Links

Rostam goes through the creation and production of a few songs. Some wonderfully specific parts, like when he included effects in the recording of a sample, or the attempt to find something completely different to an existing sound to add to a song.

When I quit smoking 17 years ago, a wise doctor counselled me that if I was going to resist cravings, I needed a more immediate reason than “I won’t get cancer in 40 years.” My answer: “I spend two laptops per year on a product whose makers want to murder me and my friends.”

Thanks Alexandria \U0001F49C

How different you and your brain behave in times of extreme emotion. Makes people bad at empathising with others (“I would never do that…”), and bad at predicting or understanding their own behaviour.

History of his website redesigns. There was a more recent one since, but this post is more detailed.

Fantastic post, and website generally. Read a few more of his posts, had a bit of an explore around. A lot of good “this is my website, I can do what I want” bits in there.

Very useful set of tips for things to avoid in technical explanations. Pick your audience!

Inspiring example of someone apparently just building all their own tools. The notes on browser as the place thinking happens is good - I mostly keep text notes on things and lists of links. Might look into those tools a bit, or try Memex again.

In general, pornography use trended downward over the pandemic, for both men and women. Problematic pornography use trended downward for men and remained low and unchanged in women. Collectively, these results suggest that many fears about pornography use during pandemic-related lockdowns were largely not supported by available data.

The mysterious and meteoric rise in obesity since the late 70s. Part 2 includes a reference to The Australian Paradox

Can’t exactly remember where I found this, but some interesting looking publications on sound and music

The review alone was very well written, quite excited for the book

Some good bits around how using past information can backfire. Either overfitting if looking too far back, or spending too much effort on predictions.

Enough effort goes into an initial forecast that updating your views when new information becomes available can trigger the sunk-cost fallacy and cause you to be right or wrong for the wrong reason.

His projects website is coooool. So many awesome things.

Another great project from Lynn Fisher. All the best movies-in-movies in one place

Great writeup on the many challenges posed by adding doors to a game. Also quite amazing seeing how much people can do with Unreal without having to type code.

Generational loss of a concept! Growing up mostly with phones means less understanding of file/folder structure. Either the OS deliberately tries to hide it from you (mobile OSs grouping files by type), or on computers where people mostly use Downloads folder and Desktop.

Short story, inspired by a GitHub thread about semicolons.

Some great design notes, making things with game design in mind (i.e. “make the next action obvious”), rather than just going for goddamn slot machine mechanics.

via Amelia

I’m not, but good set of questions for decision-making anyway

Always interesting, and very clever. Talks about upcoming technology (real and expected), cultural and institutional changes, government as buyer to incentivise development, a bunch on companies and employees.

Mostly sensible looking predictions, interesting set of topcs: Enterprise software, phone form factor, SF / NYC tech rivalry apparently, Crypto as dissident tech, fall of grad school, biotech bubble, microplastics health fears, campaign growth hacking, and SV startup scam.

Great, scary photograph. More than the boats I noticed previous high water mark on the riverbanks.

From Vox explainer of Ready Player One

Original title was “Why Captcha Pictures Are So Unbearably Depressing”, which felt a bit complainy compared to the updated one. I agreed less with that take on the article, but a lot with the sentiment from the HN comments

A website with captchas is like a retail store with metal detectors; it’s not somewhere I feel welcome.

So many good points. Tasks vs notes; not everything needs a checklist, some things are just notes. Thinking “I’ll do that later” is a lot easier than “I will select a date/time in a calendar popup to schedule a reminder for this task”. Todo apps are ineffective if having them is more work than the task you are trying to do!

A quote on HN about procrastination has also made be add Red Dwraf to booklist.

Notes from an interview over dinner at Mama Chang

A bunch of good and/or relatable bits in comments section of this. Some sounds far too intense (the guy’s ex-wife needing him to reply to messages within minutes!), some interesting ones on how people use their phones, and how beaviours and norms toward them have changed.

And from another interesting reply:

even if you ignore addiction , mobile phones have been integrated into society in so many infrastructure-like roles that they are hardly at all optional or ‘ignorable’ at this point.
When you live in a world that requires bills to be paid via mobile, rent to be paid via mobile, mass transit tickets bought via mobile, physical location reservation via mobile, as well as any customer service only available via mobile… who cares about personal addiction; normal life isn’t feasible without a mobile phone at that point, and very few (if any at all) mobile phones are designed from the premise that they should respect your attention.

The mobile phones that are designed to preserve the users attention are widely incompatible with any functions that the user needs (billpay/specific group apps, whatever) to stay integrated with the systems being forced upon them, so those options are already non-starter.

That means this problem is worth discussing – non-compulsive normal people as well as compulsive addicts are being affected by the lack of ‘respect for attention’ that mobile phones have, and this problem intersects with the ‘required prevalence’ of mobile phones across the world.

I love that when not teaching, blogging, reading, or conducting in-depth and detailed interviews, he manages to find the time to maintain a food blog.

donoteat01’s hyperloop take still has me very skeptical on tunnels as a viable transport alternative.

Excellent writeup. The CORS example dot points are a great example of good clear security explanations.

From 2019!

Not something that came up much in reviews for these (some did mention the weight). But has really been ruinous for comfort so far

Some terrifying terms in there. Universe 25 seemed ominous enough, but the ‘Beautiful Ones’ - the mice that just dedicated their lives entirely to grooming - is like something from a movie.