1334. My Life in Weeks
↪ An interesting way to visualise … life. I have never been a huge fan of the week as a unit, but maybe for the same reasons I find such a visualisation interesting. I guess it is also interesting what kind of non-personal events you find relevant to include in the story of your life in weeks. Related (and also mentioned in the link above): Tim Urban wrote a post on a life in weeks almost 600 weeks ago.
1335. macOS Tips & Tricks
↪ A collection of various shortcuts for macOS. It is very satisfying to rely primarily on keyboard shortcuts in your workflow, especially when you encounter a better and easier way of doing something. I did not know, for example, that you can hold the cursor over a word and use ⌃⌘D to see a dictionary definition. Or that you can use ⇧⌘A to select the output from the previous command in the terminal. See also the good discussion on HN related to the post.
1336. Dictionary of affixes
↪ An extraordinary collection of more than 1,250 affixes. There is a good alphabetic overview and a brief description related to each affix.
1337. Leveling Up Call and Video Quality
↪ I have a very basic setup for video calls (as in no setup at all), but I found this post informative (despite being more than a year old). Bookmarked here if I ever want to consider upgrading my setup (I doubt it will happen but why rule it out).
1338. Learning English: Grammar, Vocabulary & Pronunciation
↪ A great resource by BBC if you are looking to improve your English. Do keep in mind that this is a url to a resource that is no longer being updated, and that is one reason I like it. It reminds me of web 1.0 before everything was optimised for social media (in style and content). You can download PDFs, mp3s, and mp4s, and easily find your way around on the website. I am trying not to sound nostalgic, but the web of today makes it so difficult to sound optimistic about the state of the art.
1339. Winners of the Closeread Prize – Data-Driven Scrollytelling with Quarto
↪ There are a lot of good resources available now if you are interested in making data-driven storytelling. Closeread is one such custom format for Quarto, and here are some amazing examples on how to tell stories with data using Quarto. I have a few ideas for projects that could be interesting to explore in this way, but … time.
1340. Tyler Cowen, the man who wants to know everything
↪ A great piece on Tyler Cowen. (I’ve written a few posts directly related to Tyler Cowen’s work in the past, e.g., here and here.) He is very much specialising in being a generalist, and it is for good reasons that his friend calls him “a really good GPT”. Alas, it also means that he has pretty much seen the writing on the wall and doubled down on AI, most recently when erroneously concluding that AGI is already here (I saw somebody the other day – correctly – calling him an AI influencer). I had him down as my favourite blogger last year, but I do not really read Marginal Revolution anymore. Not because I disagree with a lot of the content, but because I have seen content being simply written by LLMs without any level of transparency (for the most extreme example, look into his now deleted post on Francis Bacon and the printing press). I might follow his writing again in the future, but these years I prefer to get his takes straight from ChatGPT rather than having him labelling them as his own.
1341. Vilhelm Hammershøi: the eminence in greys
↪ A good introduction to the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. My favourite Hammershøi painting is ‘Interiør med kunstnerens staffeli, Bredgade 25’ (1899). (A painting that I will most likely have on my list of favourite paintings in a post in the future.)
1342. The Ingenious Design of the Aluminum Beverage Can
↪ A ~10 year old video on the design of the aluminum beverage can. There is something fascinating about the design of everyday household objects, i.e., the things where a lot of work has been put into the user having to put no thought into it at all.
1343. The Secrets to Dressing Well in Your 40s
↪ I am not in my 40s (yet) and I doubt this will apply to me in my 40s, but bookmarked for confirmation later … and maybe of interest for a reader or two. And here is an article at MR PORTER on the same topic.
1344. 30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything In March 2020
↪ As we are five years away from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, several pieces have been published on what we have (not) learned from the pandemic. I cannot comprehend the fact that it is now more than five years ago, but I know that before I know it it will be ten years ago. In any case, this is a good piece with a lot of visualisations on how the pandemic changed our behaviour in early 2020. The one on alcohol sales is the most interesting, i.e., how sales skyrocketed only to return to the prepandemic trend (a trend that is still problematic).
1345. I Made Chess 2.0
↪ Such an interesting concept. I was not familiar with Kung Fu Chess. As I primarily play bullet chess that is heavily shaped by premoves, it should come as no surprise that I like this idea of “real time” chess. Also great to see that the material is available on GitHub with a funny description of the idea: “The obvious solution is just get rid of the concept of turns in chess altogether and let players move whenever they want. Real time strategy games like StarCraft and Age of Empires are much more fun and spectator friendly than chess, so this should be a pretty uncontroversial minor rules update that can be implemented before the next world championship. To prevent things from getting too chaotic over the board each piece has an individual cooldown, so once it’s been moved it can’t move for a fixed period afterwards.” Finally, also check out the video from the same channel on a foosball robot.
1346. How personal should a personal site be?
↪ A good question. This is my personal blog but I would not call most of the content personal. You do not really get to know me better as a person when you read these posts, let alone a better view of how I would like to be perceived. I call this a personal blog to give an idea about what content not to find (such as things related to any paid work or opinions that, unless otherwise noticed, reflect opinions of former or current employers). In other words, I use personal in contrast to professional rather than a description of the themes or nature of the site. This also means that I will never move this site to Substack, Medium or the like.
1347. Density of the location of the frags in professional CS2 games played on de_dust2
↪ A spatial visualisation of where frags take place on de_dust2 in recent CS2 tournaments. It could be interesting to see the visualisation both for Ts and CTs as I can imagine that more CTs are fragged in desperate attempts to retake B via window. There is also a similar visualisation for de_mirage.
1348. MDR
↪ Various analyses related to the TV show Severance using the {mdr} R package. Nothing groundbreaking but might be of interest to hardcore fans of the show. There is even a Severance theme for ggplot2 in the package.
1349. Effective Shell
↪ A publicly available (and forthcoming) book on using the Shell. The first few chapters should be mandatory reading for people not familiar with CLI. There are also good separate chapters on Vim and tmux.
1350. I don’t like traveling anymore
↪ Some interesting thoughts on traveling. I still see a lot of value in traveling, and maybe traveling is like money. If it does not make you happy, you need to find improvements in why, how, when, and where you travel. I have a few trips lined up this year which I can say I am 100% happy I took and will take.
1351. Finding the Best Sleep Tracker
↪ In this post Andrej Karpathy tests four different sleep trackers. I would like to see more people do stuff like this. I track my sleep on a daily basis (using my Garmin watch), but I would be curious to see how strong the correlation is between what my watch is showing compared to other devices (especially smart rings). Do also check out his post on digital hygiene.
1352. A walk down Victoria Street
↪ A deep dive into the architecture of Victoria Street. I have walked on Victoria Street several times and I will pay a bit more attention to the various buildings the next time I, if ever, put my feet on Victoria Street again.
1353. How to Use Em Dashes (—), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
↪ An introduction to when to use em dashes, en dashes and hyphens, including some ways to remember them (e.g., the em dash is the length of a capital M and the en dash is the length of a capital N).
1354. The blissful zen of a good side project
↪ A bit of a motivational speech. It is good to think about the consumption-to-creation ratio, not as something to maximise but to optimise. Not for the sake of productivity, but to avoid doing nothing but consume. Accordingly, it is good to work on a side project, even if it is not a good or/and important project for anybody else. “It doesn’t matter what the project is; it matters that it is.” I do see this blog as a good side project despite the lack of blissful zen.
1355. Fun ways of deciding authorship order
↪ Old post on fun ways to decide authorship order (so some of the tweets are no longer available). These methods include a brownie bake-off, a 25 game croquet series, height, fluctuation in the Euro/Dollar exchange rate, arm-wrestling, basketball skills, coin flip, base::set.seed(), and proximity to tenure decision (in my personal opinion and experience the best choice). I also found the funny paper Every Author as First Author via the discussion on HN.