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new theory

When I last wrote about AI on this blog three years ago, I spoke of it being a tool with the potential to transform scientific discovery, but the application I described was primarily theoretical. For AI to be a meaningful tool in R&D, I argued, we needed better sources of “truth” – better data sets that AI tools could query and learn from over time – and technology capable of …

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a …

Normally I don't write book reviews, because I do not have much to add to the thousands of reviews already out there, and would rather spend my time in the next book than typing words about what I just read. Still. Recently I finally was able to break my dry spell of reading and enjoyed a collection of books that have some themes in common yet are very different in …

And we’re off, into 2025. Before we get too far, it’s time to take stock (pardon the pun) of 2024. I’ll follow the 7 point approach I’ve used for the last few years, starting with the wider market context. Q1 How did markets do? December saw falls across most asset classes – arguably reverting to the mean after the November gyrations caused by the Trump election win. The Australian dollar …

A forthcoming paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE), "A Cognitive View of Policing" (htm), reports results from a field experiment showing that teaching police officers to "consider different ways of interpreting situations they encounter" led to "reductions in use of force, [and] discretionary arrests" (abstract). In this post I explain why, having spent... The post [122] Arresting Flexibility: A QJE field experiment on police behavior with about 40 …

We love a classic (tomato-based) chili, but a CREAMY chili? It’s hard to say no to! Mix up your chili rotation with this creamy vegan white bean chili with spicy green chiles, sweet corn, and nutrient-packed spinach or kale. It’s a cozy, subtly spiced, nourishing meal that comes together in just 30 minutes. Let us show you how it’s done! This EASY vegan white bean chili starts with a simple …

Nonfiction The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World, by Shelley Puhak, published 2022. It’s about Brunhild and Fredegund in the late 500s and all the crazy and frequently violent political machinations throughout their rise to power. Quite good. I really liked it, even if the going felt slower at times because of the less familiar names. I hadn’t realized the royal name Louis (Louis XIV etc., …

I wish Slack would spend half as much time on improving core functionality as they do on these obnoxious, enterprise-grade notifications for features I don’t need. This one is particularly dumb: It’s from a Slack workspace with exactly two users – me included. All our communication there happens in channels.

Searching for VictoriaLogs on search.nixos.org gave me no results, so I ran victorialogs from Docker. But at some point I did search for victorialogs on nixpkgs and realized that the binary is built with victoriametrics.

7 January 2025 - working notes AI is here to stay. And AI is famously compute-intensive, which means it’s energy-intensive, which means its carbon emissions are a worry. I think the emissions are likely to come from initial training of the model, running the model (inference), data centre stuff (mostly energy use), and lifecycle emissions associated with hardware production and disposal. What’s being done to measure and reduce the emissions? …

Back to H.L. Mencken and his book The American Language, he says in Supplement One (1945) that one of the Britishisms “that deserve American adoption” is “‘pub-crawl’ (a tour of saloons).” I’m pretty sure my readers don’t need that definition, so familiar has the phrase become on this side of the Atlantic. But it definitely had British origins. It sprang from more more specific sorts of alcoholic “crawls.” The OED‘s …

"On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love gave to me Twelve Drummers Drumming. . ."Ok, I think I'd rather pass on that particular gift. I'll take the 3 french hens, the 5 golden rings, the 6 geese a-laying (my chickens are on their winter strike right now, so any laying birds would be useful), or even the 8 maids a-milking (Although since all of my goats are currently …

The trends I got right—and wrong—reveal a pattern. Where do they point for the baby name future? Making predictions is fun. Facing up to the results, though, can be humbling. In the past, I’ve held other people’s baby name forecasts up to the reality mirror, notably the economic-class-based predictions of the book Freakonomics. Now it’s time to face the music myself. I recently came across a list I created back …

Regular readers will have previously seen the lock and wheels etc. upside down in A Vardo – Part Four, but now that I have it all painted (figure 1), it’s constantly in the way and easily damaged. I decided, therefore, to lift the vardo up and install the lock in its rightful place (figure 2). Fig. 1. Carefully assembling the painted lock and wheels. Fig. 2. Bugger! Now I need …