nikhil.io

This was rather vertigo inducing.

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 organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

He went on to call out specific issues with Horizon, writing that “our onboarding experience is confusing and frustrating for users” and that the team needed to “introduce new users to top-notch worlds that will ensure their first visit is a success.”

Shah said the teams working on Horizon needed to collaborate better together and expect more changes to come. “Today, we are not operating with enough flexibility,” his memo reads. “I want to be clear on this point. We are working on a product that has not found product market fit. If you are on Horizon, I need you to fully embrace ambiguity and change.”

I’m assuming that asking “What the fuck are we spending $70 billion on again?” wouldn’t be a recommended way to embrace ambiguity.

Kate Duffy with Business Insider:

Zuckerberg told employees this year to have their meetings on Meta’s Horizon Workrooms app, where people can come together as avatars in virtual workspaces, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.

[…] The source, who remained anonymous, told The Times that many Meta employees didn’t have VR headsets this year or hadn’t gotten around to setting them up. Those staff then had to rush to purchase headsets and register them before their managers realized, the source told The Times.

And the kicker:

Included in the Times report was inside information from two employees who told the newspaper that some workers call important metaverse projects “make Mark happy,” abbreviating it to “MMH.”

Won’t someone think of our mad king? I’m going to return to the office only to be forced to attend meetings virtually. MMH 🥲

A theater-owner on Telugu moviegoers at RRR:

This fucking shit destroyed my theater opening night. The Telugu crowd specifically wrecked out shit. No issues with the Hindi dub or the Tamil dub.

Confetti cannons, spraying soda everywhere, littering in the parking lot, sneaking in more people than there were seats in our biggest auditoriums, screaming and shouting and chanting constantly.

I get the guy is something of a hero. I get you’re excited for your long awaited movie or whatever. Here’s an interesting thought thought: fuck off. :) Just fuck right off. Don’t be an animal and make my and my employees lives worse to have more fun at our expense.

The janitors saw the insane amount of glitter and newspaper shreddings and confetti explosions and said “hm, actually, second thought, fuck this. Nobody gets paid enough for this.” In-between every seat, every chair, in every row and even where there weren’t rows of seats, on every step, even up by the projector window. We’re lucky they didn’t damage the silver screen in any way, tbh, but that’s about it. Took days to fully clean.

Fuck RRR specifically for this reason. I know it’s probably decent, and a few friends watched it on Netflix, but out of sheer principle I just can’t bring myself to watch even a second of it now. There were some fun scenes for sure, but I think I’d much rather watch War or Baahubali 1 and 2 than RRR on account of the bad time everyone but the Telugu crowd had.

With the usual “not all of us” apologies from other Telugu folk of course.

I have never, ever understood this deeply embarrassing behaviour from my people¹. At college, I remember watching a Chiranjeevi movie at some small town in Iowa. The poor folk who ran the theater had no idea what they were in for. Moviegoers littered the entire theater with glitter and torn newspaper and didn’t clean up after the show was done. Some set up an unsanctioned tea and snack station for the intermission (these refreshments were, of course, offered at a price). Chanted, chatted loudly, and generally made a nuisance of themselves.

I’ve been offered quite a few reasons as to why Telugu folk do this and they’re all pretty bullshit. I personally refuse to go to the first screening of any Telugu movie in Des Moines in case I have to deal with “passionate” people who don’t seem to understand that they’re rude, ill-mannered, immature, and annoying pieces of shit to everyone else around them.

I feel very personally attacked by Mr. Lovenstein. And somehow glad I’m not the only person who, for instance, purchases a glorious WaterRower¹ and proceeds to give it a thousand cumulative and approximate ‘pulls’ over three years. 🤦‍♀️

About five minutes in, I felt like I was reading a masterpiece even though I know very little about the graphic novel format. This is some mesmerizing inking (Burns won a lot of “Best Inker” awards for this work). The panels almost look like woodcuts. It’s about teenagers and adolescence and how we see our bodies during those important formative years, as simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. The world of Black Hole is bleak, boring, and pretty horrifying. And we’re talking moody teenagers so you get to witness a lot of terrible decisions, angst, ennui, despair, friendship, love, sex, camaraderie, depression, grief, humor, violence, acceptance, and hope in a very short span of pages. Lots of yonic imagery. The author published this over a ten-year period starting in 1995 and it looks like these are almost exclusively what he worked on during that timespan. Amazing.

Saw with LD. Very heavy subject matter loosely inspired by harrowing real-life cases and I skipped watching a few scenes. Sai Pallavi was intense and excellent, of course, but we were very impressed with the raw vulnerability and menace Saravanan brought to his character (also called “Saravanan”, lol). Kaali Venkat was great too.

S Sudha deserves a special mention both for her austere performance and who she is:

According to Britannica, most of us tend to use the terms interchangeably, and we tend to associate “ethical” behaviour with professions (like law, medicine, and engineering).

Ethicists today, however, use the terms interchangeably. If they do want to differentiate morality from ethics, the onus is on the ethicist to state the definitions of both terms. Ultimately, the distinction between the two is as substantial as a line drawn in the sand.

The way I understand it is: We mostly agree that gay marriage is ethical. However, it may be immoral to an adherent of a religion that proscribes it (but would they agree that it is ethical?)

Via Ellen 💯

Not really. Reminded me of that Transformer when I saw this macrophotograph of a Longhorn Beetle.

Just amazing. Via and TD.

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 their football.”

Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus. As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped.

It turned out there was value in putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room: They feel empowered to make each other smarter.

Many of the gifted kids in his program have parents who work at the nearby University of Florida and push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar. Others he finds on his own. He tracks down test scores of students in his district, follows the data and recruits high achievers. Some who were discovered by his spreadsheets have since graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with math degrees and landed on Wall Street themselves.

The mathletes who try out for the team and make the cut are combined into one class section and fly through competitive algebra, geometry and calculus during the school day. Mr. Frazer essentially bends the rules to move faster through harder material and pack more than two years of math into one school year. “I cover everything the state wants me to cover,” he said. “But there is no restriction on covering extra material.”

Disturbing fictionalization of a real-life tragedy (cached). Based on a book by Jon Krakauer. Andrew Garfield is simply excellent as a devout Mormon, dogged detective, and patriarch (“priesthood holder”) of his family.

Features some quick lessons in the History of the LDS which was not very flattering to the Church. Characters say “I’ve had a revelation” a lot before proceeding to perform all manner of shitty deeds. It’s a meditation over common-sense and rationality, spiritual doubt and loss, and the unbridled power that most religions impress into the hands of men by upholding and sanctifying patriarchy.

Each episode would start with one of the most beautiful title cards I’ve seen for a show:

They should give this young actor an Emmy for the few minutes she’s on screen 💯

Came recommended by HU. I had to borrow them from PG¹. A limited, 7-part comic book series based on one of my favorite movies. Told from the perspective of John Doe and provides his backstory which is about as sad and disturbing as you can imagine it would be. About as gory as the movie itself. Most parts have a different style. Plenty of out-of-context Bible quotes. Just really well-executed.

You predict (or have insider information) that the price of lawnmowers will fall. The current market price of a lawnmower is $1,000. You go to Eddie’s Lawnmower Rental Company and rent a lawnmower from Eddie for $10 a day. He doesn’t care about you returning the same lawnmower; he just wants you to return a lawnmower (assume that all lawnmowers involved in this story are in great working condition).

You sell this lawnmower to your neighbour for $1,000.

Ten days later, and as you predicted, the price of lawnmowers falls to $500. Now you buy another lawnmower for $500 and return a lawnmower to Eddie. So now you have gained: $1,000 - ($10 x 10 days = $100) - ($500 on the lawnmower you bought) = $400.

Now say you made a bad prediction and the price of lawnmowers went up to $1,500. So now you have lost $1,000 - ($10 x 10 days = $100) - ($1,500 on the lawnmower you bought) = $600.

Theoretically, there is no bottom to your losses. So you have to be very careful when you short things. It’s not for everyone. Stick to Index Funds if you don’t understand what you’re doing.

Finally, here’s some discussion on where the expression ‘going short’ may have come from.

Macula is an absolutely lovely typeface by Jacques Le Bailly.

It reminded me of Impossible Type by Fleta Selmani.

I also found out that Eric Demaine has an “Impossible Folding Font”.

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 designated a superfund site. My goddamn ticket tracker shouldn’t spin up my fans when I try to do something as austere as access the backlog, but, as we all know, it’s impossible to display tickets withou 21 MB of JavaScript and 164 HTTP requests. (Yes, those are real numbers.) (link)

and finally,

JIRA makes it dangerously easy to implement overly bureaucratic processes. A certain kind of organization is drawn to it for that reason. Even a healthy organization switching to JIRA can get carried away with the tools now at its disposal. JIRA is a software product but also a social institution, an organizational philosophy. Sure, you can have the software without the attitude or vice versa, but use of JIRA is still a (weak) negative signal about the quality of an employer.

Turns out that the main thing protecting employee autonomy is the logistical difficulty of micromanagement. JIRA “solves” that problem. (link)

A giant, disjointed fucking mess. Tried to pay attention but I zoned out twice watching it. I couldn’t even tell you what this movie is about.

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.

This beauty is by Owen Gent an artist and illustrator from Bristol (Insta). He appears to do a lot of book covers and I just love his work. Here are a few favorites.

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 the campaign’s website and Instagram.

That would be a Swiss gun instructor. His country has 2.3 million guns per 8.6 million people and has had exactly one mass shooting since 2001.

They are able to do this despite being one of the most armed European countries because they have commonsense gun laws, actually fucking act to prevent senseless tragedy, and do not fetishize or worship their guns or the hallowed, immutable, “God-given” Second Amendment.

There was yet another mass shooting in America, this time in Ames, Iowa, a collegetown I lived in for many years. Three innocent people died. More thoughts and prayers by our effete, corrupt leaders until the next horrifying and avoidable tragedy. Nothing will change.

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.

Saw with LD. Revenge flick set in Scandinavia in 895 AD. LD thought that the ultraviolence was a bit gratuitous and didn’t serve the plot very well. I don’t know what one would expect from a story about a beefy Viking beserker hell-bent on revenge. Lush, beautiful, amazing visuals from Eggers and crew. I wish I saw this in the theater. This is Eggers’ third movie after The Lighthouse (which we thoroughly enjoyed) and The Witch (which I am too much of a chicken to watch). Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy were excellent.

Excellent cinematography and art direction. Bouncy background score by Thaman. Rana Daggubati stole the show, is magnetic in every scene he’s in, and we were all amazed by the ease with which he plays arrogant douchenozzles 💯 Could’ve been at least an hour shorter. Lovely poetry.

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 nuggets like this:

See also: “Iowa is Addicted to Cornography”

I can stare at photographs of the Nefertiti Bust all day. It’s just so alive. It was carved out of limestone and covered in stucco/plaster. The eyes were made out of quartz and affixed with beeswax. Just so beautiful. Wikipedia has a 3D model you can look at.

Indecision has been a pretty huge problem in my life and this comment by /u/tomwaste hit home.

I’m not sure if people have experienced the same but when I entered my 30s I became convinced I was rapidly running out of time. Rather than using that as motivation I let it paralyze me with indecision because I “couldn’t afford to make the wrong choice.” Consequently, I’m now 39 and, though I’ve had great things happen in my 30s, I regret spending so much time worrying and so little time committing to a course of action.

What’s the simplest way out of this mire of Analysis Paralysis?

“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”

Their comment also reminded me of this Sylvia Plath poem illustrated by Gavin Aung Than of Zen Pencils.

This is Zephyr, a “captive-born gray wolf” at the Wolf Conservation Center in NY. Below, you can hear him and his friends orchestrate some of the most beautiful sounds you will hear today. I’ve watched this five times and it was somehow even better with my eyes closed.

Here’s the Wolf Conservation Center’s YouTube channel for more music. Fuck I love wolves ♥️🐺

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

• 101st Chairborne
• 1st Methanized Infantile Division
• Al-Kabob
• Army National Lard
• Battle of The Bulging Stomach
• Bozo Haram
• Branch Covidians
• Buffet Brigade
• Bundesmeal
• Call of Foodie
• Chowed Boys
• Cosplaytriots
• Country Bombkins
• Coup Klutz Clan
• CroMAGAnons
• Cult 45
• Delta Farce
• Delta Forks
• Fryatollahs
• G.I. Jokes
• G.I. Jugs
• Ghost bacon
• GI Jugs
• GI Sloppy Joe
• Gravy Seals
• Green Beignets
• Green Buffets
• Griller Warfare
• Hamburger Harkonnen
• Hez-bubba
• Hezba-la-mode
• Hogan’s Zeroes
• Insulin Insurgents
• Insulin Resistance
• Irrational Guar
• Kommando Soup Kräfte
• Kool-Aid Brigade
• Luftwaffle
• MAGAhideen
• Mayonnaise Militia
• Meal Team Six
• MephamphetaMarines
• Mid-life ISIS
• National Lard
• Natty ISIS
• Oaf Creepers
• Operation Dessert Storm
• Prone Boys
• Q Cucks Klan
• Seal Team Snacks
• Semper Fries
• Semper Fudge
• Shock & Olive Garden
• Slaw and Order
• Snack Ops
• Special Courses
• Special Farces
• Special Portions
• Special Weapons And Toppings
• Sporktroopers
• Stormscooters
• Supper Fidelis
• TactiTools
• Taking up Space Force
• Tali-Born Again
• Talibangelicals
• Talibanjos
• Talibubba
• The Califat
• The Double Chinfantry
• The Eatstern Front
• The Expandables
• The Mandalardians
• The Queens Lard
• The Secret Circus
• Traitor Tots
• Traitor Trash
• Traitortots
• Trumpanzees
• U.S Marshmallows
• Vanilla Isis
• Vietnom-nom-nom Veterans
• Wal-Martyrs
• Well-fedayeen
• Whiskey tango food truck
• Wide Supremacist
• Yeehawwdists
• Yokel Haram
• Y’all Qaeda
• Y’alliban

My dudes. Cached here via YouTube because it is too precious to be yanked off the internet. Via Rob G.

It also occurred to me that the OS in the video would be more usable, more respectful, and less full of spyware than the giant crock of shit that is Windows 11.

It’s what all the Patagonia-clads are raving about. They tell me it solves all perf problems in a snap.

Here’s an NPM package. And, of course, Java if you’d like to deploy this in an Enterprise™ setting.

Summary of Wikipedia article: Japanese kimono didn’t have pockets. They needed something to store their stuff in. So they made containers that they hung from their kimonos’ sashes¹. The part that secured the container to the sash at the top was called a netsuke (“root attached”.)

Here’s a really cute one of a sleeping cat from the 19th century 😻

Here’s another. It’s a crouching tiger 😍

This is from a while ago but I didn’t get the memo. It’s a little crazy:

It’s named after Reddit user /u/vaieriepieris, an ESL teacher from Texas, who made it for a map subreddit in 2013.

• There are more Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Communists inside the circle than outside it.
• It “pulls all of this off while being mostly water and including the most sparsely populated country on earth (Mongolia).” (Source).
• It also contains the highest mountain and deepest trench.

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 ✨

As far as Indian Gurus go, I find this guy more illumined and full of practical, actionable advice than, say, this guy, less full of shit than this one, and definitely less batshit crazy than this one.

Via LT 🙏

The creator of the video is Masood Boomgaard. Here’s his YouTube channel. And here’s the Balm your Soul needs in its entirety 🙏 🌸

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": "cups",
    "qty": 5.5
  },
  {
    "name": "flour",
    "unit": "cups",
    "qty": 2
  }
]

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” internet program, called the Sandy Hook tragedy “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax,” and “completely fake with actors.”

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