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This week we are starting a four-part look at pre-modern iron and steel production. As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron production from the mine to a finished object, be that a tool, a piece of armor, a simple nail, a weapon or some other object. And … Continue reading Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining →
I came up with this game. In the game one person thinks of something
and then gives the other person a clue. And the other person writes a
guess down on a blackboard or a piece of paper. Or really anything
you have that's laying around that's available for writing on. The
other person says whether it's right or wrong. And then when they get
it right the other person takes a turn. When they get it wrong the
other person gives them another clue and they guess again. It has to
be clos… I think we have found the #2 city in urban rail construction costs, behind only New York. This is Hong Kong, setting a world record for the most expensive urban el and encroaching on Singapore for most expensive non-New York subway. As we look for more data to add to our transit costs website, I […] I’m probably going to write this up more precisely with Eric and send this to a journal, but for now, I’d like to use our construction costs database to discuss the cost ratio of subways to elevated lines. The table I’m working from can be found here; we’re adding projects and will do a major […] This week, we’re going to be a bit silly and talk about the recently released grand strategy computer game Crusader Kings III, because quite a few of you asked for it. Now from the beginning I should note that this isn’t a game review. As a game, Crusader Kings III is clearly a tremendous success … Continue reading Miscellanea: My Thoughts on Crusader Kings III → In the last post, I criticized the idea of large-radius suburban circle, using the example of the Berlin Outer Ring, at radius 10-26 km from city center. In comments, Andrew in Ezo brought up a very good point, namely that Tokyo has a ring at that radius in the Musashino Line, and ridership there is […] In dense urban cores, it’s valuable to run circular rail lines. They connect dense near-center neighborhoods to one another without going through the more congested center, and help make transferring between parallel lines more efficient, again through avoiding central business district congestion. Some of the largest cities in the world even support multiple circles, line […] As an addendum on to our four-part look at the general structures of the farming of cereal grains (I, II, III, IV) this post is going to briefly discuss some of the key ways that the structures of rice farming differ from the structures of wheat and barley farming. We’ll start with some of the … Continue reading Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice! → Go here to see the our construction costs website. The static dataset is here, but I encourage people to go to the site, which has some interesting mapping – in particular, because the coverage is close to comprehensive, it is easier to see where many subways are being built (China!) and where they are not. […] Hey Folks! Fireside this week; next week, I hope to start up our next “How Did They Make It” series, focusing on iron production. I say ‘hope’ because COVID-19 related disruptions continue (my current university moved all classes online last week and has started moving students off campus this week) and it seems that no … Continue reading Fireside Friday, August 28, 2020 → I read David Lancy’s “The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, and Changelings” and highlighted some passages. A lot of passages, it turns out. [content note: discussion of abortion and infanticide, including infanticide of children with disabilities, in “Life and Death” section but not elsewhere] I was a sociology major and understood anthropology to be basically […]
This is jewelry I made, but I didn't really make all of them. My au
pair Erika made a few of them but I made most of them. I made at
least six of them. Erika made two.
Free delivery within a half hour bike ride of West Somerville.
Otherwise I will send it to you in the mail. You pay for shipping.
Email my dad, Jeff (jeff@jefftk.com) if you want to buy
something.
Butterfly Bracelet
It costs $8. I was thinking about butterflies when I made this
bracelet.
Pom-pom Bracelet
I was thinking about pom-p… As the fourth and final part (I, II, III) of our look at the basic structure of food production in the pre-modern world (particularly farming grain to make bread), this week we’re going to look at how at least some of the delicious food we made in the last post might make its way into … Continue reading Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man →
For kids one to ten. I might add some other episodes later.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
no badges • close slack • check email 1x/day • keep todos visible • use rss • kindle + rss • hide phone apps • block ui elements • block sites • better window switcher • no tabs how to ration your shower thoughts • care viscerally • monotask • evade obligations • timebox bullshit Impatience is the best way to get faster at things. And across a surprising number of domains, being really fast correlates strongly with being effective.
A few years ago I wrote The World in Which IPv6 was a Good
Design. I'm still
proud of that article, but I thought I should update it a bit.
No, I'm not switching sides. IPv6 is just as far away from universal
adoption, or being a "good design" for our world, as it was three
years ago. But since then I co-founded a company that turned out to be
accidentally based on the principles I outlined in that article. Or
rather, from turning those principles upside-down.
In that article, I exp… Computers can be understood • Choose Boring Technology • The Wrong Abstraction • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names • The Hiring Post • The Product-Minded Engineer • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend • The Law of Leaky Abstractions • Reflections on software performance • Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods • End-to-End Arguments in System Design • Inventing on Principle Many large companies today are software monopolies that give their product away for free to get monopoly status, then do horrible things. Can we do anything about this?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that essentially re-wrote the benchmark kernel, which increased the Sun UltraSPARC’s overall specfp score by 20%. At times, GPU vendors have added specialized benchmark-detecting code to their… When I was 21 a friend introduced me to a volume of poems by the 14th-century Persian poet Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky. I loved them, and eventually named this blog for one of my favorite ones. At some point I read more and found that Ladinsky’s “translations” were more like riffs on themes in […] Before I had children, I liked to think about how I would decorate their rooms. I collected Pinterest boards full of images like this, full of colorful, whimsical objects. Now that I’ve actually tried it, I see more of the backstory behind these photos. Know who assembled, maintained, and photographed these rooms? Adults. What kind […] I don’t like to make a big thing out of identifying with my generation, but millenials have one things right: avocado toast is the perfect breakfast food. This is my very simple and quick recipe, which, yes, I did invent. Recipe time: ~5 minutes Yields: 4 slices Ingredients: 4 slices of bread for toasting (I […] It is normal and healthy to have regrets. I have lived in mortal fear of regrets most of my life. And guess what? I regret it. There’s no getting around them– just listen to your feelings and learn from them. “I’m not okay, and that’s okay” is a popular saying for dealing with grief. We […]
Today I trimmed lots of milkweed with my daddy. I trimmed it because
it was taking over the sidewalk and I thought that it was taking over
too much of the sidwalk. So did my dad, so we went home, asked my mom
for some garden shears, came back, and then I cut all of the milkweed
down. Or, at least all that was blocking the path.
A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB. For example, here are a couple of public conversations that sound like a number of private conversations I've had. Sure, there's value somewhere, but it costs too much to unlock.
I think this overestimates how much work it is to get a lot of value from tracing. At Twitter, Rebecca Isaacs was able to lay out a vision for how…
We spent one day1 building a system that immediately found a mid 7 figure optimization (which ended up shipping). In the first year, we shipped mid 8 figures per year worth of cost savings as a result. The key feature this system introduces is the ability to query metrics data across all hosts and all services and over any period of time (since inception), so we've called it LongTermMetrics (LTM) internally since I like boring, descriptive, names.
This got started when I was looking for a st… The plain fact is that there are no obvious moral consequences to how people entertain themselves in their leisure time. The conviction that artists and connoisseurs are morally advanced is a cognitive illusion, arising from the fact that our circuitry for morality is cross-wired for with our circuitry for status. — Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate […]
Yesterday night I cooked dinner. My dad helped a bit but I mostly
made it. The things I made were:
Avocado sauce
Rice
Spinach
Cheese
Beans with onions and spices
Tomatoes with garlic
The people in my house liked it very much.
Disclaimer: I’m going to say this once. Obviously, I am not happy about the coronavirus’s threat to public health or the economic toll it’s taking. I do not think the existence of this pandemic is good. Just so happens that social distancing and remote work suits me. I am truly an introvert, and this whole […] When you get married, you are creating a family. One way to reinforce that is to have the same name. But whose name do you pick? Do you hyphenate? Do you not hyphenate, and never have a simple time filling out a form again (like my friends the Rabideau Childerses)? Do you make a new […]
As a "fully remote work" company, we had to make some choices about the
technologies we use to work together and stay in touch.
We decided early on - about the time we realized all three cofounders
live in different cities - that we were going to go all-in on remote work,
at least for engineering, which for now is almost all our work. As several
people have pointed out before, fully remote is generally more stable than
partly remote. In a partially remote team, the remote workers seem to …
I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it's not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic.
I think this is odd because tech companies in that class often have hundreds to thousands of employees. They're overwhelmingly likely to be better …
My hobby: opening up McIlroy’s UNIX philosophy on one monitor while reading manpages on the other.
The first of McIlroy's dicta is often paraphrased as "do one thing and do it well", which is shortened from "Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new 'features.'"
McIlroy's example of this dictum is:
Surprising to outsiders is the fact that UNIX compilers produce no listings: printing can be do… Before we had kids, Jeff and I fostered a couple of cats. One had feline AIDS and was very skinny. Despite our frugal grocery budget of the time, I put olive oil on her food, determined to get her healthier. I knew that stray cats were not a top global priority, and that this wasn’t even the best way of helping stray cats, but it was what I wanted to do.. . . . .The bike path near where I live has a lot of broken glass on the ground nearby. My family likes to go barefoot in the summer, and a lo… Creating really good outcomes for humanity seems hard. We get bored. If we don’t get bored, we still don’t like the idea of joy without variety. And joyful experiences only seems good if they are real and meaningful (in some sense we can’t easily pin down). And so on. On the flip side, creating really … More Hedonic asymmetries Suppose that a kingdom contains a million peasants and a thousand nobles, and: Each noble makes as much as 10,000 peasants put together, such that collectively the nobles get 90% of the income. Each noble cares about as much about themselves as they do about all peasants put together. Each person’s welfare is logarithmic in … More Moral public goods
Long ago, I wrote git-subtree
to work around some of my annoyances with git submodules. I've learned a lot
since then, and the development ecosystem has improved a lot (shell scripts
are no longer the best way to manipulate git repos? Whoa!).
Thus, I bring you: git-subtrac.
It's a bit like git-subtree, except it uses real git submodules. The
difference from plain submodules is that, like git-subtree, it encourages
you to put all the contents from all your submodules into your superproject
r… My friend used to have two ‘days’ each day, with a nap between—in the afternoon, he would get up and plan his day with optimism, whatever happened a few hours before washed away. Another friend recently suggested to me thinking … Continue reading → I suggested experimenting with different settings on personal characteristics that aren’t obviously good or bad. For instance, trying out being more or less perfectionistic for a day. A particular variety of this that interests me is experimentation with different ethical … Continue reading → I make use of a lot of analogies, for instance ‘like dancing’ and ‘the ice skating thing’ are particular phenomena I often think about, and I get value from thinking about meta-ethics as if it were romance, or saving the … Continue reading → Sometimes it seems consequentially correct to do things that would also be good for you, if you were selfish. For instance, to save your money instead of giving it away this year, or to get yourself a really nice house … Continue reading → Continuing the theme of wild animal suffering in children’s lit… Hans Christian Andersen’s stories involve a lot of suffering of both human and animal varieties. “The Ugly Duckling” takes a brief detour from describing the duckling’s repeated social humiliations to describe being a waterfowl in winter: The winter grew cold – so bitterly cold that […] Different people seem to have different strategies, which they use systematically across different parts of their lives, and that we recognize and talk about. For instance people vary on: Spontaneity Inclination toward explicit calculations Tendency to go meta Skepticism Optimism … Continue reading → Using real money in prediction markets is all-but-illegal, and dealing with payments is a pain. But using fake money in prediction markets seems tricky, because by default players have no skin in the game. Here’s a simple proposal that I think might work reasonably well without being too hard to try: Create a service that … More Prediction markets for internet points?
An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of work
in a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year per
person in their reporting hierarchy... even if they work on
nothing else. That job seems impossible. How can anyone make any
important decision in a company that large? They will always be
the least informed person in the room, no matter what the topic.
If you know me, you know I've been asking myself this question
for a long time.
Luckily, someone sent me a link to a … How should a state tax investment income if it wants to maximize its citizens’ welfare? This sounds like a simple question but I find it surprisingly hard to think about. Here are some of the positions I’ve moved through over the last few years: Taxing investment has distortionary effects, but we should have non-zero investment … More Taxing investment income is complicated From the perspective of an organism trying to propagate its genes, sex is like a trade: I’ll put half of your DNA in my offspring if you put half of my DNA in yours. I still pass one copy of my genes onto the next generation per unit of investment in children, so it’s a … More Reframing the evolutionary benefit of sex A preschool game that’s been particularly popular and versatile with my kids. Materials: Pennies Collection of counting bears or any other small objects One person is the storekeeper and sets out the bears in any way they want. The other people are customers and bring some pennies. The storekeeper sells the bears to the customers. […] I would say I’m alllmost recovered from the all-nighter I pulled this weekend calling the graveyard shift (4AM–7AM)—but heck, what a blast! Here’s the program I called (most of these walked through minimally or not at all):
50/50 — Bob Isaacs
Fiddler’s Fling — Cary Ravitz (Will Mentor var.)
Maliza’s Magical Mystery Motion — Cary Ravitz
Rollin’ to the Grey Eagle — Hank Morris
Read Between the Lines — Bob Isaacs
The Young Adult Rose — David Kaynor
Treasure of the Soda Bar — Maia McCormick
Cheat Lake Twir…
The Internet has gotten too big.
Growing up, I, like many computery people of my generation, was an idealist.
I believed that better, faster communication would be an unmitigated
improvement to society. "World peace through better communication," I said
to an older co-worker, once, as the millenium was coming to an end. "If
people could just understand each others' points of view, there would be no
reason for them to fight. Government propaganda will never work if citizens
of two w… Last weekend, I called my first techno contra (as part of a double dance at CDNY to celebrate the wedding of two of our lovely dancing humans 😍). It turns out, to no one’s surprise, that calling techno is a fair bit different from calling a regular evening dance. Here are my reflections on calling my first techno (including a bunch of great advice from folks on SharedWeight’s Callers’ Listserv).
+ If you can, listen to the tracks in advance!
I worked with DJ Flourish (Mark Moore) from Philly—he’… When people come to an effective altruism event for the first time, the conversation often turns to projects they’re pursuing or charities they donate to. They often have a sense of nervousness around this, a feeling that the harsh light of cost-effectiveness is about to be turned on everything they do. To be fair, this is a reasonable thing to be apprehensive about, because many youngish people in EA do in fact have this idea that everything in life should be governed by cost-effectiveness. I&… Hey experienced contradancers! Have you been looking for a new way to contribute to your dance community? Here’s one that I’ve been trying. It’s really small, and has the potential to make a really big impact on the quality of our dances, especially as more and more of us get on board with it. Ready? Here it is:
Be quiet when the caller starts talking, and don’t talk through the walkthrough.
That’s it. Really. If you want to go one step further, you can be the person who gently reminds people to … I’ve been contradancing for over eight years, and can jump into even the most complex and falling-apart of contras and still have some idea of what’s going on. But last summer at English-Scottish-Contra Week at Pinewoods, I tried Scottish Country Dance for the first time and I had an experience I haven’t had for quite a while: I was completely at sea in a set dance.
Scottish isn’t too different from contra and English, and I got along okay when I had a walkthrough. (Not great, mind you, but I ma… I’m late to the party, but I've been thinking about the documentary “The Life Equation” about how people use data to decide make life-and-death decisions. The central example is a woman named Crecencia, a mother of seven who lives in rural Guatemala and has cervical cancer. The doctor treating her knows that screening other women for cancer is more cost-effective than treating this woman, and that the community doesn’t have enough money to fully fund both. The filmmaker writes: “Crecencia’s… We’re often taught about the importance of “finding your purpose” as you set out into the world and choose your pathway forward. The words change–sometimes it’s ‘purpose’, but you might also find your ‘bliss’, your ‘passion’, your ‘voice’, your ‘career’, or your ‘calling’–but the narrative remains the same. Whatever it is, you’ve gotta find it. And … Continue reading On Finding Purpose →
The post On Finding Purpose appeared first on Hollis Easter .
Purpose I play music on stage, and that usually means using amplification (PA) systems. The bands I play with (Frost and Fire, The Turning Stile+, and others) typically have a bunch of musicians playing a host of instruments, each with their own microphones. Consequently, we need a lot of mic mute switches. The enemy of … Continue reading XLR Mic Mute Switch with LEDs – Proof of Concept →
The post XLR Mic Mute Switch with LEDs – Proof of Concept appeared first on Hollis Easter .
How to test thermostat and thermal fuse units on kitchen appliances (espresso machine, coffee maker, rice cooker, pressure cooker) with a multimeter.
The post How to Test Thermostat/Thermal Fuse in Kitchen Tools appeared first on Hollis Easter .
Delicious crispy caramelized zucchini with garlic, basil, mint, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. Easily scales up to use all the zucchini in the house, and it's quick! Googootz!
The post Use Up That Zucchini – Googoots / Cucuzza Recipe appeared first on Hollis Easter .
Jennifer Battle asked the National Association of Crisis Organization Directors’ mailing list for some uplifting hotline memes to use in training, since there didn’t seem to be that many available. Here are my first responses. (please feel free to use these if you like)
The post Hotline Memes appeared first on Hollis Easter .
Here are three places Jeff and I are donating this year. The first two are similar to what we’ve been doing for years, and the third represents a change.Direct workJeff and I want to support work that directly makes the world a better place. (Some arguments against falling into a “meta trap” here.) As usual for us, this year we’ve given just over half our donations to direct work. We made these donations to the Against Malaria Foundation, one of GiveWell’s top picks, except for small amounts th… Last week the Boston Effective Altruism group had a discussion on self-care for altruists. I've written about the topic before, but I wanted to share some of the more practical advice people had. Think beyond day-to-day choicesSelf-care isn’t just short-term decisions like whether to make time for yoga tonight. It’s larger life decisions too, like what job to take, where to live, how to budget money, and how to make time for partners, friends, and family.For me, having children was self-car… My latest blog post helps to explain a few statistical/ML models by whether they learn an interaction in a toy example Since Github Pages is way nicer than Blogger, I'm writing over there at http://davidchudzicki.com now. To keep old posts alive, these pages at http://blog.davidchudzicki.com will remain as is. I was converting a PNG (which represented partials sums of the Weierstrass elliptic function) to a GIF and was confused about why the PNG looked fine at low resolution but the GIF looked bad. Then I learned that GIFs can only use 256 colors and we have to do something to map the many colors to the fewer colors. We could just use the closest available color in the new set of colors, but that results in sharp jumps and "color banding" where the colors change. So instead we use (and Image… On a visit to San Francisco's Exploratorium, I saw an oscilloscope they had making Lissijous curves. So I decided to make a version in d3: You can play with it (and see the code) here This post will describe a way I came up with of fitting a function that's constrained to be increasing, using Stan. If you want practical help, standard statistical approaches, or expert research, this isn't the place for you (look up “isotonic regression” or “Bayesian isotonic regression” or David Dunson, whose work Andrew Gelman pointed me to). This is the place for you if you want to read about how I thought about setting up a model, implemented the model in Stan, and created graphic…
Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining
Learning Game
Hong Kong Construction Costs
The Costs of Subways and Els
Miscellanea: My Thoughts on Crusader Kings III
More on Suburban Circles
The Limit of Circles in the Suburbs
Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice!
Transit Costs Website
Fireside Friday, August 28, 2020
Notes on “Anthropology of Childhood” by David Lancy
Jewelry
Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man
Pony Podcast
Tools for keeping focused
Attention is your scarcest resource
Be impatient
IPv4, IPv6, and a sudden change in attitude
Essays on programming I think about a lot
What should we do about network-effect monopolies?
How do cars fare in crash tests they're not specifically optimized for?
Quick note on the name of this blog
On scruffy spaces
My personal avocado toast recipe
Don’t fear regret
Gardening
A simple way to get more value from tracing
A simple way to get more value from metrics
Embrace mediocre tastes, true happiness
Dinner
Finding home in the time of coronavirus
Have it all: take your spouse’s name socially
Several grumpy opinions about remote work at Tailscale
How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
The growth of command line options, 1979-Present
It's ok to feed stray cats
Hedonic asymmetries
Moral public goods
git-subtrac: all your git submodules in one place
Pieces of time
Ethical experimentation
For the metaphors
Self policing for self doubt
Wild animal welfare in Hans Christian Andersen
Personal quality experimentation
Prediction markets for internet points?
What do executives do, anyway?
Taxing investment income is complicated
Reframing the evolutionary benefit of sex
Bear store
Graveyard Shift at Dawn Dance
Absolute scale corrupts absolutely
Reflections on My First Techno Contra
You have more than one goal, and that's fine
Improve Your Community With This One Weird Trick!
Words Don't Help Beginners
No one is a statistic
On Finding Purpose
XLR Mic Mute Switch with LEDs – Proof of Concept
How to Test Thermostat/Thermal Fuse in Kitchen Tools
Use Up That Zucchini – Googoots / Cucuzza Recipe
Hotline Memes
Two standard donations and one new one
Practical steps for self-care
An Interaction or Not? Understanding a Few ML Algorithms via an Example with No Evidence Either Way
dithering
Interactive Lissijous Curves in d3
A Bayesian Model for a Function Increasing by Chi-Squared Jumps (in Stan)