Recent content on Shaddy's
Running a Puyo Puyo Tetris tournament at work, I learnt that for some reason not everybody knows all the intricacies of the different versions of Tetris and how they differ. Today, we will ensure that you don’t embarrass yourself the next time your in-laws grill you on your opener preferences. Classic Tetris If you grew up playing Tetris on the NES or other platforms of that generation, you…
Oliver Sacks was an extremely popular writer in 20th century psychology, maybe the most celebrated medical storyteller of his generation. His perhaps most famous work is the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat . Its stories are intriguing, revealing great insights into the human mind and neurology that surprise, impress, and just improve understanding of humans. I have read and enjoyed…
I like tiling window managers like Hyprland or Niri on Linux, and I use them on all my personal machines. They are great and give you a lot of control in how your desktop environment should behave and feel. But they often don’t come with batteries included. You do not get a task bar or a system clock, an icon tray or an application launcher. This is a blessing if you like really making…
Anki, the spaced repetition software, has recently transferred ownership to AnkiHub. AnkiHub is a separate company that has been built around the Anki ecosystem over the last couple of years. Damien, the previous steward and main contributor has further commented on the subject here . The maybe most important points for casual users: There are zero planned changes to the revenue model: The…
Doing laundry is an annoying chore, but needs must, and so we do it. An annoying part of the chore is matching the pairs of socks back together after the drying. There are at least three very different ways of dealing with it. It should be noted that this advice is easier to apply in a single household than when you’re sorting socks for 10 people. Or maybe not – some of this would make…
Quoting Matt Freeman on The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast (lightly edited for readability): The feeling of loving other people is one of the best things in the world. And it’s kind of funny because, when you’re a kid and when you’re growing up, maybe there’s this feeling of, like, I want to be esteemed in other people’s eyes. I want to be loved by other people. You…
I have written about Newcomb’s Problem before . Because the world is small, you keep stumbling over the same topics. So a couple of days ago I watched a Computerphile video about LLMs and Newcomb’s Problem . They use a box of $50 that may or may not be filled depending on whether the predictor, let’s call it oracle, thinks you’ll also open the other box with a certain $5.…
If you don’t know Anki , a learning app for flashcards and spaced repetition , I recommend checking it out. It’s phenomenal for learning pieces of information – facts, vocabulary, lemmas, quotes. I never got into Duolingo, but I am rather proud of my Anki streak, which is slowly closing in on 3000. But that is not the point of this post. Instead, I will mostly just introduce some…
The usual goal in Wordle is to guess the target word in as few attempts as possible. You don’t have to use all the information you have in every guess – even if you know the first letter is an A, you can try a word that starts with B if it gives you more information. Obviously the very first question for anybody who comes into contact with the game is: what if you turn the concept…
As you gather more dev projects on your disk and keep recompiling stuff, a lot of artefacts and dependencies tend to accumulate and take up disk space. Kondo is a useful tool to clean all those in one fell swoop. It can delete node_modules folders or rust target directories and more. Just run it over your projects dir, confirm everything review what it finds, and suddenly you I have a new 100gb of…
A couple of months ago in a context I don’t quite remember, I had the idea of a little challenge: writing a coherent narrative, where each word starts with the next letter of the alphabet, beginning with “a”. A small example would be “A bee can dance ferociously”. If you want to be extra ambitious, you wrap the alphabet and continue with “a” after…
Newcomb’s problem is one of these philosophical thought experiments that I come across every now and then, most recently on the Very Bad Wizards podcast . It is also one of those problems where everybody thinks they are obviously right with their choice and the alternative choice is irrational. I’ve got a couple ideas that are probably novel but that I don’t often see discussed.…
I grew up in a German Christian household, so I got to know the one or other German church song. Recently, without discernible cause, the song “Vergiss es nie” (Never forget) by Jürgen Werth got stuck in my head, but I haven’t been able to look at it the same way since a recent conversation. The lyrics go like this (translation below): Vergiss es nie: Dass du lebst, war keine…
Git commits have an id that is computed as a substring of a hash over the content of the repository at this point in time, the commit author, message, timestamp, and related metadata. Historically, this has been done using SHA-1, although efforts to transition to SHA-256 are underway . Typically, these ids are unique, and even its prefixes are unique. This means that applications often only show…
Everybody “Knows” things, but how well do you know the things you know? In other words, when you state a fact or make a prediction, how confident are you that you’re correct? It is very useful to be aware of this, both for knowing how much you can rely on a piece of information in your actions and for communication. There is a famous table by Fagen-Ulmschneider about what…
anthropic claude has the amazing artefact feature, which allows it to generate a web app and immediately display it next to the chat for you to interact with. it is phenomenal for prototyping or just iterating quickly on solving a specific problem. unfortunately, other llms like google gemini do not have this feature (afaik and ofc you can use alternative guis that do have it). instead, you have…
i am not a web dev – hell, i’m barely a backend dev. but i still occasionally need to debug a website that is misbehaving (surprisingly often, in fact). that is usually simple enough: open the dev tools and look at the console errors and web requests. but sometimes, the website automatically redirects, eg to an error page, and your dev tools are reset, all debug information is lost.…
on the two’s complement podcast , there was recently an episode on technical debt , where they try to really dig into what technical debt actually means and how it can be measured. one of the hosts, ben rady, has since turned the idea into a more fleshed-out blog post here . he introduces the acronym CRUFT: CRUFT represents five dimensions of technical debt: Complexity - How much code do we…
i recently learnt about how people implement auto completion in distributed systems. basically, when i search “shaddy is”, the system should suggest for example a result like “shaddy is very very smart and clever and a great guy in general”. (that it doesn’t is a clear sign of the ongoing downfall of society) in practice, we probably want to give the user the top 5 or…
I really like working with jj , and I wouldn’t want to go back to pure git. In jj, the tip of your branch doesn’t follow new commits automatically. That means you’re often in situations like this, where you want to move your bookmark to the latest change: › jj log @ pytqprxw shaddythefirst@gmail.com 2025-01-07 17:04:59 7791efad │ (no description set) ○ rxnmpktx…
We’re going a bit more niche today. Sometimes, you select a specific time frame in Grafana, like the last hour, where an event happened, to anaylse logs or metrics. Then you refine your filters or you want to share a link with others, but turning that relative time selection into an absolute one is cumbersome. Well, there’s a trick. You can press first t and then a to turn the selected…
Given a sample of your writing, Claude is pretty good at guessing your nationality . Discovered via Zvi Mowshowitz , who is a great source on AI news in general. It guessed that I’m German when given each of my blog posts, which seems pretty impressive. ChatGPT did significantly worse for myself and some friends I asked. I’m not fully confident how reliable this actually is, given that…
When sending messages as bits across the web, you need a way of deciding where one packet ends and another begins. Consistent Overhead Byte Stuffing (COBS) is an algorithm for encoding data bytes that results in efficient, reliable, unambiguous packet framing regardless of packet content, thus making it easy for receiving applications to recover from malformed packets See Wikipedia , or, less dry,…
since these affluencers have built their platforms on mocking ostentatious displays of wealth, some cast them as critics of the 1 percent. however, if these memes were really exposès aimed at shaming the ultra-rich, they’d probably be created by disapproving outsiders. that, clearly, is not the case. these memes are created by rich kids, for rich kids. they’re not indictments — they’re status…
Greenwashing is a valid concern. It refers to companies falsely marketing products or practices as environmentally friendly for profit. However, there’s a significant difference between greenwashing and businesses taking genuine, albeit imperfect, steps towards sustainability. The latter deserves encouragement, not antagonism. We should strive to create a culture where businesses feel encouraged…
The problem is that the bad consequences of underconfidence and under-ambition are severe but subtle, whereas the bad consequences of overconfidence and wishful thinking are milder but more obvious. If you’re overconfident, you’ll try things that fail, and people will laugh at you. If you’re underconfident, you’ll avoid making risky bets, and miss out on the potential upside, but nobody will know…
Quality over quantity. I often worry that I write too much on this blog. After all, the world has a lot of text. Does it need more? Shouldn’t I pick some small number of essays and really perfect them? Arguably, no. You’ve perhaps heard of the pottery class where students graded on quantity produced more quality than those graded on quality. (It was actually a photography class.) For scientists,…
I wonder whether everyone would be better off if they automatically reversed any tempting advice that they heard (except feedback directed at them personally). Whenever they read an inspirational figure saying “take more risks”, they interpret it as “I seem to be looking for advice telling me to take more risks; that fact itself means I am probably risk-seeking and need to be more careful”.…
“There are the engineers who have read 1+ books on a given topic, and sometimes on several topics, and they all come off as extremely competent. These are, for the most part, the people that make up the audience of this blog. Of course, you do not literally need to read a book - a sufficiently high volume of technical blogs or courses are probably the equivalent at varying levels of…
I have come to believe that by and large “best practices” are doing more harm than good. Not necessarily because they’re bad advice as such, but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2) inexperienced programmers who lack the ability to judge the applicability. A reminder…
If you love what you’re doing now and don’t ever want to change jobs, great: you’ve reached the end of your career, even if it plays out over many decades. If you don’t love it, though, and that’s much more likely, then it’s worth asking what job you would love, and how you’re going to get it. A reminder to go into and through your career with open ideas and an idea of what you want, where…
Every day, thousands of Cease and Desist letters are issued, telling people to stop what they’re doing (Looking at you, David Chang). What a bummer! That’s why we created: The Continue and Persist Letter. A official-looking legal letter that encourages and uplifts people, one that tells people to keep doing what they’re doing! Surprise someone you appreciate by sending them a Continue and Persist…
The distrobox project, inspired by the similarly-named toolbox , is a tool to easily switch to different environments like, as the name implies, different linux distros. It wraps around Podman to effectively allow using your shell to arbitrary docker images. For example, if you’re on debian and want to install something from the AUR, you can spin up an arch container real quick. The…
Scott Alexander quotes a friend in an article about recognising AI art. I don’t see much art on social media in general, so I’m not very familiar with the topic and what to look for, but I found this description incredibly interesting and compelling. It makes sense that AI art would try to do details without having a coherent story to tell. I think part of the problem with AI art is…
If you’re a casual consumer of pop linguistics, you’ve probably heard the opinion that language change and drift is natural, and so you shouldn’t prescribe how people should speak or write correctly. Instead, it is said, be descriptivist, describing how the language evolves, rather than prescriptivists. In the video In Defence of Prescriptivism , K Klein gives a more nuanced…
It’s a 1/n chance and I did it n times, so the odds should be… 63%. Almost always. Have you ever wondered about the odds of success when trying something with a 10% success probability 10 times? Well, I guess if you seriously thought about it and spent time doing the maths, I have no news for you. But otherwise, check out “It’s a 10% chance which I did 10 times, so it…
Aella ’s writing about How to be respected as a teenage girl . as a girl, like a young girl, maybe you get the impression that boys are cool in a way girls aren’t. people praise and laugh at boys for doing high risk things. boys do all the good thinking and flying planes and action movies. and they put women in action movies too but it doesn’t reflect life around you - the women…
I have, a while ago, started putting small tools that I developed with LLM assistance into a tiny little website. You can find it here Don’t expect anything too amazing, but maybe there’s something useful for you too. In the spirit of talking about projects , the most recent addition is a DB Ticket Price Calculator . If you are in Germany and were thinking about whether a Bahncard is…
I just came across this old Paul Graham essay about how to disagree on the internet . It’s old, and many people have probably already read it, but I found it very constructive. The main idea is that there are different quality levels to a comment on the internet that expresses disagreement. From calling names, to offering a different perspective and an according argument, to refuting the…
Jujutsu worktrees are very convenient! In git, worktrees are an old concept. The idea is that you can effectively work on your project in 2 different folders with different states while sharing a single history and git state. That means it is smaller and less work to keep up than 2 separate clones, and you can potentially build changes in one folder on top of changes in the other. I usually use it…
fickle direnv Nix submodule syntax In trying to chase down a bug, I was trying to run a very old commit of a project of mine. No problem, I thought, it’s got a Nix Flake, so it will be easy to get running again. Turns out, I’d done some cleanup since then to significantly improve the Nix UX of the repo, and I’d forgotten the exact incantations to get it to work.
Hello World Following the example of my blog hello-world , I figured I’ll start with a hello world note. I’ll just post small interesting stuff I come across that doesn’t warrant a full post, or quick notes. They’re roughly inspired by Simon Willison’s til , though I’ll mix it up with quotes and other stuff I find interesting. I may or may not disentangle those…
If you’re following AI news and discussions, you might have heard about that little game with Gandalf trying to protect a password. Your goal as the player is to trick the poor AI into revealing its secrets, no matter the cost. The game is intended to teach about the concept of Prompt Injection and to spread awareness of some weaknesses of LLMs (Large Language Models). Honestly, it’s a…
In my post on The Divisible Numbers Challenge , I mentioned a trick for determining in your head whether a number is divisible by 4. A friend told me that that note was silly because everybody learns that stuff in primary school, which surprised me. While I did learn about it in primary school, for some reason, I never realised that it’s probably common knowledge. Of course, I was aware that…
Are you overwhelmed by the vast amount of content on the internet? Do you struggle to decide what to read while drowning in a sea of information without even remembering what you’ve read before? Or maybe you already know what you want to read by following a couple of places you know produce great content, but you’re not sure how to keep track of them all? It’s so much work to…
When I was a kid, maybe around 10 years ago, and my father and I were readying for some trip I don’t remember, I noticed something weird. My father was just standing there on one leg, the other pulled close to his body, high in the air, like a flamingo. Balancing, yet stable as a rock, his fingers skittering across his raised foot, he tied his shoe in seconds.
After recently having handed in my Master’s Thesis for my Computer Science Degree, I have found myself looking for a job. In IT, it is not uncommon to have a technical interview about solving some algorithmic problem while talking the interviewer through your thought process. There’s a huge industry around sites like LeetCode just to prepare for this prospect. One company I interviewed…
You have found Shaddy’s, a place where I may or may not be writing about things. Feel free to drop me a mail at blog@shaddy.dev . You can also find me on Discord on sandwich.chat .