New incubating project in the radar: Apache DataSketchs, for stochastic streaming algorithms.

We don’t remember things because we’ve somehow deemed something worthy of remembering, we simply remember things because they’re remembered, because they happened, because they stuck in our minds. I think a great note-taking system should inherit these properties of memory to properly extend it. — Incremental note-taking

TIL about Beets, which is a media library management system for obsessive music geeks.

Give me a to-do app with tags, color choices, and hierarchies, and I’ll give you an hour of my time to organize something as simple as a grocery shopping list. Give me multiple notebooks for my notes and I’ll give you days of my life building an organization system. — I Still Use Plain Text for Everything, and I Love It

The Old Web isn’t dead. It just got old enough that it constantly seems to leave the spreadsheet with all of its passwords open on the desktop. It is sinking into the sofa while images of a low-bitrate Spaghetti Western dance in its bifocals. — Things We Left in the Old Web

Introduction to Modern Statistics.

TIL about lieer, which can be used to fetch and two-way tag synchronization between notmuch and GMail. I no longer really use Gmail, and I use mu instead of notmuch to manage my Maildir’s, but this is quite nice. See Setting Up neomutt with notmuch, gmail(lieer) and gpg signing for additional information.

Computer Security and the Internet: Tools and Jewels.

In the software industry, there is a term for intentional designs which coerce the user into doing something, be it consciously or subconsciously - a ‘dark pattern’. These patterns are employed by social media networks, e-commerce, video games, and many more places. — The ‘Fuck You’ Pattern

Text editors inhabit a weird space in computing. What could be simpler than transcribing the ramblings of an operator into characters on a blank screen? And yet there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of different ways to do it, all targeting different use cases, writing styles, feature sets, abilities, and trade-offs. There’s a reason new ones still come out, despite the industry existing for decades. — Thinking out loud about Vim