Now that deft 0.2.0 is released, I figure it's a good time to talk about what I built, and why I built it. The point of Clojure's everything-is-a-map toolkit is that getters and setters are a waste of time. Clojure was built, in large part, in response to the crappy 2008 Java workflow, where you had to write getters, setters, and builders, and you took on all this bloat that nobody enjoyed. The…
I finished reading On the Edge last week, and it was bad. Not that I don't respect Nate Silver. I respect him a lot. So when his seminal text on gambling and risk taking was a rambling mess, I was suprised and disappointed. Nevertheless, a completionist at heart, I trudged on, to the very end, where I was greeted with this message: "ChatGPT was a significant help in writing this book, serving as a…
I recently released deft , a Clojure library that defines types and protocols using plain maps, and so, to take it for a spin, I wrote the game of chess in Clojure. Chess is a good trial run for any class and interface system, because it's reasonably small and self-contained (and has some pretty obvious choice for classes), but it also comes with some of the messiness of a real application, in…
Today I'm releasing deft! It's a library that replaces clojure's existing class system with plain maps and Malli schema. It took me about 6 months to really think it through all the way, and get the design just right, so it feels good to finally publish it. The library: https://github.com/sstraust/deft Video Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlW6YzwUZ-M On Hackernews:…
if ur reading this i can publish to my blog w/rss. im using org-rss-export-to-rss with some very simiple tooling. i thought about using hugo but idk it seemed too heavy and i kinda like the minimalist feel. im optimistic that hugo will be better when i set it up right, and i will probably need some of its features eventually, but thats a battle for another day.
I played my first game of Wordle this week, and I got in 4! Ok, I got a little bit lucky, but it wasn't all luck. While I was playing I had a chance to think through some of the strategies, and saw some pitfalls I think others might have missed. 6.1. Don't guess letters that are already green Unless you're trying to make your final guess to win the game, you shouldn't guess the same letter in the…
Charles Duhigg was a reporter for the New York Times, and you can feel it in his writing. This is a modern-science report that's sensational, inspirational, and often highly misleading. This book has it all, self-help transformations from couch potatoes to superstars, the success of Starbucks and the Colts football team, all simply explained by the power of habit. Of course habbit only plays a…
Like any political agenda, modern monetary theory isn't perfectly specified, and people often tailor its definition to their own ambitions. As best I can tell it goes like this: If you're a country that controls its own currency, its ok to go into debt, and you can print as much money as you want as long as it doesn't cause inflation. Some people argue that with the power of MMT, we have the money…
Every year, sometime around the holidays, I splurge on one really nice thing for myself. Locked inside during quarantine, there hasn't been much to spend on, but I've had a great time doing landscape photography. We still haven't been to bars and restaurants, but we can drive around in a car, and we've been exploring parks in and around New Jersey. This year I set my mind on a new camera.…
Camera lenses are expensive. If you own a DSLR, chances are your lenses cost more than the camera body itself. This is because lenses are often the bottleneck for image quality. If you're looking through a blurry window, it doesn't matter how sensitive your sensor is. In addition, camera lenses come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Physical limitations mean you can't have one lens that just does…
Ok, wrong might be a little bit too severe, but at the very least unfairly biased. I think most models underestimate Warren and Sander's chances of winning the primary because it evaluates the voting in every state as a single event, rather than viewing the primaries as a sequential selection process. In past elections, while the later states still matter, the early voting states have had special…
Oh man, if you thought the electoral college was bad, you're in for a real treat. On paper, it looks like primaries are mostly the same process. Every state gets "electoral college delegates", and the number of delegates for each state is the same as in the presidential election: two plus some extra porportionate to the state's population. The thing is, the number of delegates is porportional to…
The impeachment trial, as it stands, is a little bit of a mess, with what feels like many muddled and ever-changing accusations, against a president who keeps doing new things to be accused of. Right now Nancy Pelosi orchestrated an impeachment vote in the house, but has stalled refusing to send a vote to the senate. Given all the confusion I'd like to take a step back to understand how we got…
In this section, we now look at the specific drugs we would need to put the ideas in Part 2 into practice. We have a tremendous advantage here because we are not developing new chemicals. All of the drugs listed have already seen clinical use. What we'd like to do is, send a signal that tells all the cells in your body to start dividing, and then send a chemotherapy drug which kills any cells that…
In the last section we looked into what types of cancer treatments are out there, and, from a research perspective, what areas hopefully have the most low hanging fruit. Due to cancer heterogeneity, and the problem of targeting undetectable or microscopic tumors, black-box chemotherapy methods seemed like they would yield the best results. I wrote down the definition of our "black box" and…
Cancer treatment is something I've thought about a lot recently, and the more I've studied it, the more I've seen that it's an interesting and complex problem. At it's core a cancer is a group of cells whose genetic code has mutated such that they divide uncontrollably, in a way that cannot be properly regulated by the body. Cancer cells, in contrast to benign tumors, also have the ability to…
This morning I woke up, a little on the later side, and didn't have anything important to do. I didn't have work, and I didn't have chores, just had to eat breakfast, and be out the door by noon. I had 2 and a half hours, so it should have been easy. With so much time, and nothing, really, to do, I started browsing the front page of reddit. I thought maybe the act of reading, or looking at…
Most people I know really don't like Citizens United. For those who aren't familiar, Citizens United was a supreme court decision that essentially let corporations and wealthy individuals funnel unlimited amounts of money into American politics. Not only that, it let people donate to certain types of political causes with little to no transparency or oversight. The people I know who don't like it…
When I got my first DSLR, I opened up the settings menu, and found it loaded with options: active-d lighting, vignette control, auto-bracketing, ambient lighting, and much more. It took a while to sift through all the options, but after assigning some reasonable defaults (use full resolution, turn on vibration reduction when available, etc.), I found that despite all of the options, there were…