My favorite Russian songs
Context I’ve been sharing some of these off-and-on with people, I thought I’d spend half an hour and sit down and make the list. “Don’t tell my mom I’m in Chechnya” The most hummable of all these,…
Curated
342 posts
Writing with constraints
This might be an extreme example of a maxim. I was dimly aware of a novel written without the letter “E”. Recently saw a mention of it and looked it up. "Gadsby" is a novel written by Erne…
RISC, 30 years ago
Heard this in a Lex Fridman interview (with George Hotz), wouldn't have believed it if I didn't find the clip. But, yes, it's true. Hackers. 1995. Angelina Jolie. "RISC architect…
Shiro Protagonist
I thought this was a cool combination of skills. This is Shiro, the author of Gauche Scheme, a Scheme implementation you may not have heard of (and if you're unfamiliar with Scheme itself, some o…
Gotta go by the bridge ...
I found something amusing about this pic I can't put into words. Think of it as a little party game of "who do you think this is?" (afaik this is from the 80s, and he was in his early…
An internet of spam
Filing this under "seen on Hacker News today" Clearly we didn't think this through back then. It should have been obvious to us that it is easier to create noise than it is to create s…
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
One of my favorite songs of Simon and Garfunkel was Scarborough Fair/Canticle I recently came across a song that clearly is the original It was interesting to listen to it, and contrast the lyrics,…
Songs of war, songs of life
Sometimes there’s a “just right” aesthetic about a piece of art. If you get it, you get it. It’s a gut level infantryman song. Obviously dated because it’s about events from over two decades ago.…
A tale of three agents
I had an experience that I feel encapsulates the tradeoff between a few different products that each claim to replace part of the “general search experience”. I asked the following question: How can…
Best of Lex
Had been recommending Lex Fridman to my wife for a while, and she finally tried it out, with one of the best episodes of all, the one with Yuval Noah-Harari. She later asked me about other possible o…
Carlo Rovelli doesn’t always review books …
… but when he does, it’s amazing! You’ve got Kepler (!) and Nagarjuna (!) and the Fall of the Roman Empire, all together.…
On cultural literacy
… Or the lack therof Extract here from the foreword to “classic myths to read aloud” (highly recommend getting this to read with kids!)…