inasio

The end of life section is a bit whitewashed. Freeman Dyson had an article (struggling to find it) about how von Neumann was invited to give a Hilbert-style lecture on the 10 problems for the new computing age. All the big names at the time were there, but von Neumann was in such poor shape (dementia I assume), that it was decided to pretend it had never happened.

edit: article is called Birds and Frogs, by Freeman Dyson https://wucj.lab.westlake.edu.cn/Others/Dyson_Birds_and_Frog...

Reminded me of the Huascaran avalanche (1970, killed approx 30K people) [0]. I'm surprised this is not also in the thousands of casualties (perhaps it'll get there) [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Huascar%C3%A1n_debris_ava...

For another super condensed shorthand system for recipes, see Thermomix cookbooks (requires a Thermomix though)

The main story in the wiki page comes from the Autopian [0], specifically from Jason Torchinsky, ex Jalopnik. It's an awesome publication, check them out, and Jason is an incredible writer (Onion alumni)

[0] https://www.theautopian.com/bmw-is-showing-commercials-on-th...

See The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

I've worked optimizing MRIs trying to make them faster and more accurate, they're amazing machines (distinguish white matter from grey matter in the brain is very non trivial), but super complicated and expensive. To me, the paradigm change that could come from greater accessibility and throughput to analyze all that data would be having longitudinal baselines (scans every x months), which right now only very few people can access, and for the same reason there's not a lot of data to build accurate models.

Nice job! Sid Meier's Pirates is one of my favorite games, wish they brought it back (I still play it occasionally, can't believe it never got a remake)

Stayed a few times in a place exposed to constant breeze from a tropical Pacific coast beach, and learned that stainless steel doesn't really last very long there. Everything stainless steel-based (fixtures, fridges, handles) rusts in a few years. I'd bet there's a market for upscale alloys

Does anyone know if this has an accelerometer? I recently got a nice sports-oriented smartwatch (non-Garmin), to use it mostly for rowing, but it doesn't track the rowing-rate. It should be pretty easy to program one if the watch has accelerometers, but couldn't tell from the spec sheet (maybe that means no?)

Vancouver also has a pretty nice La Marzocco showroom, the occasionally organize events, and can always go by to view the very nice machines and if you ask politely you'll get an amazing espresso

There's a whole thing this days about building solvers (e.g. SAT or Ising) out of exotic hardware that does compute in memory. A while back I wondered if one could leverage distributed DB logic to build solvers for massive problems, something like compute in DB.

I have a nice copy, at least as of a few years ago you can get them for relatively cheap. I've been meaning to put scans of the text into OpenCV and play a bit to see if there's an underlying code. The number system in the page numbers has been cracked as far as I know.

I found a Minidisc player that had been in storage for over 10 years, probably closer to 15. Runs off a single AA battery; I'd left it with a Duracell and it was still running.

Reminds me of Emilio Salgari (late 19th century, Italy's Jules Verne), one of my favorite authors growing up. He has many books on Malaysian pirates, Wild west cowboys (he's apparently considered the grandfather of the spaghetti western), adventures in India, etc. Always thought he must have been an adventurer, or at least a sailor. He never left Verona.

My electrician drives an electric F-150, it's impressive how useful it is for him. The frunk carries a big box of tools, there's tons of outlets to charge his power tool batteries, he can even run a small welder

I read the Ars Technica version [0], completely insane read if true (LLM allegedly painted target on mom, convinced him he was the matrix's Neo, but kung-fu was already pre-uploaded, etc...)

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/openai-refuses-t...

The paper compares p-computers with D-Wave's quantum annealing machine, which is limited to only solving certain problems (as opposed to universal QC such as Google or IonQ's, that could in theory implement Shor's)

A lot of WW2 heavyhitters from all sides:

Hitler, Mussolini, Patton, Churchill, Goebels. Even Anne Frank and Einstein.

Skunks apparently make great pets (but need to have their stink glands surgically extracted), the pitch is smart like a cat but faithful like dogs

A few years back (10 maybe?) they had a disk crash, and there was a notice that for people with 100 or more problems solved they'd do an extra effort to recover their solutions and add you back, not sure if it was only posted on the main website. I was lucky to get my account back at the time

I love them in pizza, I don't think we even blanche them, cook them Napolitan-style on a very hot oven quickly. Definitely tasty.

Also works as a pesto ingredient

Basically Amdahl's law [0]. If optimizing for weight, go for the components that make up most of the weight first.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

A few years ago I was evaluating options to move away from a deprecated external latex library my company relied on in Confluence, and tested Notion. I was super impressed at the rendering speed of their latex implementation (KaTex of course). As other have mentioned, not everything is there, but it was sufficiently good for our purposes. The switch was a pain, I hoped that Notion had good tools to move over from Confluence, but we had to do a custom job relying on sketchy undocumented APIs

There are already robots that do that (autobelayers)...

In days of prison time?

I was surprised that for almost 300 pages there were only 26 references listed in the back. Not the end of the world by any means, clearly a ton of work went into this, but I find it useful to see from references how it overlaps with other subjects I may know more about

It's also (partly) a Frank Lloyd Wright house, that alone would justify a very high price

There was an auction of a lot of his memorabilia a few months ago, it included a lot of Festool stuff. He was an avid woodworker (the sale also included furniture he made). I like how the work table where you can see the miter saw is made of the most utilitarian plywood, it feels like he was working until his last days

I was expecting a mention of symplectic ODE solvers, although perhaps that was beyond the scope of the blog post. For Hamiltonian ODEs, you can design methods that explicitly preserve energy, outperforming more generic methods.

The point is that you can go "from more people bad" to "less people good" in just a few jumps, and that is not great.