en.wikipedia.org

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/wilson-invisible-kingdom.jpg'); } Invisible Kingdom. G. Willow Wilson; Christian Ward. www.darkhorse.com . www.hoopladigital.com . 2019. Accessed Dec 3, 2022. A Flawed Religious Organization [Vess] But what if… What if you found something here that seemed wrong? That seemed out of place? [Krikko] I would go straight to Mother Proxima and ask for guidance. That’s why she’s here. [Vess] And… If the something wrong had to do with Mother Proxima herself?...

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/millar-american-jesus.jpg'); } The American Jesus Trilogy. Mark Millar; Peter Gross. imagecomics.com . www.hoopladigital.com . 2019. Accessed Jan 30, 2024. Snapshots It’s a coming of age story interrogating how a hero is formed, how a villain is created, and how similar the lives of the righteous and wretched can be, how fine the fault lines of good and evil are....

A collection of notes/impressions from titles where I didn’t find enough to necessitate a dedicated page. Usually short works of fiction. Unknown Number Unknown Number. Blue Neustifter. twitter.com . genderdysphoria.fyi . Jul 27, 2021. Accessed Sep 6, 2022. tells the story of a person who has gender dysphoria. In an alternate universe, they never transitioned but went on to become an established physicist who could communicate across parallel universes....

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/doom-patrol-1987.jpg'); } Doom Patrol (1987-1995). Grant Morrison; Richard Case; John Nyberg. www.dcuniverseinfinite.com . www.hoopladigital.com . 1987. Accessed Dec 23, 2022. Punchlines Father McGarry has long since ceased to believe in miracles. Saturdays, he trudges out to the dump, looking for God among the debris. Saturdays are always the longest days and, in the winter, chilly. He asks for very little....

was written in a period when NLP practitioners are producing bigger (# of parameters; size of training data) language models (LMs), and pushing the top scores on benchmarks. The paper itself was controversial because it led to Gebru being fired from Google, following disagreements with her managers on conditions (withdraw, or remove Google-affiliated authors) for publishing the paper. A lot changed since mid-2021, when I initially wrote this page....

#meritocracy #inequality #socioeconomics Our Lot in Life Not recognizing your blessings feeds into the dark side of capitalism and meritocracy: success is a choice, and that those who haven’t achieved success are not unlucky, but unworthy. I’m relatively lucky. I don’t know how much of the techie hubris that I bear. I have unresolved feelings about meritocracy and fairness. Race is usually used as a proxy for bridging the gap, e....

Looking for parallels should be done cautiously. For example, the advantaging associated with race may be different from the one associated with heterosexism. It’s also hard to disentangle [dis]advantaging where social class, economic class, race, religion, sexuality, ethnic identity, and other factors interact. Isn’t this the crux of intersectionality studies? Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance....

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/bitter-root.jpg'); } Bitter Root. David F. Walker; Chuck Brown; Sanford Greene. imagecomics.com . www.hoopladigital.com . #extraterrestrial-possession Snapshots [Dr. Sylvester] I am not the devil. It was the devil that made me what I have become, and the devil I am here to destroy. Look around you, Enoch Sangerye. You’ve seen this before – cities and towns burned to the ground....

Exercise 1: Have a regular savings program. Start investing early because compound interest and time are you greatest resource. When it comes to setting saving accounts' interest rates with regard to the interest rate that banks enjoy from the fed , banks are downwards-flexible and upwards-sticky. Depositors lose the tune of $100b when interest rates are rising. One is better off with special accounts such as Marcus by Goldman Sachs (1....

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/sandman-nightmare-country.webp'); } The Sandman Universe: Nightmare Country. James Tynion IV; Lisandro Estherren; Yanick Paquette; Andrea Sorrentino. www.dc.com . www.hoopladigital.com . sandman.fandom.com . 2022. Tynion IV won Eisner’s “Best Writer” award for 2023. Snapshots MR. ECSTASY. Dreams are a trap. They comfort and they coddle. They comfort and they coddle. They give false hope, and false understanding....

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/gaiman-sandman.png'); } Path to comic: Lucifer (Netflix) -> Lucifer (Comic) -> The Sandman (Comic) Netflix is also adapting the comic, so interested in how it deviates from the source. Ser Brienne of Tarth will be Lucifer. Hype! Love Dream: Sister – you know how I felt for Nada one. What I feel for her still. But she defied me. I gave her due earning, and she still spurned me, so… Death: So you sentenced her to hell....

Stories of Your Life and Others. Ted Chiang. 2010. ISBN: 9781931520898 . Tower of Babylon #religious-fiction #divine-retribution-motif Story focused on Hillalum, who lived during the construction of the Tower of Babel . notes that the Hebrew school version was more elaborate than the Old Testament account, e.g. the tower is so tall that it takes a year to climb, and when a man falls to his death, no one mourns, but when a brick is dropped, the brick-layers weep because it will take a year to replace....

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/arca-2023.jpg'); } Arca. Van Jensen; Jesse Lonergan. 2023. Snapshots ARCA. Good morning, children. It is time to awaken. It is time to serve. Another day is here! A day to take joy in your work. Remember, the role of each settler is essential to the mission. Because there is only one way that we will reach Eden. And that is… CHILDREN....

#religious-fiction #extraterrestrial-possession Volume 9 was nominated for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic. However, not very stoked after Book One (Vol 1 and 2). Maybe it gets better? Only Volume 9 has been nominated for a Hugo Award, so maybe check that next time before committing? body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/wicdiv.jpg'); } ​​The Recurrence. Every 90 years, 12 gods reincarnate on earth for 2 years....

Saga. Brian Vaughan; Fiona Staples. imagecomics.com . www.hoopladigital.com . en.wikipedia.org . body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/vaughan-saga.jpg'); } Volumes 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 and 9 have been nominated for the the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. A 6/9 nomination rate implies that the comic is pretty good! Themes (Mostly War) Planet Landfall (Alana’s) and Wreath (its moon, Marko’s) have been in conflict as long as anyone can remember....

The Department of Truth | Image Comics. James Tynion IV; Martin Simmonds. imagecomics.com . Accessed Feb 18, 2022. body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/tynion-dept-of-truth.jpeg'); } Expecting a modern take on 1984, which I didn’t finish because I lost interest. Plot Points [Lee Harvey Oswald] The more people believe in something, the more true that thing becomes. The more reality tips in the favor of that belief....

Parable of the Sower. A Graphic Novel Adaptation (Original by Butler, 1993). Damian Duffy; John Jennings; Octavia E. Butler. www.abramsbooks.com . www.hoopladigital.com . 2020. ISBN: 978-1-4197-3133-4 . body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/parable-of-sower.jpg'); } Notable Plot Moments “A pessimist if I’m not careful.” She did not just reject pessimism once and become a Pollyanna thereafter. It was an impulse that she had to quell over and and over....

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/gaiman-snow-glass-apples.jpg'); } Snow, Glass, Apples Stumbled onto from Hoopla’s recommendations. flips the script and tells the story from the step mother’s perspective, and she is also the protagonist. Snow White is a vampire. She fed on her father (consensually?), the King, to the point of him being a shadow of a man. Her stepmother, the Queen, was only 18 when the King died....

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/bendis-house-of-m.jpg'); } Plot Points [Xavier] Wanda, put the world back now! [Wanda] No! [Xavier] Put it back! [Wanda] But my children! [Xavier] Never existed! Wanda’s overarching desire to have a family to the detriment of others has been explored in the films WandaVision, and Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness. First time seeing it in comic form. [Logan] Someone do the math for me… How many more of you does she have to kill before you snap out of it?...

#extraterrestrial-possession body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/liu-monstress.jpg'); } Ms. Liu notes that Monstress is a creator-owned comic book series. Why is “creator-owned” significant? While creator ownership has been common in fiction writing, it’s more the exception in comics, recorded music, and motion pictures, where the work is sold to the publishers, or produced as work-for-hire. Prominent outfits for creator-owned comics include Image Comics (founded by prominent Marvel artists), DC’s Vertigo imprint (now Black Label), and Dark Horse Comics' Legend imprint....

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/the-last-days-of-ptolemy-grey.jpg'); } The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey. Walter Mosley. en.wikipedia.org . www.apple.com . 2022-03-11. Accessed Feb 4, 2023. Snapshots [Ptolemy] Well, what I always tell Reggie he got to do? [Reggie] Uh, I got to take care of my kids. I got to go to the doctor if I run a fever. And… And, uh, I got to put in at least ten dollars in the bank every time I get paid....

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/king-vision-little-worse-than-a-man.jpg'); } Vision Vol. 1: Little Worse Than A Man. Tom King; Gabriel Hernandez Walta. www.marvel.com . www.hoopladigital.com . Jun 29, 2016. Accessed Feb 5, 2023. Snapshots Most of the Visions' neighbors worked downtown, and they talked often about the traffic on 66 or Lee highway. On the weekends they tended to stay in Virginia, though they often lamented that they should go into the city....

body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/superman-birthright-2003.webp'); } Superman: Birthright. Mark Waid; Leinil Francis Yu; Gerry Alanguilan; Dave McCaig. www.dc.com . www.hoopladigital.com . 2003. Accessed Mar 24, 2023. Snapshots JOR-EL. For the thousand orbits, a shining planet circled a celestial font of heat and light. The people of that world grew tired of war so they achieved a united society. They feared the unknown… so they conquered it with the marvels of science....

Star Trek: Year Five. Brandon Easton; Jody Houser; Jim McCann; Collin Kelly; Jackson Lanzing. idwpublishing.com . www.hoopladigital.com . memory-beta.fandom.com . 2019. body { background-image: url('/img/fiction/star-trek-year-5-2019-2021.webp'); } Snapshots SPOCK. They Lloyd Zeta hypergiant is the single most massive stellar object ever detected by Starfleet. And according to calculations by both the Vulcan Science Academy and Starfleet, within the next five minutes… it will explode, emitting a high-yield gamma ray burst that will effectively sterilize this entire sector....

A relational data model uses tables that consist of rows and columns. A row can be uniquely identified by a table + ID combination. A column entry can reference another row in another table through a shared key. One goal is to avoid duplicating data. However, to answer a real-world query, we end up paying th cost by joining results from multiple tables. That said, with proper indexing and prior research, combining results is pretty fast....

Mental Attitude While Learning Distinguish Mere Facts From Conclusions or Opinions Discriminate between mere statements of facts, necessary conclusions which follow therefrom, and mere opinions which they seem to render reasonable. There’s no need to perform an experiment to verify that the atomic weight of oxygen is 16. That the sum of the angles of a plane triangle equals two right angles is not a mere fact, but an inevitable truth....

What Are Design Patterns? Arriving at designs that are specific to the problem at hand but general enough to address future problems and requirements is hard. New designers tend to be overwhelmed by the options available. Expert designers do not solve every problem from first principles; they reuse design patterns. I’ve also encountered the “you aren’t gonna need it” (YAGNI) school of thought that aims to minimize writing code that anticipates too far into the future, as such guesses usually don’t pan out....

Harden, a liberal behavior geneticist, is publishing a book, “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality”. Watch this space as it casts doubt on prevailing social justice thesis that environmental factors, and not genetics, influence behavior or social outcomes. Check back in Sept 2022 (one year from now). Faster Human Trials In 1986, AZT (AIDS treatment) showed 1/145 deaths compared to the placebo’s 16/137. 6,000 AIDS patients were offered AZT, helping it get to the public much faster....

Premise: Orr can have “effective” dreams that retroactively change reality for everyone else, except those who are aware of him dreaming. See for a refresher on the plot. Notable Plot Points Prodded by Haber to dream of the end of overpopulation, Orr dreamt of a plague that killed 6B people. But Orr tries to convince himself that the world that was was fiction in his head, so he didn’t really kill anyone....

Criticism/Defense Of Billionaire Philanthropy Taxes will probably not go to the same causes, e.g. reforming the bail system, grassroot efforts for migrants, etc. Admittedly, these are things that the government should be doing, but it seems that the government doesn’t do enough. Furthermore, some of these issues so politicized, e.g. immigrants, that government support can be fickle. Foundations are more effective than governments as they do their due diligence, e....

Browser Market Share Worldwide (2009 - 2020). Source: [statcounter | GlobalStats](#browserShare20092020) At the very least, Chrome is worth studying. Something worked out. I’m biased, I only plan to deeply explore Chromium-based browsers and Firefox. Stability, Testing and the Multi-Process Architecture In a single-threaded browser, devs use asynchronous APIs - which may sometimes hold the browser up. Instead of multiple threads, Chromium chose multiple processes: isolation, independent crashes, better asymptotic memory management, identifying expensive sites, etc....

Journals note that prediction services can still make accurate predictions using a fraction of the data collected from a user device. They propose Cloak, which suppresses non-pertinent features (i.e. those features which can consistently tolerate addition of noise without degrading utility) to the prediction task. Cloak has a provable degree of privacy, and unlike cryptographic techniques, does not degrade prediction latency. Using the training data, labels, a pre-trained model and a privacy-utility knob, they (1) find the pertinent features through perturbation training, and (2) learn utility-preserving constant values for suppressing the non-pertinent data....

Objective: Learn to read the game and make smart predictions. Reaction times are overrated; perception and prediction rule . Offensive Playmaking and Scoring tracks the following play types: transition, isolation, pick & roll ball handler, pick & roll roll man, post up, spot up, handoff, cut, off screen and put-backs. At least these categories provide a baseline for what search terms to use. also has a miscellaneous play type section, so it’ll be interesting to see if a new play-type pops up in the future....

notes that , the primary source, glosses over nitty-gritties. e.g. the “message queue” server. Maybe reading through these will provide a larger perspective to design decisions made in Chromium regarding observers. Rant: some of willchan’s thoughts on WeakPtr, for those who care to read criticizes the observer pattern for murking dependency chains. Investigate more in this regard. Intent A one-to-many dependency between object so that when one object (subject) changes, all its dependents (observers) are notified and update automatically....

Main resource: . What is Modular Arithmetic? Where \(A\) and \(B\) are integers, we can write: $$ \frac{A}{B} = Q \text{ remainder } R $$ Using the same \(A, B, Q, \text{ and } R\) as above, we have: $$ A \text{ mod } B = R $$ \(A \text{ mod } B\) can be visualized as taking \(A\) steps on a clock that runs from \(0\) to \(B-1\). If the number is positive we step clockwise, if it’s negative we step counterclockwise....

Link Prediction Given network-structured data, predict whether a link exists between two nodes. General types of prediction tasks on graphs: graph-level (e.g. will a molecule bind to a receptor implicated in a disease?), node-level (e.g. what is the identity of each node?), and edge-level (e.g. does this edge exist; what value does it have?). Applications include: predicting drug-drug interactions (common in treating patients with complex/co-existing diseases) as they may cause changes in the drugs' pharmacological activity ....

Formal Software Design Alloy is an open-source language and analyzer for software modeling. An Alloy model is a collection of constraints that describe a set of structures, e.g. all possible security configurations of a web application. Alloy’s tool, the Alloy Analyzer is a solver that takes the constraints of a model and finds structures that satisfy them. 📑 The Alloy Analyzer leverages a SAT solver, and this precludes Alloy from analyzing optimization problems....

Strange Loops A Strange Loop occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started. The 3-voice Canon Per Tonos from Musikalisches Opfer BWV 1079 exhibits a strange loop. Successive modulations make one expect to hopelessly far from the starting key, but after six modulations, the original key of C minor is restored! I can’t quite perceive the rising canon....

The Dilemma There are wide productivity variations between good programmers and poor ones. Sackman et. al. found 10:1 ratios. The data showed no correlation between experience and performance. The idea of a 10x developer is mostly ridiculed in my online circles. That said, some jobs have X years of experience as a requirement. How can we resolve these contradictions? The major part of the cost of large teams is communication, and system debugging to correct the ill effects of miscommunication....

Two Types of Thinking Soldier Mindset Reasoning is like defensive combat. Finding out you’re wrong means suffering a defeat. Seeks out evidence to fortify and defend your beliefs. Directionally motivated reasoning. When we want something to be true, we ask, “Can I believe this?” When we don’t want something to be true, we ask, “Must I believe this?” Scout Mindset Reasoning is like mapmaking. Finding out you’re wrong means revising your map....

Going to a talk is difficult for everyone because nobody understands the whole thing, but it’s especially difficult for undergraduates because they still expect to. is a rich resource for understanding scholarly literature. Browse it. Some of the listed items are familiar, e.g. Google Scholar, SCImago, Sci-Hub, but it’d be informative to zoom out to the larger picture, e.g. good alternatives to Google Scholar. Why Even Read Papers?...

#code-hygiene Pick up from: IEEE’s International Conference on Software Maintenance Improving Code: The (Mis)perception of Quality Metrics Springer’s Software Quality Journal On Abstractions If you find yourself adding more parameters and if-statements to an existing abstraction, is the abstraction still apt? Why not remove the old abstraction and re-extract a new [more apt] abstraction? Devs frequently succumb to the sunken cost fallacy thinking that there must have been a reason that the code was written in a certain way....

Clang, LLVM, GCC, and MSVC LLVM is an umbrella project, with several sub-projects, e.g. LLVM Core and Clang. LLVM Core libraries provide an optimizer and code generator for different CPUs. Clang is an “LLVM native” C/C++/Objective-C compiler which aims for fast compilation, useful error and warning messages, and a platform for building source-level tools. The Clang Static Analyzer and clang-tidy are examples of such tools. So if I were to create a programming language, I can define a transformation into LLVM intermediate representation (LLVM IR), and that will make use of LLVM core to optimize it?...

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth. On the fiction’s importance, phrases it nicely: But we could not live in this [real] world if we were not able, from time to time, to get away from it. We do not mean that imaginative literature is always, or essentially, escapist....

Reaction Times are Overrated Elite athletes do not display superior reaction times to those of average people; most hover at 200ms. However, games are played at speeds where 200ms is too slow, e.g. 100-mph baseballs, 130-mph tennis serves, etc. A reaction time of less than 100ms is deemed a false start in track and field sprints. Superior Perception Athletes outperformed novices when asked if there was a ball in a rapidly flashed slide....

Environmentalism Over the last 70 years, less than 10% of plastic waste has been recycled - it’s uneconomical. Recycling shifts attention from the environmental impact of plastics and their overproduction to the consumer’s willingness to recycle. Reducing and reusing is a much better environmental strategy. #environmentalism Betting (and Gambling) I’m seeing more prominent gambling sites and ads compared to when I was growing up. Based on my peers, SportPesa made lots of headway in Kenya (few companies can claim to sponsor English Premier League teams)....

Product Differentiation and Price Discrimination Product differentiation seeks to distinguish a product from a competing product to make it more attractive to a specific target market. Price discrimination occurs when the same goods/services are sold at different prices from the same company. The Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socio-economic unfairness: the rich man who bought the high quality $50 pair of boots would still be using them in 10 years, while the poor man who buys the $10 pair would have spent $100 on boots in the same time, and still be worse off....

The human genome has sequences of nucleotide base pairs that are repeated over and over again. At each locus of interest, a person has two sets of repeats inherited from each parent. Each possible difference at a locus is an allele. The combinations of the possible differences at multiple loci form a DNA profile that can be used to tie suspects to a crime scene. The Accuracy of DNA Testing is Wanting 74/108 crime labs erroneously incriminated a suspect during a mock study....

Luxottica - Queen of the Seven Kingdoms Luxottica owns and licenses Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace. Italy’s Luxottica also runs EyeMed Vision Care, LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical. It also merged with the world’s leading maker of prescription eyeglass lenses and contact lenses, to form EssilorLuxottica....

Political Ads Cambridge Analytica (CA) paid people to take in-app survey; mined FB profile data including friends' data; crafted tailored sensitive ads to sway-able voters. Elections are about emotions, not facts. Data science and social media can help us make sense of and manipulate the chaos. An alternative argument. Political misinformation is: Weak in high profile partisan races because pre-existing beliefs hardly change Strong when people don’t have string pre-existing opinions, e....

Should Platforms Be Neutral? Facebook banned praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism, because the two concepts cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups. Furthermore, people that search for related terms will have “Life After Hate” suggested to them. Part of me is uncomfortable. Sure, Facebook is trying to do the right thing here. What if Facebook was replaced by some tyrannical government that censors opposition?...

Short Selling Say $A shares are selling at $100, but I think they’re overpriced. So I borrow 10 shares, pay my brokerage interest and post some collateral. I then sell the shares for $1,000. Whoever buys my shares has no idea that I do not own them. In a naked short, I do not actually borrow or ensure that the security can be borrowed within the standard 3-day settlement period....

Contact Tracing “Apps” in this context means contact tracing apps released by public health authorities to do contact tracing. The APIs are limited to them. Big Picture Release APIs to enable apps to interoperate between Android and iOS devices. Bluetooth-based contact tracing baked into Android and iOS, such that no app is needed for broadcasting/listening. This ensures broad adoption, but will be on an opt-in basis....

Dependency Management Golang introduced a new library referencing mode to overcome limitations of the old one. While the two library modes are supported by Golang, they are incompatible, e.g. dependency management (DM) issues, reference inconsistencies, build failures, etc. did an empirical study that resulted in HERO, an automated technique to detect DM issues and suggest fixes. Applied to 19k Golang projects, HERO detected 98.5% on a DM issue benchmark, and found 2,422 new DM issues in 2,356 Golang projects....

State Surveillance In the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, FBI was contacting people whose cellphones pinged cell towers near the Capitol during the riots. #state-surveillance A powered mobile phone always sends signals to one of the closest base stations. Given multiple base stations, the angle and time of arrival, and location signatures of each cell location can be used to locate a mobile device. The higher the density of cell towers, the more precise the calculated location....

Motivation: Why are politics so contentious? How can I relate better with people that hold opposing political beliefs? Why People Are Irrational About Politics. Michael Huemer. Philosophy, Politics and Economics. 2015. Salient features of political disagreements: widespread (many people disagree on many issues), strong conviction/confidence, and persistent (difficult to resolve). Political Disputes Are Not Explained by Miscalculation or Ignorance Miscalculation Theory: Political issues are difficult and partisans make mistakes in their reasoning....

WWW ‘21: The Web Conference 2021 REST: Relational Event-Driven Stock Trend Forecasting REST, an event-driven stock trend forecasting framework, that overcomes two limitations of existing event-driven models. Models the stock context, and learns the effect of event information on the stocks under different contexts. Constructs a stock graph and designs a new propagation layer to propagate the effect of event information from related stocks. #stock-trend-forecasting #computational-finance #graph-based-learning The value of stock trend forecasting is not unanimous, e....

Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest uses a captivating narrative style to elaborate on a complex question. The exposition makes the scientific parts memorable. features a good anecdote of insight favoring the prepared. On a jog in London in January, probably primed by reading Nick Lane’s Oxygen, he noticed that there were some bar-headed geese. These geese migrate between India and Kazakhstan/Mongolia, necessitating a flight over the Himalayas, sometimes at 28,000 feet....

#education Societal Preference for STEM Over the Liberal Arts Not everyone can [wants to?] take the sciences, but they were pushed out of their passions into applicable degrees like Business and Communications. The initially high economic return to applied STEM degrees declines by more than 50% in the first decade. People who major in LA don’t get first jobs that are as lucrative, but they do catch up....

Bloom Filters In true fashion to Stigler’s Law of Eponymy (no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer ), Ross Ashby (1960) did a probabilistic analysis of Calvin Mooers’s Zatocoding (1947) (coding system for library cards). This predates Burton Bloom’s work (1970). Motivation A Bloom filter for a set \(X: \{x_1, x_2, …, x_n\} \) from some universe \(\mathbb{U}\) allows one to test whether a given item \(x \in \mathbb{B}\) is an element of \(X\)....

Bloom Filters;

#utilitarianism As the Last I May Know. Shi Lian Huang. www.tor.com . Accessed Dec 4, 2021. won the “Best Short Story” Hugo Award in 2020. Memorable Points Background: Sere missiles can wipe out a city completely. Nyma’s nation has been the only recipient of a seres strike. They’ve since acquired their own seres stockpile. They’re engaged in war with an state that lacks seres weapons....

Startups tend to fail more often than they succeed. However, a lot of startup advice is given by those who made it, and therefore prone to survivorship bias. Hearing from founders that gave it their all but never succeeded should be enlightening. I expect reasons like misunderstanding the customer, sunk costs, running out of money (especially with societal pressures like a family to fend for), wrong time, etc. I’d categorize my flashcards web app as a project that never made it....

Crime Drama Ozark’s highlights are Ruth Langmore’s 90s' hip hop playlist, Wendy Byrde’s sociopathic ambition, and Del Rio’s suave. The show follows the Byrde family that has to launder money for the Navarro Cartel. The writers use shortcuts as the show proceeds, and grant excessive plot armor for the Byrde family in subsequent seasons. ’s Bill Dubuque also wrote The Accountant (2016 Film) , which follows a CPA with high-functioning autism who makes his living by uncooking the books of criminal organizations experiencing internal embezzlement....

Debugging 101 Definition? Debugging involves inspecting a program’s internal state. printf Debugging and Logging In printf debugging, one adds print statements and keeps iterating until enough information has been extracted. Using logging has several advantages over printf debugging: varying logging destinations (e.g. standard output, files, sockets, remote servers, etc.); severity levels (e.g. INFO, DEBUG, WARN, ERROR, &c) that support filtering of output; color-coding for readability. Terminals have varying levels of color support: plain color; ANSI escape codes (16 color codes with bold/italic and background); 256 color palette; 24-bit truecolor (“888” colors, aka 16 million, e....

Money was a sore point in the Holmes household. Holmes’s grandparents had squandered away their share of the Fleischmann fortune. Richard Fuisz, a family friend, was a flashy successful businessman. So in a way, Elizabeth didn’t grow up in wealth? This puts a spin on Chapter 01: A Purposeful Life . Fuisz was offended that Elizabeth never consulted him. Fuisz made his money patenting medical inventions that he anticipated other companies would someday want....

How to Be Wrong found that experts were barely able to forecast better than random chance. However, a small subset of people (coined “superforecasters” ) were better. In a competition, they beat teams of top professors and CIA professional analysts. These superforecasters were not smarter than everyone else nor did they have more knowledge/experience, they were great at being wrong. Change your mind a little at a time. Seeing the world in shades of grey is less stressful, as the experience of encountering evidence against one of your beliefs is not high stakes....

Argument from Consequences If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. Straw Man The essence of this technique is to caricature a position to make it easier to attack. My opponent is trying to convince you that we evolved from chimpanzees who were swinging from trees, a truly ludicrous claim. Environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people. Appeal to Fear You should give me all your valuables before the police get here....

The Law of the Few From 1995 to 1996, the # of children born in Baltimore with syphillis increased 500%. CDC blamed it on cocaine and reduction in clinics. In 100k+ Colorado Springs town, the gonorrhoea epidemic tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in 4 small neighbourhoods, frequenting the same 6 bars. Gaëtan Dugas, an Air-Canada flight attendant, is [mis?]regarded as “Patient Zero” for AIDS in the US....

Incomplete List of Information Privacy Properties Control/consent, e.g. Cambridge Analytica exfiltrating FB users' data Discussion on Cambridge Analytica Anonymity, e.g. Snowden leaking NSA docs without revealing his identity Limits on data collection, e.g. laws restricting government surveillance Limits on data use, e.g. US Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 Under GINA, health insurers must not use genetic information of the clients (or clients family) to inform their policy....

The Principle Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. In Essence of Bullshit , Frankfurt posits that the essence of bullshit is lack of concern for the truth, which may explain why bullshit is easier to produce. Jonathan Swift: Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…...

Introduction The Tipping Point is the biography of how little things had big effects. From 1992 to 1997, murder rates dropped 64.3% to 770 and total crimes fell by \(\approx\) 50% to 355,893. Geometric progressions are non-intuitive, e.g. if given a large paper and asked to fold it 50x, the stack’s height will be \(\approx\) the distance to the sun. This is a popular illustration. The standard paper’s thickness, \(h_0\), is \(0....

quotes Doug McIlroy: Those types are not “abstract”; they are as real as int and float. What is the context of this quote? A class is a user-defined type provided to represent a concept in the code of a program. Essentially, all language facilities beyond the fundamental types, operators, and statements exist to help define better class or to use them more conveniently....

Multi-dimensional arrays using massiv; Fusion; Box vs. Unboxed; Connected Components; Data.Set; Monadic map

Day 7 - Advent of Code 2021. adventofcode.com . Accessed Mar 5, 2022. Part I Description A giant whale has decided that your submarine is its next meal, and it’s much faster than you are. There’s nowhere to run! Suddenly, a swarm of crabs (each in its own tiny submarine - it’s too deep for them otherwise) zooms in to rescue you! They seem to be preparing to blast a hole in the ocean floor; sensors indicate a massive underground cave system just beyond where they’re aiming!...

Day 6 - Advent of Code 2021. adventofcode.com . Accessed Mar 2, 2022. Part I Description The sea floor is getting steeper. Maybe the sleigh keys got carried this way? A massive school of glowing lanternfish swims past. They must spawn quickly to reach such large numbers - maybe exponentially quickly? You should model their growth to be sure. Although you know nothing about this specific species of lanternfish, you make some guesses about their attributes....

This page contains remarks on Haskell that I encountered when working with source files that span multiple AoC 2021 problems. and have Haskell solutions. It’ll be nice to compare how they solved the problems. I don’t want to end up perfecting the wrong approach! Setting Up Haskell Env for AoC To manage dependencies, Cabal and Stack are pretty popular. Stack incorporates the Cabal build system....

Problem Statement You are given the following information, but you may prefer to do some research for yourself: 1 Jan 1900 was a Monday. Thirty days has September, April, June and November. All the rest have thirty-one, Saving February alone, Which has twenty-eight, rain or shine. And on leap years, twenty-nine. A leap year occurs on any year evenly divisible by 4, but not on a century unless it is divisible by 400....

Timeline of Secure Multi-Party Communication In 1982, secure two-party computation (2PC) was introduced for problems that are boolean predicates, e.g. Yao’s Millionaires' Problem that asks whether \(a \ge b\) is true without revealing the actual values of \(a\) and \(b\). Andrew Yao generalized 2PC for any feasible computation in 1986. Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson later generalized it to secure multiparty communication. Yao-based protocols requires that the function to be securely evaluated be represented as a circuit, but an efficient transformation is not trivial....

\(X\) is a binomial random variable if it takes the values \(0, 1, 2, …, n\) and $$ \mathbb{P}\{X = k\} = { n \choose k } \cdot p^k \cdot (1 - p)^{n-k} $$ Sanity Check: Do the probabilities sum to 1? $$ \sum_{k=0}^{n} \mathbb{P}\{X = k\} = \sum_{k=0}^{n} { n \choose k } p^k (1 - p)^{n-k} = \left( p + (1 - p) \right)^n = 1 $$ I totally didn’t understand how we got to \(\left( p + (1 - p) \right)^n\)....

Version Control Systems track changes to a folder and its contents in a series of snapshots. Each snapshot encapsulates the entire state of files/folders within a top-level directory. Git’s interface is a leaky abstraction. While the interface is at times ugly, its underlying design and ideas are beautiful. A bottom-up explanation of Git therefore makes more sense. Snapshots A blob corresponds to a file, and it’s just a bunch of bytes....