nikhil.io

In German so I needed a translation.…

Featuring several seasoned negotiators listening in on the master class.…

AUSTIN, TX—Stressing that the billionaire’s completely erratic behavior had strained the already fraught relationships, sources confirmed Thursday that a rift was widening between Elon Musk and anyone who had ever met him. “Elon’s megalomania and tendency to lash out indiscriminately seem to have…

No math/equations. Just clear and concise overviews of topics. Made as a video to fall asleep to!…

A three-hour rundown of the game’s mythology from the 1992 Mortal Kombat to 2023’s Mortal Kombat 1 by ClementJ64. For a more extensive historical overview that doesn’t get into the mythology, there’s Ian Scherer’s excellent “The History of Mortal Kombat”1. Lots of dedicated research in both videos…

This is super-cool. They place a piece of Uranium Oxide in a cloud chamber and you can actually see two kinds of radioactive ‘bullets’ just flying out of the sample: Alpha particles, which make shorter and chonkier streaks because they’re Helium nucleii which are much heavier than: Beta particle…

I say ‘little’ relative to all else it finds itself in. Read some place that if the Milky Way were the size of the United States, our ‘little’ Sun would be the size of… drumroll… a grain of sand someplace in the Midwest 🫠🌽…

The cringe I get from the explanation from someone who truly knows the game is akin to the one I get from “hacking the mainframe” or “tracking the killer’s IP address” or the casual “bypassing the firewall”. All hat, no cattle indeed. I can venture a guess at the answer but: Why, why is any of thi…

Features two late legends, Sanjeev Kumar (Santa) and Kishore Kumar (singer). Not sure who advised the former to strike a “BRO WHAT’S EVEN GOING ON” expression throughout the song. Wondered what became of the kids in the video. Assuming they were ~10 at the time this movie was released in 1974 they…

Best I’ve seen in recent memory. Features the poem “Boots” by Rudyard Kipling, read with this bone-chilling pitch and cadence by a chap named Taylor Holmes in 1915. Here’s the track by itself. Sounds like it was taken from a record; the noise doesn’t help with the chilling of the bones. Update…

Not sure what else to add here, other than my head reeling with “How the heck does one even think up this subject?”. And appreciating how the Internet can be such an amazing forum for collective weirdness and joy. Speaking of fora, the link’s on Twitter so here’s a cached version to save you the d…

Not completely unsurprising, but yeah: I was struck by how it’s essentially a continuous tone after about 2,000 BPM. Makes one wonder if anything in the Universe is really continuous or if all of it is fundamentally discrete. Also makes you wonder how animals like bees perceive the world.…

Super-cool. I look forward to bookmarking this, telling myself that I’ll finally put Pi Zero to good use, and never doing this 🤘…

NEW YORK—Claiming he could easily fit into a similar position at most companies, local CEO Mike Waltke told reporters Monday that his skill set was transferable to any job that requires an inept dumbass to receive a big salary. “I have the incompetence necessary to effortlessly transition into a…

Caption by CO 🤣…

Trenchant, brilliant stuff by William Kennedy 💯 (Cached)…

If you liked that, you might like this longer documentary called “Being Poirot” by Suchet himself.…

Was doing some digital house-keeping and came by a cached copy of that by MisterBG. Things haven’t changed too much over the past two decades……

Molly White asks if Web3 is bullshit. Short and excellent talk.…

And because no good deed goes unpunished, Fletcher claimed to have been harassed by his own community and he also found bullet holes in his barn. Fletcher used the proceeds from farming the land to pay the taxes for the interned Japanese. From 1942 to 1945 he managed the Tsukamoto, Nitta, and Oka…

Things are going well with the Metaverse: In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, [Vishal] Shah1 said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this o…

Via Ellen 💯…

Coached by a former Wall Street bond trader who studied the opposition and set up a pipeline that produces Superstar Mathletes: “You wouldn’t grab a kid in ninth grade who’s never played football and expect him to be a great high-school football player,” he said. “For most of these kids, this is…

Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link) Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially d…

For day-to-day things, a 10-year old MacBook Air is perfectly adequate (except, maybe, if you’re trying to read an article on the Des Moines Register’s or KCCI’s websites without using a PiHole…)…

Didn’t realize it was a four-parter. Major nostalgia. Have forgotten most of my French but I somehow still remember a lot of words for things (and their gender!) thanks to these books (well, Volume 1 at least). Looks like the CBSE still uses it. Here’s audio to accompany the books.…

I know nothing of D&D, wanted to find out more after watching the latest season of Stranger Things, and came by this video. I still don’t understand how the figurines contribute to the gameplay but was amazed by his vast collection of them. Lots of lovely passion and camaraderie here ♥️ Here’s…

Amil Niazi in a sobering article about ambition, COVID, women, mothers, and late-stage capitalism.…

Think jq but for HTML/DOM. If you wanted to get all the post titles on this log, curl -s -o - https://log.nikhil.io/ | gunzip - | pup "header > h2 > a" text{} Lovely stuff.…

It’s hosted by three University of Iowa engineers and scientists who are tired of “cropaganda” and is rather entertaining. The latest episode calls the recent E15 Law a “Fart in a Hurricane”. One of the hosts is an engineer named Chris Jones who also writes a very lively blog with wonderful nugget…

Simple, consistent, SVG, adjustable stroke-width, and there are 1900 of them (and counting).…

It’s what all the Patagonia-clads are raving about. They tell me it solves all perf problems in a snap. Update Here’s an NPM package. And, of course, Java if you’d like to deploy this in an Enterprise™ setting.…

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This really got me: My job is to keep our code running while other packagers are changing theirs. Lord have mercy. NPM continued use and existence is proof that (Almost) Every Day is a Miracle ✨…

I mean just look at it 🥰…

Really cool stuff. Trained on the New York Times ingredients corpus (large 13.5MB CSV) and turns this ingredients = [ "3 large melons", "5 1/2 cups water", "2 cups flour", ] into this [ { "name": "melons", "unit": None, "qty": 3.0 }, { "name": "water", "unit": "cup…

Heslin’s vow on Wednesday comes one day after Jones offered an FBI agent and 18 members of 10 families who lost loved ones in the school shooting $120,000 each to settle defamation lawsuits he lost against them in Texas and Connecticut late last year. […] Jones, the host of the “Infowars” interne…

Saved me a ton of time with small project I’m working on right now. Looks like it’s written in C.…

I’ve been nearing capacity for a while and this is a Godsend.…

Here’s a giant list of games people have created with it. Here’s a teeny little introductory adventure. I plan on playing The Quest of DuBebe this evening:…

Very common in India. And that article is from a journal that offers EAL news. EAL (English as an Additional Language) is not the same as ESL (English as a Second Language). EAL is favored above ESL among the language pedagogy community: Why? Because sometimes it is not clear what an individual’s…

A study of DNA extracted from the leg bones of extinct moa birds in New Zealand found that the half-life of DNA is 521 years. So every 1,000 years, 75 per cent of the genetic information is lost. After 6.8 million years, every single base pair is gone. Bacterial RNA is much tougher and sequences h…

Excellent stuff, particularly the mechanical keyboard envy1. There’s a Nikhil in it too! 💁‍♂️ I don’t think I’ll get into them. Got myself one of these (brown switches) about three years ago after outsourcing the research to a highly enthusiastic and helpful co-worker. The “L” key sticks sometime…

Because we don’t simply write non-annoying and non-creepy software that respects you and does the thing you want it to do anymore. Gotta deliver Value™ to all key stakeholders. By which we mean ourselves and the Market. Not you. You are nothing more than Data that taps “Purchase” to us.…

Fun little quiz! Did not do as well as I thought I would……

In case that site is unavailable, and for the year 2020, it’s an exponential curve with the 50th at $67,463 75th at $122,500 80th at $141,100 90th at $201,052 95th at $273,850 98th at $386,915 99th at $594,420 Until not-too-long ago, I used to think that “the top 1%” referred to “few hund…

Certainly looks like it, Mr. Hlas. Go Hawks 🤘…

I’m not saying there’s going to be a schism or anything, but I’m not not saying that, either. This is just genius. (Cached)…

It belongs to Tom Bosworth. I thought “I cannot even run that fast” and decided to look at the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOYdS5QZasMÏ While it certainly does look like they’re running, there are some severe restrictions on their movement, of course, else it’d be an event called ‘Trot…

Don Gorske started eating them in 1972 and continues to do so. He will buy 6-8 at a time twice a week (at the same McDonald’s franchise) to save on gas. He’s kept all boxes and receipts, which I suppose are what you’d need to apply for and maintain a Guinness Record. Emphasis mine: Seriously, if…

She addresses graduate/PhD students struggling to complete their theses but there’s quite a bit to learn here. She considers procrastination as a perfectly logical response: why wouldn’t one seek pleasure? It’s something that (a) reveals a lot about what you’re afraid of and (b) is hence a protecti…

The key takeaways in no particular order. Use <noscript>. If you are using it, use it a lot more. There is no guarantee that chunks will load after the main one does; the user’s location and/or network access might have changed! Think CalTrain. ISPs, Corporate VPNs, and Browser Plugins1 c…

by Ned Gulley at Star Chamber from a long, long while ago.…

By Michael Dearing. Couldn’t find any video and not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek (like the “48 Laws of Power”.) The distortions are: Personal Exceptionalism “I am special.” Dichotomous Thinking “X is sh*t. Y is genius.” Correct Overgeneralization “I see two dots and draw the right line.” Bl…

Lovely stuff. Cached here.…

Being a long and informative post that leads to “Use /dev/urandom” and features a quote by DJB and a list of computationally secure PRNGs. Cached here.…

LaTeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX and ConTeXt. That’s a lot of TeX! This was most helpful, even though MacTeX solves all my problems.…

Our learning objectives are straightforward. After taking the course, you should be able to: Remain vigilant for bullshit contaminating your information diet. Recognize said bullshit whenever and wherever you encounter it. Figure out for yourself precisely why a particular bit of bullshit is b…

A still-very-relevant 9-year old article. Pandas has gone from strength to strength since he wrote that. In terms of expressing your computations, Hadoop is strictly inferior to SQL. There is no computation you can write in Hadoop which you cannot write more easily in either SQL, or with a simple…

From over 10 years ago (I’m sorting through my old bookmarks). A single object looks like this: { "ACCTOUNT_NUMBER":"1234567890", "CUSTOMER_NAME":"ACME Products and Services, Inc.", "ADDRESS":"123 Main Street", "CITY":"Albuquerque", "STATE":"NM", "ZIP":"87101-1234" } He te…

I loved how the author imagined persistence 💗…

No. It’s just a fucking operating system1. A giant program on a computer. What weird, disconnected, embarrassing bullshit ‘spiritual’ techbro nonsense. “We made a website full of memes you can search through, powered by Bitcoin and Machine-Learning (of course), and are changing the world.” No. Sto…

Value™ must be delivered to stakeholders at any and all cost 🏏…

This is for children under 13. Because children over 13 engage with Social Media in very healthy and fruitful ways. “They are also simply too young to navigate the complexities of what they encounter online, including inappropriate content and online relationships where other users, including pre…

by Josh Comeau. Saving here to refer to later. Here’s another by Manuel Matuzovic. It features a lot more OG tags and a most clever way to cut the mustard apropos modern browsers. Saved here.…

A most dangerous Easter Egg by Microsoft, known only to the most elite of hackers.…

It’s very simple and clever. This is an example of what’s rendered from this giant Markdown file 💙…

I love this more than I can describe.…

The argument here being that, since the ‘general form’ of the conjecture is undecidable, TypeScript’s type system is undecidable. How does one even think of doing these things? I love Typescript, but it isn’t nearly ambitious enough. It would be vastly improved with an --extremelyStrict flag enfo…

A guide to elegant post-dinner debauchery from Mr Wei Koh, watch aficionado, Style Council member and founder of The Rake Magazine, in partnership with IWC Schaffhausen. The ‘guide’ in a nutshell: “Drink whatever you want, with whomever you like, talking about anything you’d want to, on any day…

About as ‘essential’ as it gets if you want to appreciate a tool you work with every day. (Cached)…

No macOS love though 😔…

Here’s another list of 36 styles with real examples. (Cached: styles, elements one and two.)…

Nakamuro and his team looked at the videos Sakakibara had captured and were the first people ever to see tiny cuboid crystals made of tens of molecules of NaCl emerging from the chaotic mixture of separate sodium and chloride ions. Straight away, they noticed a statistic…

Dylan Beattie is my new favorite nerd on YouTube.…

Dark Brown or Black: Nocturnal (helps with camouflage.) Orange: Dawn and Dusk. Yellow: Daytime. There are no Blue-Eyed Owls.…

Here’s a short overview but I found it as easy as brew install tesseract # See output.txt tesseract -l eng input.png output…

It was found in 1982 in France. It’s 165M years old. Researchers reconstructed it in 3D using “synchrotron microtomography.” I was unable this reconstruction because the system of scientific journals is a money-grubbing bullshit system run by greedy people. Here she is though ♥️…

The focus of this project is to build a super reliable, durable, and stable network device from tried and tested tech. This is not a project for pushing the limits or testing out flashy new stacks. This affinity for ‘boring’ technology will reflect on most of the choices made here, from the hardwa…

By a single dev. At $42, an absolute steal for all the things you can do with it. Perpetual license, no bullshit subscription model. 😍…

It’s run by the fine folk at Loganberry Books, costs a nominal $4 per submission, and has a very admirable 50%+ success rate. Here’s my submission 🤞 Via CK ♥️…

Followed by the Chinese Army (2.3M), Walmart (2.1M), McDonald’s (1.9M), and the NHS (1.7M). The Indian Railways comes in eighth with 1.4M people.…

By the Audubon Society cached. Ravens are beefier, gauche, and less ‘refined’. They’re also relatively solitary. They have curvier beaks, wedge-like tails, and soar instead of flap. Here’s what a raven and a crow sound like.…

(cached)…

Here’s how the author made that list. Here’s a cached version.…

(Cached)…

Here are her website and Wikipedia page.…

by Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen…

And here’s our man, Shankar Kurhade, modeling my 2021 strategy given how confident I am in my state’s government fucking up vaccine distribution.…

Gone is the gimmicky TouchBar, gone are the four USB-C ports that forced power users to carry a suitcase full of dongles. In their place we get a cornucopia of developer-friendly ports: two USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2 ports, a redesigned power connector, and a long-awaited HDMI port. Photographers…

They use a pantograph to etch things out, after which they ‘tampograph’ the logo (at 1:45.)…

When you’re following a bunch of feeds, it’s easy to forget that the web is the greatest library in the history of the world—and that a good library doesn’t just have a rack of newspapers, it has a vast collection of books and archives: the stacks. These are stories that get reposted a lot. Many…

That’s from 2010. Here’s the 2020 revision.…

Bit pricey but appears to generate lovely layouts. Via Ash Furrow’s photography site.…

Learn C and build a basic Lisp #VALUE 😍…

If you rarely drive on snow, just pretend you’re taking your grandma to church. There’s a platter of biscuits and 2 gallons of sweet tea in glass jars in the back seat. She’s wearing a new dress and holding a crock pot full of gravy. @Chadsu42…

“Am I truly controlling anything?” (cached)…

Of course. Well, the transaction was in person and in cash (of course.) It was just a little bag of weed sold through an Arpanet account in Stanford’s artificial intelligence lab in 1972. It’s not clear who was in on the sale aside from the students, but despite the underhanded nature of the deal…

😭 Clever girl 🐘 ♥️…

I must have watched this 14,221 times. A parody of this (real) miniseries. There’s a Part III too.…

Via PLG.…

Had to cache it because this is just lovely stuff. Pretty sure I had a mini-blackout when I read the Trainspotting part 💯…

If impatient, skip to the last minute.…

One should be good 80%+ of time between that and the awesome pgcli.…

Turns out Miyazaki’s dad was an aeronautical engineer.…

🐶…

Woo! Covers the biggest reason why I use jq (grep for fields) which, as the gron author notes, is more general-purpose and takes a little more effort to understand and use.…

It helps minimize or eliminate popping sounds (“aspirated plosives”) like when you say ‘pop’ or ‘pepper’ or ‘pots’!…

“Hum toh doobe hain sanam, tujhe bhi leke doobenge.” Afghan Cricket Team Captain Gulbadin Naib warning Bangladesh…

It’s priced at $475 for the basic model and $800 for a deluxe version. The video is very satisfying to watch (I couldn’t have picked better background music.) One could start with a Brachiograph for around $20 (basic Raspberry Pi setup, soldering skills, and assembly required.)…

Via AS as we were discussing Audemars Piguet’s “petite tapisserie”…

On why GNU grep is fast. Via HN.…

So saith Uncle Roger, who finally approved someone’s egg-fried rice. Via KP.…

. I mean yes, Denis Villeneuve and all that. But please don’t suck.…

is a simple and aptly-named COVID tracker that uses data from Johns Hopkins. As of September 1st 2020, my state of Iowa is #1 (woohoo!) with a 7-day infection rate of 261/100,000 people (“there might be 2 to 6 times as many recent infections”) and an R0 rate of 1.7. “Over the past 30 days, 246 peop…

helps you “bust writer’s block and be more creative” using an AI. Came by it after reading this amazing result of a collaboration between GPT-3 and James Yu.…

, ThriftBooks, and Bookshop are three alternatives to purchasing books on Amazon. Powell’s is withdrawing from the Amazon Marketplace: “The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive. We will not participate in undermining that vitality.”…

Myrna Tellingheusen is my new favorite person on the internet ♥️…

See also: “Creating a QR Code step by step”…

Look we just wanted to make sure The Ocean would remember our species for having delivered value at any cost.…

The Punisher logo is genius. Via Pete.…

Ah, lovely. Absolutely lovely. Really lovely folks, let me tell you.…

Wikipedia calls it “decompression damage”. The Smithsonian Magazine has more.…

They call themselves Blac Rabbit. Here they are on Ellen.…

I had no idea how these were made until watching this. The music is annoying.…

via Mark…

What’s even more remarkable is that it has about 12,000 posts in a single ~38MB file! He uses TiddlyWiki which I need to try and understand.…

Being a satirical take on the state of enterprise software development, and authored by smart people who presumably like to watch the world burn. The issues are highly entertaining as well.…

The firm also did the beautiful, interactive version of Transmit’s awesome logo.…

I wish I had this intuitive, visual understanding and appreciation of the topic when I was in college.…

This is some astounding PowerPoint-fu. Reminded me of the words of Linus Torvalds, “That is either genius, or a seriously diseased mind.”…

He played Hans Gruber’s “right-hand man” Karl Vreski. Here’s more on his roller-coaster of a life.…

By someone at Toggl, a software company that also makes great comics… 🤷‍♂️…

It also doesn’t retail for less than $21,000 so there’s that.…

Constructed around 1100 BCE, it had “995 graffiti left by visitors […], ranging from the 1st century BC to the 4th century AD” a 1,000 years later.…