Self Wright
Over the weekend, I took a first stab at transforming my prior little cave-generation toy (https://abacusnoir.blog/2020/08/02/cave-generation/) from Scala to Rust.
Old repo: https://bitbucket.org/agambrahma/caves/
New repo: https://bitbucket.org/agambrahma/caves/
I’m sure a lot of people get to this point … it’s a form of procrastination, clicking on the tempting little Watch Later mini-clock-face.
“Of course I’ll watch you”, I say to the little thumbnail.
Fast-forward a few years later, and there are now about five hundred of these. Surprise.
Given that the average length is about half an hour (if it’s five minutes, I either watch now or watch never), this is several months of dedicated watching time. Not going to happen.
I could painfully prioritize these, figure out what I really meant to watch, and what I was just lying to myself about.
I don’t need to do that. I know I was lying to myself most of the time I clicked that little button.
So the next best option: start over.
Unfortunately, Youtube hasn’t allowed for this possibility.
I found a hack on StackExchange1. It involved moving some playlists around. Painful, but doable.
Doubly unfortunately, this doesn’t work anymore. The Watch Later playlist is an append-log now. Your pile of misery cannot be allowed to shrink2.
There seemed to be light at the end of the tunnel: by suitably obscure Javascript, you too can wipe your slate of false optimism clean. It was an innocuous looking short one-liner3.
I tried it, didn’t work for me.
I tried reverse-engineering it, but couldn’t hack and cut my way through the mass of divs that characterize modern web pages. Javascript is the new assembly language of the web, deal with it.
I got more desperate, tried out other, more unwieldy snippets4.
I did find some kindred souls5.
Anyway I’ve been on-and-off this quest, with no success. Still looking for that “magical snippet” that will work for me.
(@Youtube, Y U No Let Me Delete My Watch History ?!)
getElementsByClassName, then looping and calling click on them ↩︎javascript:var tmr = window.setInterval(function(){var _this = document.querySelector('ytd-playlist-video-list-renderer #button > yt-icon'); if (_this){_this.click();document.querySelector('#items > div > ytd-menu-service-item-renderer:nth-child(2)').click();}else{window.clearInterval(tmr)}}, 1000); ↩︎
These human ancestors, who roamed different patches of Eurasia roughly 1.77 million and 800,000 years ago, respectively, share a claim to fame: Their fossilized teeth harbored the oldest surviving proteins from extinct human species — molecules more than twice as old as human DNA.
How does one faithfully compress the entire experience of a reliable, unbiased, expansive public library and its helpful, friendly staff into a 14” computer screen?
Some sites, like Netflix or YouTube, solve this problem with recommendation engines that populate information based on what people have previously seen or searched. Consequently, readers may unknowingly find themselves caught in a sort of “algorithmic bubble.”
… the more risk Robinhood’s customers take in their hyperactive trading accounts, the more the Silicon Valley startup profits from the whales it sells their orders to. And while Robinhood’s successful recruitment of inexperienced young traders may have inadvertently minted a few new millionaires riding the debt-fueled bull market, it is also deluding an entire generation into believing that trading options successfully is as easy as leveling up on a video game.
… Robinhood gets paid—by the quants—58 cents per 100 shares for options contracts versus only 17 cents per 100 for equities. Options are less liquid than stocks and tend to trade at higher spreads. While the company says only 12% of its customers trade options, those trades accounted for 62% of Robinhood’s order-flow revenues in the first half of 2020.
It wasn’t until my 30s that I began to understand free speech, that the real antagonist of speech is power
The two residential buildings were constructed in 1990 after the demolition of a temple at the same site, and the sculpture was uncovered during a clearing of foliage in the area.
One of the most interesting aspects of programming is the ability to inspect and modify programs while they are running. We all know debuggers, but there are lots of programs which let you interact with them directly while they are running. Some programs let you run scripts via embedded interpreters, which let you extend the program, but in some instances the programs themselves are the interpreters.
I’ve been at Confluent for a year and half now, and it was fun in many ways, but I’ve decided upon a change, and I’m joining Sigma Computing next week.
Another instance where I was looking for a different “local maxima” but ended up finding a global maxima instead.
Everyone wants different things at different points, but Sigma feels like a sweet spot for me right now.
It’s not too big and not too small, with a rapidly growing engineering team, there is a whole different bunch of tech to learn from scratch, an opportunity to work on an end-to-end full-stack product while also having significant infrastructure challenges.
I’ve learnt a lot from the folks I’ve worked with at Confluent, and I’m excited to begin the new year on a new adventure 🙂
Abacus Noir 