Keegs

I’m a big fan of this book. It’s an equally great algorithms reference and way to prep for coding interviews. I haven’t had one in a while but doubt they’ve changed too much in the last half decade.

This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.

I understand the infinite coastline concept in theory but in practice would you even want to measure a coastline that way? Even if your goal was “perfect” precision, coastlines are variable. You’d have to take an average across tides and that would require zooming out enough to get a normal sounding answer.

Can you expand on this? I can't find any references online.

I almost purchased a Kindle Scribe this year but went with a Supernote Manta instead. I couldn’t be happier. It runs the Kindle app but also KOReader so I can read pdfs transferred from my computer. It’s awesome for papers and pdf copies of documentation.

My favorite book is Douglas Adams’ Last Chance to See. He talks about it here [0] and IIRC he says it was his favorite book to write. Adams took a dark subject - endangered animals and our role in their extinction - and told a story that’s equally hilarious and hopeful.

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc

> If the service sucks, they’ll lose customers.

We’re talking about hospitals. Many areas are served by one local hospital. And where there are several, it’s typically the ambulance who decides where you go. It’s also pretty difficult to compare one hospital with another.

IMO hospitals resemble utilities where market forces aren’t enough to guarantee good service.

This is off topic, but can anyone tell where the photo with the caption “The situation is developing” was taken?

There aren’t many clues in the image, but the travel ad and outdoor dining point to somewhere tropical. Looks like a cool place.

This is my favorite possibility, that space has a “finite volume but no edges: if you travel farther than the scale of the universe, you end up back where you started.” It’s comforting on an existential level to imagine the amount of stuff around us is finite.

Suppose the rules changed so that some authority guarantees your right to sell your house at the price you bought it, but only at that price: when you find your next home, you get back the cost of your old one, which is then auctioned off to its next owner. Individuals are protected from falling house prices and no longer treat their homes as investments. The authority takes on that risk, now distributed across many homes, some of which appreciate. How do you think this would play out?

Your younger self was right about sanitation workers. In my city it also pays well.

My building rattled for a good 15 seconds.

The quality of writing in this book is fantastic. If you're studying math or have a recreational interest I really recommend it.

> I am getting tired of the whiplash between "it's harder than ever to find a job" and "the economy has recovered and unemployement is record lows". This is normally easily explainable

I’m curious. How can these be true at once?

I tried to read Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays during an episode of major depression, thinking I’d appreciate the message, but it was too dense given the circumstances.

What I did finish, and what ended up becoming one of my favorite books, is Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams. He traveled around the world with a biologist to find endangered animals. It’s a funny and life-affirming book.

Humans. Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations about 2000 years ago and it’s still useful for navigating modern life. On the surface, life has changed a ton over generations because of technological advancement. Underneath that though, basic human worries and basic human needs haven’t changed and probably never will.

> “We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company,” the officials add. “Proper investment in response and mitigation is mandatory.”

It’s crazy to me how tech companies pretend customer support is not a critical business function. HN and Twitter are not your contact center, and law enforcement is not your Tier 2 support. With Google in particular I keep hearing that, it isn’t that their customer service is bad, it’s that it doesn’t exist at all. Any exec should find this embarrassing.

This is a page where you can type git commands and watch how they change the tree. It's a great way to build a conceptual understanding of git.

Especially if the universe really is a dark forest. Although, if you wanted to stay undetected, why would you advertise your solar system like this?

I went with a Killer Whale, which is missing from the page but very similar to an Iris. It was tedious to build but having mouse control in my keyboard is very cool.

This website helped me choose a keyboard to build. You can stack keyboard layouts on top of each other, or print a layout to get a sense of how comfortable it is to use.

A post that predates CSS.