Micro posting in June
The message you’re sending is that you think I’m not capable of reading and writing my own emails. That the people I’m exchanging messages with don’t deserve my time and energy. That I’m doing something wrong by not outsourcing my communication skills to a token prediction machine. — Gmail Thinks I’m Stupid, So I Left
2026-06-04: A useful asymptotic
approximation
for the expected range of n samples drawn from a N(0, 1) random variable:
$$
d_n = 2\Phi^{-1}\left(\frac{n - 0.375}{n + 0.25}\right).
$$
2026-06-04: Screenshots like
these always make me feel a bit wistful. I must have grown older without really
realising it over the last few years: macOS Needs Its
GridBack.
#apple
2026-06-04: 90 % of
the t
distribution:
Another enlightning article by Christoffer Stjernlöf on Entropic Thoughts.
2026-06-04: What I would change
in Common
Lisp.
#lisp
2026-06-05: TIL about
universal database CLI tools, like usqlor
databow. I usually rely on
DuckDB core
extensions.
#database
2026-06-09:
Albums currently being listened to this
month:
2026-06-15:
But it is much better to say “Your function is not enough. You are correct that it needs to be a homomorphism”. That acknowledges the student’s contribution. It tells them that their analysis of the difficulty was correct!— Just ANSWER THE QUESTION
2026-06-15: As advertised, no
math at all: How LLMs
ActuallyWork.
2026-06-15: TIL about this
simple trick for pasting images
to piped commands on macOS. #apple
2026-06-15: Container
machine
provides a highly integrated Linux environment that works seamlessly on your
Mac. I still haven’t played with this stuff since last
year. #apple
2026-06-15:
reader seems to works better than
readability-cli. Compare w3m https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html
vs. reader https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html | w3m.
2026-06-16: /me is listening to
“The Greatest” by Billie Eilish
2026-06-16:
(…) when even the most sophisticated Git users talk about branches, theydon’t simply mean refs; they mean sequences of commits. — I wish people wouldstop insisting that Git branches are nothing butrefs
It’s interesting to see that biological evolution, which creates and operates in an entirely separate domain, uses a similar sort of trick: using genetic recombination (in the form of sexual reproduction and horizontal gene transfer)to make the search process more modular and gain information more rapidly. —Biological Evolution and InformationAcquisition
Matt’s Web Scripts, as it appeared on worldwidemart.com in 1997. One example of many of a random website becoming popular, no real rhyme or reason to it. But hey, Matt had some pretty good scripts! — What Was MattThinking?
Now, the “Top 40” has become a real hamster-on-the-wheel project. The following plot shows my count of the number of new packages to make it to CRAN since I began publishing on R Works. — New CRAN Packages: signal ornoise?
2026-06-28: So
good…
2026-06-29: Data Compression
Explained.