Links

Jupyter notebook by Peter Norvig working through some prob problems.

Good one to work through.

Easy to follow and approachable mod.

Winning variation in “preferred hug from a researcher while blindfolded” was 10s with one arm above, one arm below.

Matrix of three factors for three stages (before, during, after). The word “host” made some of the explanations sound funny to me

Separate the agent from the host.
Provide protection for the host.

From a saved note from years ago, I apparently wanted to learn OCaml in 2016. Never did

Relevant bit to current book:

Guthrie Govan, a slide guitarist whom Zimmer discovered on YouTube, described the process: “He’ll outline the desired end result rather than prescribing a specific means of getting there. For one cue, he just said, ‘This needs to sound like sand.’”

And not relevant to the book, but what a time to be alive:

These vocals were recorded in a closet in Brooklyn, the makeshift studio of the music therapist and singer Loire Cotler. In that space, sitting on the floor, with clothes dangling above her head and her laptop perched on a cardboard box

Sort of like a switch statement with type annotations

Was wondering why bonds exist - is it like insurance on rent, or damage, or other? Could you solve a similar trust issue without needing the upfront cost?

How do anti-inflammatories work? What do they actually do? Bodies are crazy

Headphone porn

Comments have some good background on google image search, the cached/full-size images thing, Bing image search, and other things.

coooool

Article does kinda go on a bit of a nostalgia trip. I still manage to take plenty of shit photos

Good book rec in the comments for Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”

Wrapping broccoli in a material that slows down its respiratory rate doubles it shelf life.

Going for the unwrapped version not only potentially doubles food waste (probably the greatest environmental threat to humanity), it can cause a nutrient decline of up to 90%.

And from replies:

My understanding is that (nutrient decline) occurs at the early stages of the production, by the time the unwrapped broccoli has got to the store it’s has already declined a great deal. This is wrapped within a really short time frame from picking, so retains a huge amount of nutrients.

And this is some Dune shit:

It would not surprise me if they were wrapped in the picking fields.
Huge bits of kit are hauled into fields to process food asap.
This includes blast freezers for frozen food. They are frozen within a hour of picking.

Some bits on retirement and people figuring out what they want to do.

I wish people would only use this for good. A stupid arms race that just makes it harder to automatically download utility bills.

not p2p for files under 5gb, but they are deleted after a day.

tldr: Backblaze cares more about dataloss edge cases than you do

An impressive recommendation from @patio11

Also does voice generation from text! And remove filler words. Some cool stuff in there.

A history of African Jazz

This is still an all-too-common occurence

On the many issues with burger, kebab, meatball and bento buttons

Crazy stuff. Also the generated faces

on overly specific expertise

Rise of holograms, deepfakes, so more ongoing fame for existing artists. Decline of labels, consolidation of the remaining power/profit in that business to fewer and fewer people.

The “official industry figures” will show that the music business is growing, but these numbers will be highly misleading. A huge portion of “music profits” will actually go to tech companies (Apple, Google, etc.), who have no interest in reinvesting this cash into the music ecosystem. For example, Spotify will take the cash flow generated by music and use it to acquire rights to podcasts, etc.—and, in general, the music culture will be starved of funds because it now must pay the bills for other businesses

Good page, some worrying all-eggs-in-one-basket figures.