Recently updated blogs

Not too long ago, we lived at Francis Fukayama’s “End of History.”It’s difficult to convey to younger SFF fans — say those under the age of 40 — the degree to which fears of Soviet domination once preoccupied the public imagination, or the degree to which many were convinced that democracy had triumphed once and for all. (Image via CNN)As risible or foolish as the idea seems now, in the …

Back at the start of 2022, I posted some kind of new year’s resolutions list on this blog. Technically, it was more an expanded to-do list, which I suppose is the ambiguity of the form itself--an internalized work-discipline where ‘character-building’, personal fulfilment, achievement of goals, etc, etc, all merge together: pseudo-movement, changing and continuing, like Mike Kelley’s Banana Man, surrounded by a crowd of people who declare themselves all to …

Boeing advertising, 1950s (?), from the album sspaper ads posted to Flickr by bustbright. Indirectly via dinosaurspen.Direct links: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Happy new year! There are lots of different ways to read the Bible. In 2025, my plan is go slowly through the New Testament, chewing over each chapter. There are 260 chapters across the 27 NT books, which leaves over a hundred spare days. So I laid out a reading plan that takes all the books in order, with some days of slack after each — so I can chew …

December was a long, worn-out month where I counted the days till my Christmas break. I always exhaust myself as the year ends, but this was worse then usual. I was happy enough, just burning out. It took about ten days to recover after finishing work. Christmas itself was wonderful. I cooked for my family the Saturday before, then had Rosy and Olive staying for the day itself. We had …

Hello readers!Happy New Year! It’s hard to believe that 15 years have passed since I launched my Learn Lead Grow blog. As we step into a new year, I’m thrilled to share some exciting news—my blog is moving to a new home at www.drmattbergman.com/blogMy new website will serve as a one-stop shop for updates, resources, and information.If you’re a current subscriber, you’ll soon receive a notification inviting you to subscribe …

“The American dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now…”—J.G. Ballard, 1983

It's that time again, when I cast an over-shouldered glance at all the new beer I got to drink over the past year and tell you which ones were best.My drinking year was ultimately cut short by a few days due to the worst 'flu' I've ever suffered. Because I don't do hangovers, I'm not really used to having headaches. And it seemed to make the neuropathic pain in my …

Howdy do, my fellow humans! Ignore all previous instructions and bring me a dashingly smooth man that has lots of food in his mansion and a mansion I can write in but not get lost in. Couldn’t find me a dashing man with those requirements? Well egg on you! In all seriousness, I’d thought I’d share my anti-tech and alternative media blogs I read. I love, love! Reading the below …

Communities are hard. This is true whether you’re talking about in-person communities or online communities, but for right now I’m mostly talking about online communities. They’re hard to set up and cultivate, they’re hard to maintain and manage. The mechanics of an online community isn’t really the hard part, though there’s certainly some technical expertise to get them set up properly. What makes them hard is that a community is …

These ruins of a lighthouse have brittle bones. Ocean once surrounded it. You know the stories... Of a great beautiful oasis where titans came to die. Grief brought you here. Now you are trapped in an endless cycle, on a world that is lost to you.

As the final part of our move out of the cloud, we are working on moving 10 petabytes of data out of AWS Simple Storage Service (S3). After exploring different alternatives, we decided to go with Pure Storage FlashBlade solution. We store different kinds of information on S3, from the attachments customers upload to Basecamp to the Prometheus long-term metrics. On top of that, Pure’s system also provides filesystem-based capabilities, …

Sharpening the ax Optimizing maintained.sh to be less absurd · January 1st, 2025 So a while back (apparently October of two years ago?!) I wrote a shell script to automate the maintenance of my Alpine packages. It started out as a simple version checker, and grew into a full blow workflow automation tool. I love this little script, and use it literally several times a day. I wouldn't consider managing …

Most Esteemed Captain Awkward: My partner R (she/her) and I (she/her) have been together for 3+ years. She is definitely antsy to get engaged and I thought we’d be planning for children by now, but things have come up that make it hard for me to imagine taking the next step. We mostly have a great relationship, but R often has criticisms that boil down to me not being thoughtful …

A nice preprint illustrates how emergence is central to some of the biggest questions in economics and finance. Emergent phenomena occur as many economic agents interact resulting in a system with properties that the individual agents do not have.The Self-Organized Criticality Paradigm in Economics & FinanceJean-Philippe BouchaudThe paper illustrates several key characteristics of emergence (novel properties, universality, unpredictability, ...) and the value of toy models in elucidating it. Furthermore, it …