right, and, although it doesn’t sound like a pejorative term (what’s wrong with being popular?), it’s one of those terms people only used to describe others (negatively). I used to think of it as meaning “anti-elitist”, or basically something which is popular but most educated people…
I was listening to a podcast (about metaphysics in the social sciences, very interesting but not the topic of this post) and the guest mentioned as an aside the principal-agent theory of political corruption, pretty common in economically-inclined poli-sci literature. (1) (1) Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption: A Study in Political Economy seems to be the classic The idea that politicians will…
Kevin Lewis’ daily Findings blog at National Affairs is a great way to stay on top of social science news, presenting a daily themed collection of abstracts of recent papers. The site is free to read, but doesn’t offer an RSS feed, which is my preferred way to consume it. I decided to write a short Python script to scrape new posts into a local XML file. The basic script I started with…
About six months ago I downloaded the Arch ISO and stuck it on a thumb drive. I finally got around to installing it now - I was nervous about accidentally nuking my computer, so didn’t want to try dual-boot the way I would with a distro with a graphical installer, and running it via WSL would be missing the point. I finally got my hands on an old laptop I could mess around with and did it.…
(This guide assumes familiarity with Vim, git and command line, but no prior knowledge of Emacs. This is a good guide from zero to Emacs. I was also helped/inspired by Noel Welsh’s Doom guide, and that of mad genius Tecosaur .) After several aborted attempts to get started with Emacs, I’ve finally made some sense of it. Since there aren’t many basic guides online, I thought…
I recently asked a French friend why that country produces so many brilliant mathematicians and scientists - not really expecting a good answer. He replied that in France, being an academic or theoretician is seen as the most admirable position to aspire to, on a par with philosopher or artist. However, engineers and entrepreneurs are associated with far less prestige, which would roughly explain…
There’s a great quote from Douglas Adams’ posthumous final novel, The Salmon of Doubt : Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented…
I recently read the book Just for Fun , a lot of which focuses on Linus Torvalds’ battle for his operating system, Linux, to be “Open Source” software. Open Source doesn’t mean free; but it means that the software’s code (the source) is freely available, so anyone can copy it. Thus there’s no viable business in selling the code, but there could be in supplying…
In The Will to Believe ( Is Life Worth Living? , IV), William James writes: Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the…
There’s a funny xkcd cartoon about the tar command: How does one remember those ridiculous single letter commands? My preferred solution is to first consult with TLDR , but Justin Abrahams has a fun solution over at his blog : extract () { if [ -f 1 ] ; then case 1 in *.tar.bz2 ) tar xjf 1 ;; *.tar.gz ) tar xzf 1 ;; *.bz2 ) bunzip2 1 ;; *.rar ) unrar x 1 ;; *.gz ) gunzip 1 ;; *.tar ) tar xf 1 ;;…
I’ve just finished a book on Nonviolent Comunication and thought it would have made a good pairing with one I read last year, Never Split the Difference , as a lesson in effective communication. The latter is about getting what you want from your counterparty, no matter your relationship afterwards. An adversarial, zero-sum situation is assumed, and Voss (the author, a former FBI hostage…
I almost always have earphones in, filling up the time in which I’m not actively focusing on something else with a steady patter of podcasts or mildly interesting books. But occasionally I wonder: aren’t I missing out on being alone with my thoughts, the serendipitous free flow borne of tedium? Maybe it isn’t worth it. So I have a control: one day a week, I forswear all…
Thanks to this explanation (coding it out in Ruby made it clearer to me, but it’s really the verbal explanation that worked). At the outset you have doors A, B and C. Given the choice between A or B and C, obviously you would take the latter. That’s what you’re choosing here! B and C, which combined have a greater chance of being correct. It’s more likely that it was in the…
Someone tweets: I like mushrooms. Mushrooms are great. Yummy! Hits “send tweet”. Most of the replies are from the person’s followers. “Wow, you’re so right! You have the best take on mushrooms.” “Totally! Mushrooms rule!” “Ugh people who don’t like mushrooms be like [GIF from The Office]”. Then one person says “mushrooms are OK, but garlic is also cool”. Everyone else goes: “oh look it’s reply…
In general my view on podcasts is the shorter the better. So I really like Bloomberg View , which runs just over a minute and distills the essence of a longer (usually well thought-out) op-ed. (I guess by this logic the ideal podcast would be 0 seconds - very Cagean.) But it seems like the Berg is phasing this one out. It no longer appears on the website or on most podcast providers, and the RSS…
You could tell a story in which the West is in decline, and China (and perhaps India, Africa, whoever) is rising to take its place. Similarly, you could take the post Cold War view that liberalism survives all attacks, and that the current backlash against liberalism will also run out of steam. Which of these is correct? Maybe whichever we believe it is. I thought of this while reading Jack…
Haven’t written anything in a while, and so this post seems appropriate. It seems sometimes like in the Internet age, everything has been said, and it’s mostly wrong. Take any news event in the last 24 hours, and you will find on Twitter a vast panoply of opinions, taking every possible perspective: joking, chiding, worrying, connecting it to the Grain Riots of 1874. These will link to…
I like to think that I’ve taught myself to become a better conversationalist. I know that makes me sounds rather dull; but I do try not to think about it as a set of procedures or an algorithm, but rather as a general attitude that can make you more fun to hang out with. Famously, the golden rule of conversation is to “ask people about themselves and let them talk”. This is true;…
It’s common to think of rhetoric as a gloss on top of ’true’ thinking, mere packaging for the intellectual content of our ideas. From some of the Platonic dialogues it seems like rhetoric, (or sophistry , which Plato made into an insult) is a foil to rational thought, an alternative tradition which privileges aesthetic value - elegance of expression - over content. (I seem to…
An anecdote from Richard Rhodes’ book The Making of the Atomic Bomb : Out of curiosity in 1940, while visiting Berkeley to deliver a lecture, Enrico Fermi attended a seminar one of [J. Robert] Oppenheimer’s protégés led in the master’s style. “Emilio,” Fermi joked afterward with Segrè, “I am getting rusty and old. I cannot follow the highbrow theory developed by…
There are elections now, and people here are deeply cynical about the slate of candidates. Political despair is the dominant tone, and has been for some time. This is also true in the wider world, where few politicians inspire trust or excitement. There was talk this week of Elizabeth Warren launching a Presidential campaign, which "I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary…
Back in my yeshiva days, I struggled with the concept of prayer. We observe that sometimes people pray for things and aren’t answered - after all, we all pray every day for health, wealth and the ultimate redemption. So the underlying theory seems to be something along the lines of prayer increasing your odds. Or, since presumably these things are deterministic, your score: perhaps a young,…
A few years ago, a lot of people were sharing an Aziz Ansari bit about feminism. The thrust - if you don’t want to click through - is that if you think men and women deserve equal treatment, then you are a feminist, and shouldn’t try avoid the label. It’s a good joke, but philosophically I think it is a little bit more complex. Words have multiple shades of meaning, and words…
A very overdiscussed topic lately is political correctness, and if there’s too much of it. I propose the following three points: At least some measure of socially ordained political correctness is unquestionably a good thing. There is a point where social monitoring of offensive speech becomes intrusive, burdensome and overall not worthwhile. ‘PC Culture’ is currently unevenly…
There’s a “salon” here where people get together once in a fortnight to discuss a topic. The other week we were talking about politics and I floated the idea that there are “good” and “bad” voters: those who understand the issues to a greater extent and vote correctly representing their interests, and those who understand less, whose vote is essentially…
I’ve been working at home this week, and leaving the windows open, as I like doing in all but the hottest weather. But I’ve been bothered by these guys on the right. Aedes Albopictus. Public domain image via the Centre for Disease Control. Googling mosquitoes with zebra-striped abdomens reveals that this is a tiger mosquito , an aggressive invader from SE Asia. Ranked as one of the…