Recent content on Sound & Complete
Update Dec 7, 2022: Apple scrapped the plan of CSAM-scanning iCloud Photos libraries. My wife is pretty tech-savvy. While not a software engineer and not a computer scientist, she has a good understanding of computing technologies, statistics, formal methods, and an intuitive (but quickly growing) grasp of machine learning. She’s also able to code in R for her research , and she’s…
Remember the days when you had to look for plugins for your editor to support your favourite programming language? Or even the language that isn’t your favourite, but which for some reason you need to write in? Well in case you didn’t notice, those days are gone. They aren’t “long gone,” but the are gone. I thought they weren’t gone, but they are. Gone. For…
Yesterday I read Rutger Bregman’s excellent opinion piece in The Correspondent, and today is Tuesday. Tuesday, in my household, is the recycling day. Why Tuesday? Because the island we live on only has 2 paper trash containers. They are emptied on Tuesdays midday-ish, so on Tuesday evenings I pack all the paper trash in the house (along with all the glass and plastic) into the trunk, and I…
Planning I’m gonna read a book a day. I’m gonna go through SICP (including all the exercises) and Kurt’s new Haskell book. I’m gonna learn how to play bass. I’m gonna buy that wardrobe for the guest room so that we could get rid of the ugly coat hanger there. Depression & self-loathing Weather is really shit, I should have and could have gone somewhere nice. COVID-19…
Here’s what’s good about Anne Applebaum’s new book : it’s anecdotal in all the right places. This is a book that attempts to explain the authoritarian turns across Europe and in the United States and Applebaum, as you’d expect from her, provides a convincing, well-reasoned and insightful explanation as to why they are happening. And since she’s a well renowned…
The best, most entertaining and immortal topic in software engineering is back! Editor Wars! After reading Roben Kleene’s blog post I realized that I’ve been using VS Code all-day every-day for over a year now. I’m not willing to admit it because in my mind I’m a die-hard (n)vim user, but the reality is this: VS Code is brilliant. Kleene makes many great points about key ingredients of VS Code’s…
I went to music school as a kid. Ages 7 to 13 I studied classical violin and basics of music theory. I played in duos, trios, and orchestras. Even as a college student, despite my amateurish skills, I’d still find decent orchestras I would join and play many concerts with. All this, despite my slight disdain for classical music with its pompous ethos and pretentious audiences. I stopped…
In January 2019 I bought an 11-inch iPad Pro. It’s a magnificent piece of hardware that you can read many reviews of online. The screen is brilliant, the portability and battery life are unmatched, the performance is swift (until you’re trying to perform a long-running CPU-intensive operation, that is). The iPad Pro was always meant to be my “personal computing” device. I don’t…
Marc Andreessen writes about how ill-equipped the United States is to handle the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and concludes that it’s due to the fact that the America lost its ability to “build” things, be it medical equipment, infrastructure, or financial mechanisms that’d allow the federal government to support its citizens better. There’s a particular paragraph that stood out to…
A couple of weeks ago I went to Paris to attend dotGo (thanks, MessageBird !), one of the biggest Go conferences in Europe. dotGo lasts only one day, and it’s single-track, but it’s a solid offering with great organization, excellent venue and awesome talks. I realize I sound like a dotGo commercial, but as a former academic I remain amazed at how much better professional conferences…
Most of you probably don’t know, but about 5 months ago, Karolina and I bought a beautiful, red, 2013 Seat Leon coupé. We sold it today, because of our upcoming move to the Netherlands where we won’t need it, and also because it’s a major hassle moving a car to NL (a proper European federation cannot happen soon enough). It was our first car and despite the fact that we’re both pretty…
As some of you might have heard, the legendary Munich label ECM finally jumped on the streaming bandwagon. Yes, Manfred, I wholeheartedly agree that the beautiful music your label publishes demands to be listened on CDs and LPs, but these are harder and harder to take on a plane. With iPod Classic not sold anymore and iTunes morphing into Apple Music, music lovers will soon be left with only 3rd…
I always slightly disliked Yanis Varoufakis. Strike that, actually I always thought he’s a bit of a clown. Motorbike-riding, leather-jacket-clad, attention-seeking, populist, arrogant clown. Worst of all, he was part of that annoying movement of European politicians that rejected the narrative I believed in, namely that: One must always pay ones debts. 1 EU and its institutions always know…
2016 was, as The Verge put it , “a good year for weird jazz.” 1 I’d go even further: both 2015 and 2016 show that jazz is an evolving genre, and that it became more exciting than ever before. Influences of hip-hop and electronic music are becoming more visible, new artists pop-up in places you’d never expect (I’m looking at you, LA) and push music into new…
Last weekend I spent some time working on a small project: bora . 1 It’s a simple wrapper around AWS Cloudformation, so obviously everyone’s question is: why the hell would I want yet another Cloudformation wrapper? tl;dr answer is: because all the ones which are available suck. But let me elaborate. Troposphere -based tools are inelegant. Troposphere itself is poorly documented, and I…
Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body— it is heritage. My recent disillusioning trip notwithstanding, I am still very much in love with the US, but Ta-Nehisi Coates puts things into perspective. Much like sexism is often difficult to notice for males until a woman points it out, white people tend not to realize just how huge a problem…
To some, Apple’s yesterday keynote wasn’t all that impressive. After all, the new iPhone 7 doesn’t look all that new, the new Apple Watch looks exactly like the old one, and minor improvements aside (water resistance, GPS for the watch, new processors), there wasn’t really anything impressive shown in San Francisco last night. Except one small detail—the camera(s) on the…
(I’m biased towards everything American, so despite a relatively US-critical tone, you may be offended by this post if you’re too European.) I remember watching “The Cosby Show” with my parents in the nineties. It was a crazy time of massive political change in Poland, and my parents were always pointing at the fictional Huxtables as role models. Me and my father were even…
I’ve been riding bikes for a very long time, and although I’ve had breaks, I can safely say I’ve been riding bicycles throughout my whole life. I am lucky to have never had any serious accidents or injuries while cycling, other than the occasional my-shoes-are-still-clipped-into-the-pedals thing, 1 I’ve never been doored , I never smashed with my bike into things that…
All the stuff described here I learned from my dear colleague Giulio . I’m sharing it here because it’s cool, and because I don’t think he’d share it anywhere other than our internal mailing list. Do you use MFA a lot? Are you tired of reaching for your phone to check those codes on Google Authenticator app? Perhaps you’ve been logging to too many different AWS…
I know Carrie Brownstein through “ Portlandia ,” a quirky sketch show she’s been doing with Fred Armisen for the last couple of years. I’m a huge fan of how accurately “Portlandia” pokes fun at alternative-culture so commonly associated with Pacific Northwest. 1 What I learned later, only after doing some research on Fred and Carrie, is that they were both…
Abhishek Jain asks Stack Overflow about the differences between zlib, gzip and Zip, and gets a fascinating and very insightful response from none other than Mark Adler . I particularly like the comment Adler made when the OP asked about referenecs for his answer. I am the reference, having been part of all of that. This post could be cited in Wikipedia as an original source. This, to me, is a…
Google Deep Mind ’s AlphaGo won two games against the world go champion, Lee Sedol . This is a ginormous triumph of statistical methods in general and machine learning in particular over “symbolic AI.” I remember writing an essay for a class in philosophy some years ago about the progress of AI game engines and the somewhat unimpressive achievements of Deep Blue . It was of…
One of Go’s features is that it doesn’t have an excess of features, and frankly, I think that feature is undervalued. There’s an interesting discussion on Quora about the differences between Golang and Scala. As a former academic with tendencies towards functional programming, I used to be very tempted by Scala. 1 It offers all the functional goodness without the exoticism of…
I made jokes about this before, but it actually happened: since I no longer use LaTeX, I removed it from my laptop and got rid of the config from my .vimrc . It’s nothing unusual, but I somewhat feel that the departure from LaTeX marks an important (sic!) moment in my life. LaTeX was my “gateway drug” to programming. I kid you not. Since I was interested in publishing as a…
In the spirit of 2015 summaries , I felt like sharing my recommendations for the best, in my view, jazz albums of yesteryear. The list is, of course, highly subjective and biased towards contemporary and European jazz. 1 I also admit that the great majority of what I listen to comes from ACT Music label, since many of my favorite artists record for them, and thus it’s somewhat easier for me…
Are you traveling for Christmas to a country where Netflix/Hulu isn’t available? Are you worried you might resort to violence against your own family once you’re fed up with them? Here’s a VPN server template to help the situation (and keep you away from prison). update Jan 6, 2016: Oh, well. VPN servers can still be useful for other purposes. Netflix is brilliant and…
Manton Reece: By creating a blog, you’re making a statement that you care about something I haven’t been blogging on a regular basis for many months now, primarily because I was busy with my PhD, depressed with my PhD, depressed about looking for a job or busy with my new job, but also because I wasn’t really sure there’s a point in having a blog in the first place. I’ve…
A couple of weeks ago my company sent me over to London for 6 weeks to do some project work for one of our clients. I’m back in Munich now, but everyone’s been asking me how it was and I have surprisingly many things to say about my stay in the UK. Thus, to ease my pain of having to tell everyone the same bunch of observations, I decided to group them all neatly into a blog post. Here…
Stephen LeDrew wrote an interesting post about the influence the so-called “New Atheism” movement had on society, pointing out some intriguing similarities between our militant atheists and, surprisingly, the far right wing conservatism. The one observation which I don’t find completely accurate, and I think it’s because I live in Europe, is that the “New…
I was about to write a blog post about how indifferent I became towards different text editors, and how I don’t really care anymore whether I edit code with emacs, vim, Sublime or even Atom . And then this happened: It’s called Spacemacs and it’s a beautiful hybrid between emacs and vim, or at least it looks like it. Will explore how it works in the course of the next couple of…
I like taking photographs, and I love cameras. My grandfather was the first professional photographer in my hometown, 1 and I loved playing with his cameras. His darkroom was my favorite place on Earth, filled with cameras, lenses, and a huge enlarger in the middle of a table. I spent hours playing there, and perhaps that’s what sparked my interest in photography, but it was definitely what…
It is with great sadness that I read the news about Ornette Coleman’s death . Ornette was one of the first jazz musicians I ever heard of, an artist that inspired my love for jazz but also profoundly expanded my understanding of improvisation and free jazz. There are a lot of great anecdotes about Ornette Coleman, like those about other musicians reportedly paying him not to play during his…
On Thursday, April 30th I successfully defended my thesis on “Agents that Play by the Rules” and was awarded the title of PhD. 1 It was 4,5 years of work, 2 and the last week was definitely the most stressful and exhausting one I had in my entire life, but now I’m done. There’s no more school to go to, no more exams and no more courses to take. 3 The overwhelming feeling of…
My girlfriend Karolina defended her PhD on Monday, and shall be referred to as Dr. Karolina from now on. It was an excellent defense and you’ve missed out if weren’t there. You still can (and should) read her book, however. It’s very good (and I’m not biased) and available (for free!) on her website .
In the spirit of 2014-summaries I’d like to mention Jonathan Glazer’s film “Under the skin”, which was definitely one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, and one of the very best sci-fi movies I have ever seen. If you have some winter holidays now, rent it on iTunes or Amazon or something and watch it. It’s very disturbing, but great. (Also I think…
I’ve been trying to read as many books as I can these Christmas holidays since I have plenty of free time and the weather outside is particularly cold, 1 so another book that I’ve read is Mitchell Stephens classic: “The rise of the image, the fall of the word.” It’s obligatory reading for anyone studying journalism and new media these days, as it tries to argue for…
A hilarious article appeared in PLOS ONE recently (thanks for the link, Pim). StackOverflow already made some good comments, but here’s my two pennies’ worth. While I find the study methodologically flawed 1 and I have a strong dislike for MS Word for numerous (un)sentimental reasons, I cannot disagree with the fact that LaTeX sucks . It has a complex syntax (take a look at Markdown or…
Since it’s Christmas, I feel it’s only appropriate to share some thoughts about a book on philosophy of religion I recently read. Written by contemporary analytic philosophy’s chief theist and protestant, Alvin Plantinga , “Where the Conflict Really Lies” is a careful and systematic study of the (alleged) conflicts between science, naturalism and religion. 1 As far as…
Peter Sunde writes a guest post for Wired: Only a few activists left are actually doing things. We’re way underfunded, we’re getting older and we’re getting lazy. We’re trying to work smart while still having a family life, managing our lives with boy- and/or girlfriends, thinking about careers. A sad piece in which one of The Pirate Bay’s founders shares his…
Ian Bogost writes about a famous Star Trek TNG episode: On stardate 45047.2, Jean-Luc Picard leads the crew of the Enterprise in pursuit of a transmission beacon from the El-Adrel system, where a Tamarian vessel has been broadcasting a mathematical signal for weeks. The aliens, also known as the Children of Tama, are an apparently peaceable and technologically advanced race with which the…
“All of my colleagues — composers and arrangers — are seeing huge cuts in their earnings,” says Paul Chihara, a veteran composer who until recently headed UCLA’s film-music program. “In effect, we’re not getting royalties. It’s almost amusing some of the royalty checks I get.” One of the last checks he got was for $29. “And it bounced.” Scott…
I am very sad to read that Charlie Haden died last Friday . 1 He was one of the first jazz musicians I ever heard about, when my dad bought the now legendary “Beyond the Missouri Sky” (Verve 1997) record, and I immediately fell in love with his great bass lines and compositions. Then I learned about Charlie Haden’s history with Ornette, and I also realized he played with Keith…
Companies selling "speed" and "aerodynamics" to dudes who only ride on the weekends, rather than selling them an experience. — John Watson (@JohnProlly) June 10, 2014 I used to laugh at people paying $7k for bicycles with handmade steel frames and all the hype that surrounded the whole NAHBS community. After some months of reading PinP aka The Radavist , however, I’ve changed my mind…
Wired: Current methods of counting cyclists take a ton of time or a ton of money. The DOT can videotape traffic and have someone sit at a monitor and count cyclists, or it can send someone to sit on the sidewalk and watch them go by in real time. Neither method is terribly efficient. You’d think that the problem of building cycling lanes is a simple one, right? Well, it’s not.…
I first heard about Wayne Shorter when my dad bought the brilliant “1+1” (Verve 1997) album he recorded with Herbie Hancock. I listened to it and was blown away – the soprano saxophone in the hands of Wayne Shorter sounded like nothing I heard before. I had a “jazz band” in my music school at the time, 1 and I told the guys “Look, Shorter and Hancock play without…
Last Sunday night I was walking home and I got hit by a car on a zebra crossing. 1 It was pretty late (around 11:30pm) and there was very little traffic. I was on a green light and while I was in the middle of the road, a black car came from behind me (he was making a left turn). I stopped, turned right, and as I was facing the car it hit me on my left leg knocking me down, and then just drove…
put.io is a service that lets you download and seed torrents, and also watch the downloaded movie files, in the cloud. An obvious question that such a business model raises is a matter of illegal downloads, and that spawned an interesting discussion on HN. Whenever I read discussions about illegal torrent downloads, I immediately think of three issues. The first one is convenience – as a Netflix…
I don’t ski, 1 and every winter doing any sorts of sports becomes a major problem. This year I’m trying to change that. As anyone will tell you, riding a bike or running in bad weather is simply a matter of attitude. One should just embrace Rule #9 and keep on pushing, but I’ve never been able to do that myself. Every year I promised myself that I won’t be paying any…
I traveled by train, and this post is an account of my experiences and a warning for others who might be attempting the same thing. It costed a lot of money, but most importantly, it was a very exhausting and stressful experience. So if you’re reading this and planning on doing the same thing – don’t. First of all: why did I do it? Well, there’s a couple of reasons. First was…