← Home

You can read the daily log for the last few days below, or with the Atom feed. Browse the archives for more.

2024-10-21

Facts: Software Engineer Titles Have (Almost) Lost All Their Meaning #titles #engineering #swe

Fullscreen Screenshots on Windows

I watch a lot of video content on my TV that is hooked up to a Windows PC. I wanted a smooth workflow to take fullscreen screenshots with a hotkey while I was watching, without any dialogs or popups.

The Logitech K400 wireless keyboard that I to use with the PC does not have a dedicated PrtScrn key. The standard shortcut key Win + Shift + S opened up the Snipping tool which was too disruptive and clunky.

Finally, I download and Installed ShareX and setup the Hotkey for fullscreen capture to be: Ctrl + Shift + Backspace. By default, the screenshots are automatically saved in a folder under Documents/ShareX. I use the hotkey to snap screenshots while watching shows and movies, and they get saved in the background without interruption. I can browse them later and create memes 😀! #screenshots #windows

CSS trick to balance text as well as icons

You can use text-wrap: balance; on icons – Terence Eden’s Blog #css

Streamlining Go Project Creation

Go-Blueprint Docs #go #boilerplate

Powerful CLI tool designed to streamline the process of creating Go projects with a robust and standardized structure. Not only does Go Blueprint facilitate project initialization, but it also offers seamless integration with popular Go frameworks, allowing you to focus on your application's code from the very beginning.

A Philosophy of Travel

Some great tips on travel, and how to travel well: A Philosophy of Travel - by Tracy Gustilo - Pose Ponder

I read up on history, geography, and culture. I love to browse street markets and bookstores. If I do touristy things, I prefer secondary or tertiary sites, or locations that domestic travelers themselves go. I travel to learn — and I want to learn to travel well. I have no real desire to collect “experiences” of places — just say No to bucket lists! My goal is to stretch to accommodate what’s around me, and to try hard to see beyond whatever’s become habitual and mundane at home.

Economist Special Report on the US Economy

The envy of the world | Oct 19th 2024 | The Economist #usa #economy

On Productivity:

This year the average American worker will generate about $171,000 in economic output, compared with (on purchasing-parity terms) $120,000 in the euro area, $118,000 in Britain and $96,000 in Japan. That represents a 70% increase in labour productivity in America since 1990, well ahead of the increases elsewhere: 29% in Europe, 46% in Britain and 25% in Japan.

On Shale Oil:

The Marcellus is just one of several such rock formations around America, from the oil-rich Bakken shale in Montana and North Dakota to the Permian basin, endowed with both oil and gas, in Texas and New Mexico. The revolution in tapping their hard-to-reach hydrocarbons got under way in the latter half of the 20th century as companies and government researchers worked to combine hydraulic fracturing, or fracking (the injection of specialised liquids to open cracks in rocks), and horizontal drilling. As they honed these techniques in the early 2000s, production surged. Now, America produces some 13m barrels per day of crude oil and 3bn cubic metres per day of natural gas, making it the world’s biggest producer of both.

On the yuan displacing the dollar:

On the IMF data, the dollar’s share of reserves has fallen back only roughly to where it was in 1995. And it has not been China absorbing its share, or even the euro, which Europe uses for most of its own trade and is the dominant currency in parts of Africa. Rather, it is, as one joke goes, other currencies called “dollar” or “krone”: those in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. “They are the currencies of small, open, well managed, in the main inflation-targeting economies,” says Mr Eichengreen.

They are also mostly America’s allies, making it hard to sustain an argument that the fall in reserve share says much about lost Western hegemony. And among remaining official holdings of dollars, three-quarters are owned by governments with a military tie to America, says Colin Weiss of the Federal Reserve. Strikingly, note Mr Arslanalp and his colleagues, the yuan’s share of international reserves has shrunk since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, sparking American sanctions and much speculation that countries would jettison the dollar for fear of similar treatment.

On why the dollar is the preferred global reserve currency:

Looking in the round, researchers at the Federal Reserve concluded in 2023 that dollar dominance “has remained stable over the past 20 years”. Why is it so tough to displace?  One reason is network effects: the more people use dollars, the greater the incentives to use them. This is visible in currency-trading, where the dollar’s liquidity means that for some currency pairs it is cheaper to trade through the dollar—ie, to sell a holding for dollars, then buy the desired currency—than to trade two non-dollar currencies directly.

Network effects do not guarantee the status quo for ever, as shown by the fall of past reserve currencies such as the British pound and the Dutch guilder. The problem faced by rivals now is that they simply cannot offer as safe and liquid a store of value, and in such quantities. China’s authoritarian system and controlled capital account, which restricts how much money can be taken out of the country, make investors skittish. Europe lacks safe, jointly issued assets on the scale of the Treasury market. Nowhere offers America’s combination of the rule of law, deeply liquid markets and an open capital account, meaning that investors know they can get their money out easily.

On the dominance of US stock markets:

There are two ways for a stockmarket to outperform its rivals, setting aside ephemeral ups and downs (and America’s stockmarket is no more volatile than those of other major economies). One source of high returns is if the companies comprising the market make more profits. The other is for investors to value those profits more highly. America’s recent stellar record reflects primarily the latter effect. In a paper last year Cliff Asness, Antti Ilmanen and Dan Villalon of AQR Capital Management compared the American market with a currency-hedged index of large- and mid-cap stocks in other developed countries. They found that once the effect of rising valuation multiples was stripped out America’s outperformance fell by nearly three-quarters and became statistically insignificant. Today America’s valuations are unmatched: the US market trades at 24 times forward earnings, compared with 14 in Europe and 22 in Japan.

2024-10-20

Podcasts:

John Collison on Crypto

From the podcast linked above. I used the transcript made available on Listen Notes site, which seems to be really bad at transcribing an Irish accent 😀:

Well. The thing about crypto is there's been a lot of hype on what crypto is useful for. And so for example, if you go back and read the original Bitcoin paper, which is a great read. It's a very readable original paper, it actually used the word interchange in there and talks about kind of the use of bitcoin as a payment method. But bitcoin turned out to be certainly stock bitcoin, you know, before lightning and everything like that should have to be a horrible payment method, like slow expensive, let's not do that. And now the technology has matured through what has been kind of fourteen years of development. I think the crypto haters used this argument that like, well, you know, it is the Web in ninety three for you know, many many years, whereas the actual web coming along. But there's been fourteen years of lots of technical development happening such that we've ended up with much more advanced technologies. And so what you specifically have now with stable coins is you have, firstly, something that's value doesn't change and so there's none of the kind of speculation stuff that we're talking about. You have something that's actually very technically scalable, so with the current L two's there's no real scalability issues with them, and you have a pretty sensible construct where in a way, it's narrow banking. Right. We've been talking about narrow banking in this country for decades, and we have ended up with narrow banking through stable coins, where let's say a good stable coin, you know that like a PAXOS or a USDC. In the case of USDC, it is fully backed by short term treasuries. And that actually just seems like a pretty good construct to me. And so you know, we now make it where you can, you know, accept money and strive via crypto. You can do some payouts things like that. And the obvious thing that people say is true where in the US you will be slightly too biased against crypto because the US is the world's best currency. You know, the US has the world's reserve currency where you get to spend and might back exactly. And so of course people in the US think the USD is awesome because it is an awesome currency, whereas many people in many other countries have a much more adversarial relationship with their own currency. And I'm not even talking about Zimbabwe, though it is true. I'm talking about Turkey, which is a very large country and economy and population, but people there do not have full faith in the lira, and they think about what's a better place to keep money than lira.

I think all the serious grown up crypto players today, I mean they're subject to the fincent travel rule. They are ky seeing the actors, and so if you go through a crypto flow today, you will see the normal frictions of dealing with a regulator financial product where you are asked to provide your you know, last for your social or upload a driver's license or things like that. And so I think just in most of the crypto use cases that are being tough. Obviously there's the sketchy dark web stuff exists as well, but in most of the use cases we are talking about where serious businesses like stripe or serious merchants are using crypto, it is the custodial lissis part of the crystals.

Hack Hours: Build Your Side Projects

I spent time on Zoom today hanging out at Hack Hour : Build Your Side Projects · Zoom · Luma. This is a session organized by Bhavani Ravi (who also happens to be friend). It was a good experience and I came across people building some interesting stuff.

I spent the time building the backend for a weekly newsletter that would aggregate my daily logs as a digest.

First, I spent time exploring the features offered by Buttondown, a newsletter service. It is pretty easy to get started. I realised that its API feature and RSS-to-Email feature both required a paid subscription and I wasn't ready for that kind of commitment just yet.

However, Buttondown does support a Markdown compose feature. So I came up with the idea of generating a Markdown output of my daily log entries and copy-pasting it into the online Buttondown interface manually. I had some code in < 15m with the help of Cursor, which also included some minor transformations from Obsidian Markdown syntax to something that Buttondown supports for images and embeds: Add newsletter generation. Fix #14 · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@9ab01ad · GitHub

Need to do some more testing before making the newsletter public.

Bhavani also linked me to this article about running and hosting your own newsletter. I don't think I have the bandwidth for that right now, but it's an interesting read: Guide to running a newsletter in 2024

2024-10-19

Have been a bit behind on updating my podcasts, so am gonna just add all the ones I didn't add the past few days #podcasts:

Darren Acemoglu on the On Humans podcast

Summary of key themes generated by ChatGPT

tmux config for undercurls

Pull of the Undercurl #tmux

The article contains some .tmux.conf incantations to better support undercurls. It also talks about updating the terminfo on macs. I should try that to improve the rendering of fonts on my neovim/tmux setup on mac.

audio transcription using Gemini models

podscript currently doesn't support Gemini, so I am keen to add support. As part of the research, I read the README in this repo: GitHub - SouthBridgeAI/llm-transcription-study: Useful resources for LLM-based Diarization and Transcription. #audio #transcription #gemini #google

It seems like unlike ChatGPT, Google Gemini accepts audio files as input and can transcribe the audio and even generate diarization.

Found this repo in a much bigger thread on audio transcription which has a lot of wonderful insights:

4-stage guide to machine learning

I have posted a link to this Twitter thread before (twice, it seems!). But today I actually got around to reading it: https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1821614668516839777

The thread is well worth reading in full, but I wanted to extract the key resources mentioned for easier recall:

no-yap reading session

successfully completed another my second no yap reading session in 3W CMH. Rutvi joined like last time, and this time Swayanshu joined as well.

I read parts of the following books:

2024-10-18

TIL there is a BuyItForLife subreddit.

For practical, durable and quality made products that are made to last.

Found a great thread for the best review sites: What review sites do you trust? Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc? #reviews #purchases

Long thread on a 4-stage guide to learning ML: https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1821614668516839777 #ml #learning

2024-10-17

Talked to a lot of people on Twitter DMs, which does not happen often.

AI Tinkerers Meetup

I gave a talk about podscript at the AI Tinkerers Meetup. It was some good public speaking practise after a long hiatus. Initially, I thought about going in and doing a spontaneous talk. But as I waited for the event to start at the nearby coffee shop, I decided to do a quick dry run and realised I would go over the 5min limit quite easily. So I cut down some material and tightened up a few things. Practising the talk definitely helped and I could feel it in the audience reaction during and after the talk. It felt very validating. Some folks came up to speak to me after, and after that I summoned up the courage to speak to some others as well. Told them all to follow me on X for the best vibes 😊.

2024-10-16

Podcasts #podcasts:

Finished Season 1 of Colin from Accounts. Loved it: Colin from Accounts (TV Series 2022– ) - IMDbtw

2024-10-15

Podcasts #podcasts :

Debrid

A random conversation at 3W cafe introduced me to the magical world of Stremio and Debrid servers to watch popular media online.

To set some context, my current media consumption workflow is quite effective, but a bit bespoke and clunky. It essentially involves:

Enter debrid servers into the picture. Here is a nice definition from GitHub - debridmediamanager/awesome-debrid: 🆓 Download and stream in an instant

Before: Debrid services are web apps that provide premium access to multiple file hosts (or one-click hosters, OCH). This enables users to download or stream content from various sources through a single account, often at higher speeds and with fewer restrictions. They are also referred to as multi one-click hosters (MOCH).

Now: Apart from being able to download from OCH, Debrid services are becoming more and more popular lately because of being able to instantly finish downloading a torrent and providing an HTTPS (!) link to download or stream a video inside it. The concept is similar to a shared torrent seedbox although not all Debrid services support seeding. The difference of this and Usenet is with a Debrid service, you don't need a different software to download content and it supports streaming a la Netflix. Other Debrid services like Real-Debrid also supports video transcoding without any additional fees.

Mind blown 🤯!! Why did I not know about this before 🤦🏽‍♂️.

In the conversation mentioned above, a friend demoed a combination of Stremio, Torrentio - Stremio Addon and Real-Debrid: All-in-one solution that just worked seamlessly. There is a guide on reddit that provides dead simple instructions to set it up: Stremio + Torrentio + Debrid: A How-To Guide

Here's an explanation of how my new simplified media consumption flow works:

  1. Search media to watch in Stremio.
  2. Stremio queries its addons for available sources.
  3. The Torrentio addon searches for torrents of the requested media.
  4. Torrentio sends the magnet link to the Real Debrid service.
  5. The Real Debrid service downloads the torrent to its cloud servers. A lot of the time the media is already cached because of previous users.
  6. Real Debrid creates a streamable link from the downloaded content.
  7. This streamable link is sent back to Stremio.
  8. Stream the media directly through Stremio.

2024-10-14

A great way to start the day, reading Ava's birthday post: 28 things I’ve learned - by Ava - bookbear express #self-improvement

My top 5:

I lied and put 6 down because I could not choose 🤷🏽😊

Love this book cover: Book: Alice’s Adventures in a differentiable wonderland - Simone Scardapane - The book PDF is free to download and looks really interesting. I find the idea of approaching neural networks as compositions of differentiable primitives, and building them as a type of differentiable programming quite intriguing. #neural-networks #ai #ml #books

/images/alice_neural.png

A comprehensive intro to Typst, a new typesetting system written in Rust: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX - jreyesr's blog - something I have been meaning to play with. I have been a longtime typesetting nerd, and one of the highlights of my life is getting Lua bindings for a font shaping library into LuaTeX, a popular typesetting system in the scientific community (details here) #typesetting

TIL - niche construction, courtesy of video: We could make every human on Earth rich and happy—if we decided to | Agustín Fuentes - YouTube

But humans, for better and for worse, we reshape the world in a pace and pattern that nothing else does. So, when we talk about niche construction in humans, we're not just talking about making buildings or dams or using fire to heat things. We're also talking about ideas, faiths; beliefs about death and afterlife; about morals and ethics; about economics and justice. All of those things shape how we act. So, what we have to recognize then is the human capacity to create, to imagine, to live in incredibly complex societies, to build amazing technologies, is a double-edged sword, right? On one hand, it slices through all our challenges and makes us capable of doing a lot of stuff. On the other hand, it slices through bodies and lives and hopes and dreams. And so the same capacity that makes humans, in my opinion, amazing, makes us awful. We have the capacity to be the most amazing, compassionate, incredible organisms on this planet. At the same time, we have the capacity to be the worst, cruelest, most violent organisms- and it's that dynamic process that makes us human. What we can do is think technologically, biologically, ecologically, and ask questions about sustainability. And maybe to do this, we might want to listen to peoples around the planet, who are not the major contributors to the problems. It's just that we've been trying one system, a particular mode of economics and technology, and yeah, it's sort of gotten us into a bad place. So maybe, just maybe, we need to think culturally, a little bit more expansively, to do a better job of biologically and ecologically engaging with the world. Now, many people will just say, "Well, it's just nature." Right? The fact that some people are rich and some people are poor, it's just nature. The fact that in some cases men are violent to women, it's just nature. There's never just nature: It's always history and politics and culture and experience and biology and bodies and brains and hormones and diets- all mixed together. So, anyone that says things are the way they are because of human nature, doesn't know what human nature is.

☝🏽 Found here from the On Humans Substack: How We (Literally) Construct Our Worlds - by Ilari Mäkelä

This was probably the most profound sounding thing I said today 👇🏽

2024-10-13

Podcasts #podcasts:

Met folks for a 2hr no-yap reading session at 3W CMH: #books

Got introduced to the Stremio ecosystem thanks to Cyril. It seems like there might be way to streamline my media watching workflow a lot more with this, than my currently duct-taped version that involved Seedgator, rTorrent and scripts that download files using wget.

2024-10-12

Sex bomb: The collateral damage of OnlyFans’ explosive success #sex

Reuters reported some of the most direct harms in investigations that exposed child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual or “revenge porn” posted on the site. Those findings were drawn from police complaints obtained from more than 250 of the largest U.S. law enforcement agencies.

But the files also reveal collateral harms: families torn apart, reputations threatened, finances ruined.

Aside from Melinda Lam, who said her husband’s porn-buying spree destroyed her marriage, the police files describe a creator who unwittingly made sex videos for a close relative; women and girls shocked to find their likenesses stolen to sell porn; and passersby who found naked men making porn in public for their “fans.” Another creator filmed himself in lewd acts with a dog.

against brute forcing - by Ava - bookbear express #self-improvement #life #purpose

Take the ayahuasca discourse. Urban legend has it that people take ayahuasca and afterwards do things like give up on their startups, which is bad because productivity, ambition, greatness, etc. Now, my argument is that if you do psychedelics and quit something afterwards, it’s probably because you didn’t like or care about it very much. Again, we live in a culture that teaches smart young people that they have to direct their attention and energy towards something, even if it’s arbitrary and they don’t get any sense of meaning out of it. Because of that you get a lot of people trying very hard to brute force something that’s essentially meaningless to them. To me, that’s a bad outcome.

When I see people who are really good at brute forcing things I fear that they’ll just throw themselves at the nearest attractive obstacle without any sense of like… what is actually spiritually significant to them. And I actually think most people can find something to do that is deeply meaningful. I do not think that we teach our youth this!

But a life that looks good is not the same thing as a life that feels good. Maybe no one can tell the difference except for you, but you’ll struggle to fool yourself. More and more I notice that most people are primarily motivated by the avoidance of certain feelings. For instance, if you have spent a lot of time investing in something you don’t actually like very much, admitting that to yourself creates a lot of pain and discomfort and regret and uncertainty. And you might think to yourself, I can just avoid feeling all of those things if I don’t look at the problem too hard. I mean, my life is good, right?

Managed to score Navaratri ka prasad

2024-10-11

Another brain fog day 😒, but things improved in the afternoon!! Decided to go pandal hopping in HSR Layout.

Way behind on my reading and didn't code much the last two days.

Xiaohongshu helps Southeast Asia with tourism recovery post Covid-19 - Rest of World - Can't think of a non-Chinese app that works like this, using user generated content to drive recommendations.

User recommendations can sometimes be misleading or underwhelming. A single tree located on an empty plot of land by the roadside has gained popularity on the app as a photogenic spot, dubbed “Lonely Tree.”

The rise of the ‘manifinsta’: how social media became a manifestation tool | Dazed #culture #technology

Simply put, manifestation is intention-setting through focusing your thoughts on the desired outcome until it happens. It’s part of psychological thought that became popularised by books like The Secret, before taking over popular culture in 2020. Since then, there’s been a growing fascination around how algorithms, the internet, and even AI can be tools for manifestation.

Ellis says using social media as a tool for manifestation is similar to writing affirmations in a journal. “Popular culture today is wellness culture,” she says. “We’re going to be on our phones anyway, so it may as well be the best experience it could be.”

The latest Amplifier playlist: The Amplifier: All Apologies (8 Songs for the High Holy Days) #music

2024-10-10

Brain fog day 😒!!

Podcasts #podcasts:

2024-10-09

Podcasts #podcasts:

Fascinating article on how Ozempic is changing the layout of a typical modern gym: Ozempic is transforming your gym #fitness #gym

Key Points from Depression as a Functional Signal - Evolving Psychiatry Podcast

Podcast on Youtube: Depression as a Functional Signal | Hans Schroder | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #31 - YouTube

Tips for improving concentration

A friend pointed me to a PDF on the University of Manitoba Site titled Tips for Improving Concentration. Most of it is the usual stuff. But a couple of things were useful, so I am noting them down here:

5 Tips for Staying Focused (When You’re Stressed) - Scott H Young

2024-10-08

Writing a circuit breaker in Go | Redowan's Reflections #go #patterns

Why main character syndrome is philosophically dangerous | Aeon Essays

/images/Pasted image 20241008123446.png

Not a clinical diagnosis but more a way of locating oneself in relation to others, and popularised by a number of social media platforms, MCS is a tendency to view one’s life as a story in which one stars in the central role, with everyone else a side character at best. Only the star’s perspectives, desires, loves, hatreds and opinions matter, while those of others in supporting roles are relegated to the periphery of awareness. Main characters act while everyone else reacts. Main characters demand attention and the rest of us had better obey.

 MCS is not a puzzle to be solved via a ‘do and don’t’ listicle. It is not a social problem against which laws can be passed. Instead, it calls on us to engage in what Joseph Campbell, among others, called a ‘dark night of the soul’. This might mean sitting with our anonymity, solitude, boredom and lostness; pushing back on the equivocation between performance and authentic connections; making ourselves vulnerable to others, and thus to failure. It might mean seeing ourselves as always incomplete – and recognising that fulfilment might not be in the cards, that life is not a triumphant monomyth, and others are not here to be cast in supporting roles. Myself, I tend to turn to Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame (1957), where a character reminds us: ‘You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’ Sounds about right – let’s begin there.

AI Snake Oil Book: FAQ about the book and our writing process #books

The AI discourse is polarized because of differing opinions about which AI risks matter, how serious and urgent they are, and what to do about them. In broad strokes:

☝🏽🥺

nvim setup (contd.)

Watched this: Full Neovim Setup from Scratch in 2024 - YouTube

Installed plugins and tweaked configs. Made sure I was reading the docs for every line of code that I was adding to the config file.

/images/nvim_scratch.png

Had to add these two lines in my ~/.tmux.conf to get neovim fonts to look right, with italics and everything. No idea why exactly it works (esp the second line). #tmux #tools #config

set -g default-terminal "tmux-256color"
set-option -a terminal-features 'xterm-256color:RGB'

2024-10-07

Benefits of psychedelics: Can they teach us about the search for meaning in life? | Vox

Lot of stuff in the article ☝🏽. I will need to read it again to process it fully. Some disjointed quotes below

In 2017, Katrin Preller, a neuropsychologist at the University of Zurich, published the first experiment to test the specific contribution of these serotonin receptors in the subjective effects of LSD in humans. Participants listened to three kinds of music: music that they found meaningless (often free jazz — no disrespect, Sun Ra fans), music they had preselected as highly meaningful to them, and “neutral” music that was similar to their preselected songs but that they had never heard before.

They listened to each set on three different occasions: once while sober; once on LSD, which, they reported, made all three pieces of music more meaningful; and once on a combination of LSD and ketanserin, a drug that blocks the serotonin receptor so psychedelic molecules can’t dock there. The idea was to see if LSD still produces elevated levels of meaningfulness even when it can’t interact with the serotonin receptor.

The result? Blocking that receptor completely canceled the subjective effects of LSD; participants might as well have been sober. Preller’s findings helped establish that these receptors are critical to the noetic quality. No receptor activation, no extra meaningfulness.

But explaining psychedelic meaningfulness via the activation of serotonin receptors is like saying that turning the keys in the ignition explains what makes a car go. Once the receptors are activated, there’s a whole lot of under-the-hood activity that’s important to understand the mechanisms of meaning.

No matter how strong a psychedelic trip can be, connection remains a critical aspect of meaning-making. Psychedelics may help us forge new connections more easily — but the rest, like designing a society that does the same, is up to us.

Istanbul Food Recs 👇🏽 #turkey #istanbul #food

Today I used the gh cli for the first time to create a github repo from a pre-existing folder:

gh repo create --private --source=.

So much more convenient than using the web interface.

nvim exploration

I am a pretty competent vim user. But I hadn't explored nvim deeply so far. My vim config was in VimScript till recently and I hadn't made use of LSP and TreeSitter related features much. I finally decided to setup my nvim from scratch, and started by watching some YouTube videos #nvim #tools

I watched these videos and used the NVIM_APPNAME environment variable to start a fresh nvim config without disturbing my current setup.

Podcasts #podcasts :

2024-10-06

A couple of chapters of Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry: Subramaniam, Arundhathi: 9780143464907: Amazon.com: Books

AI and globalisation are shaking up software developers’ world #ai #coding #tech

These shifts matter because software talent is greatly treasured. Salaries are high (see chart 2). The median wage of a developer in America sits in the top 5% of all occupations, meaning that coders can earn more than nuclear engineers. Technology giants need them to make their platforms more attractive; non-tech company bosses want ever more coders to aid the digitisation efforts that, they hope, will improve productivity and increase the appeal of their products to consumers. The future looks to be one with more, and more productive, coders—and cheaper software.

Workouts for the face are a growing business #face #skincare

The FaceGym studio in central London looks more like a hair salon than a fitness studio. Customers recline on chairs while staff pummel their faces with squishy balls. They use their knuckles to “warm up” skin and muscles; give it a “cardio” session to improve circulation; and then a deep-tissue massage. Customers, who spend at least £100 ($133), say they leave with less puffy cheeks and more defined jaw lines.

The booming market for facial workouts offers the hope of looking younger and more chiselled. A third of Britons who had a non-invasive facial treatment in 2023 had or were interested in having a face workout, says Mintel, a research firm. Their growing popularity may be a result of customers frowning at conventional facials, which involve lathering with lotions and invasive cosmetic procedures. Inge Theron, Facegym’s founder, got into facial workouts after a having “thread lift”, which uses temporary sutures, that went wrong.

The house-price supercycle is just getting going #housing #finance

Three factors will ensure that, for decades to come, the housing supercycle endures.: demography, allure of cities, inability to build infrastructure to bridge long distances

Over the coming years housing markets could face all sorts of slings and arrows, from swings in economic growth and interest rates to banking busts. But with the long-term effects of demography, urban economics and infrastructure aligning, consider a prediction made in 2017 by Messrs Miles and Sefton. It finds that “in many countries it is plausible that house prices could now persistently rise faster than incomes”. The world’s biggest asset class is likely to get ever bigger.

AI offers an intriguing new way to diagnose mental-health conditions #ai #therapy #mentalhealth

Traditional methods of diagnosing mental-health conditions require patients to speak directly to a psychiatrist. Sensible in theory, such assessments can, in practice, take months to schedule and ultimately lead to subjective diagnoses.

That is why scientists are experimenting with ways to automate this process. Artificial-intelligence (AI) tools trained to listen to patients have proved capable of detecting a range of mental-health conditions, from anxiety to depression, with accuracy rates exceeding conventional diagnostic methods.

By analysing the acoustic properties of speech, these AI models can identify markers of depression or anxiety that a patient might not even be aware of, let alone able to articulate. Though individual features like pitch, tone and rhythm each play a role, the true power of these models lies in their ability to discern patterns imperceptible to a psychiatrist’s ears.

Good analysis of the Malcolm Gladwell formula and it's appeal: The Malcolm Gladwell rule: how to succeed while annoying critics #books #pop-culture

Mr Gladwell is not a social scientist, nor does he claim to be. He is a journalist who popularises ideas from social science using what he has called “intellectual adventure stories…Their conclusions,” he concedes, “can seem simplified or idiosyncratic.” But stories are also, to use a Gladwellian phrase, sticky. The 10,000-hour rule is memorable; “work hard” is the forgettable line that every coach, teacher and parent has said a million times over.

His work may be formulaic, but so are spy novels, romantic comedies and pop songs. The secret to his success lies less in what he says than in how he says it. Mr Gladwell is a great storyteller and writes with a contagious sense of curiosity, with each revelation seeming as exciting to him as it is to readers. He may be an entertainer, but there are worse ways of being entertained than being prodded to think differently about the world.

The caveat here is that folks who read Malcolm Gladwell, once exposed to a different way of thinking about the world must expand their sources and do their own further research to know more about the topics he covers in his books. Unfortunately, few people do that and end up just spouting pithy quotes from his book without engaging deeper.

TIL - “K-healing”: Turn down the K-pop and pay attention to K-healing #books #mentalhealth #therapy

The country that gave the world popular bands such as BTS and hits such as “Parasite” and “Squid Game” is now exporting something slower-paced. The publication of “Marigold Mind Laundry” in America and Britain this month brings attention to the latest South Korean trend: the healing novel.

These books about burnout can be judged by their covers, which ooze wholesome peacefulness. Most depict an attractive building in a soothing colour, with nature artfully arranged outside. In the stories characters leave behind stress in search of something more meaningful. A high-flier sets up a bookshop; a TV writer quits her job and starts pottery classes. A connection to a new place brings connections to new people on their own quests for well-being. From cats to kimchi, ice-cream to coffee, “cosy healing elements” abound, says Clare Richards, translator of “The Healing Season of Pottery”, a popular novel in Korea that is set for international release this autumn.

First pull request for podscript from another contributor lfg!!! - feat(assemblyai): add assemblyai command by swayanshupanda · Pull Request #17 · deepakjois/podscript · GitHub

Played with OpenAI Canvas. Really liked the ergonomics of iterating on code, esp the inline edits. Looking forward to working more with it!

TIL VSCode Snippet Syntax: Snippets in Visual Studio Code #tools #vscode #snippets

2024-10-05

Life Admin Day

Bingewatched Nobody Wants This Nobody Wants This (TV Series 2024– ) - IMDb

2024-10-04

Podcasts #podcasts :

A couple of chapters of Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry: Subramaniam, Arundhathi: 9780143464907: Amazon.com: Books

The 'Biggest Man-Made Disaster' Ever? - by kyla scanlon

For the first time since 1977, the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) went on strike. ~45,000 dockworkers have started picketing at 36 US East and Gulf ports - from Houston to Miami to New Jersey. This comes at a very intense time with escalating geopolitical tensions, a presidential election in about a month, and a hurricane that devastated the lives of millions of people.

This strike represents about half of all US trade volumes. It puts $2 billion at risk per day in trade, and the economic loss could be as high as $5 billion a day. A strike that lasts only a week could take a month to clear. Some might say that’s mere pennies compared to the size of the US economy ($29T), but this is about more than just dollar signs.

Because strike is about more than just money- it’s about the democracy of automation.

Kyla Scanlon, as always with yet another great analysis - this time on the longshoremen strike.

Related, a piece in the Economist about the strikes: A ports strike shows the stranglehold one union has on trade

There are whispers that the two sides may not be too far apart on wages. The bigger issue is the union’s biggest fear: automation. The container liners do not want to concede too much on this.

Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? A call to test the prevalence inflation hypothesis - ScienceDirect #mentalhealth

In the past decade, there have been extensive efforts in the Western world to raise public awareness about mental health problems, with the goal of reducing or preventing these symptoms across the population. Despite these efforts, reported rates of mental health problems have increased in these countries over the same period. In this paper, we present the hypothesis that, paradoxically, awareness efforts are contributing to this reported increase in mental health problems. We term this the prevalence inflation hypothesis. First, we argue that mental health awareness efforts are leading to more accurate reporting of previously under-recognised symptoms, a beneficial outcome. Second, and more problematically, we propose that awareness efforts are leading some individuals to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems. We propose that this then leads some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms, because labelling distress as a mental health problem can affect an individual's self-concept and behaviour in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling. For example, interpreting low levels of anxiety as symptomatic of an anxiety disorder might lead to behavioural avoidance, which can further exacerbate anxiety symptoms. We propose that the increase in reported symptoms then drives further awareness efforts: the two processes influence each other in a cyclical, intensifying manner. We end by suggesting ways to test this hypothesis and argue that future awareness efforts need to mitigate the issues we present.

More about terminal colors than I ever wanted to know: Terminal colours are tricky #terminal #colors

The Perfect Girlfriend #ai #girlfriend

It’s easy to dismiss Miku and WaifuChat as a niche product for lonely, introverted men who are already somewhat on the fringes of society, disconnected from real-life relationships as it is. But that’s not looking at where the puck’s going: It’s not just Dungeons & Dragons–playing “incels” who are susceptible to the allure of AI-powered connections, at least not for long. Like a lot of other virtual-world trends, what starts out as a niche can quickly become mainstream. And by the way, those introverted “nerds” who spend loads of time alone on their devices? They’re a growing percentage of the population.

TIL source_env: Direnv's `source_env`, and how to manage project configuration — brandur.org #tools #direnv

# Common configuration for al developers, committed to Git.
source_env .envrc.local

# Custom env values go here.

Good overview of Python formatted output: A Guide to Modern Python String Formatting Tools – Real Python #python #strings #formatting

2024-10-03

Podcasts #podcasts:

This tweet made me watch Annayum Rasoolum today. The movie has its weak points (long rambly plot, for one!) but the excellent cinematography and a deeply humanistic portrayal of Kochi working class folk makes up for it. Loved Andrea Jeremiah's performance.

The latest Capital Gains newsletter has great career advice: Central Nodes #tech #career

That offsetting growth comes from two sources that sound like they're opposites but that actually have some deep similarities. One is that as people age, they accumulate more loose social ties, and those ties are relevant to what they do. Someone who's worked in investing for a long time will have a roster of friends whose opinions they respect on specific topics, like the mechanics of ETF construction, the best way for an American to tax-optimize investments in Europe, or how to handicap the odds when one of your portfolio companies faces a big lawsuit. In other fields, the specifics of expertise vary, but the general phenomenon holds—jobs have turnover, many jobs involve working with outside organizations, so over time the number of people who you vaguely know will keep on increasing.

But people also accumulate facts, and get better at pattern-matching. This is especially useful when an industry goes through a long cycle: in 2022, there were professional investors with a decade of tech investing experience who had literally never experienced a bear market that didn't resolve itself in a quarter or two. And, in fact, they'd experienced what looked like a literally apocalyptic bear market in 2020, and saw that the time gap between "the world is ending" and "stocks are now at a record high" was about five months. Someone a bit more experienced, who remembered either the long painful grind-down from 2000-2002, or that the low point for US equities during the financial crisis was months after the spectacular headlines—the market started moving up in 2009 when the flow of bad news slowed, not so much because there was good news.

Two actionable pieces of advice are about increasing the space of relevant connections:

  1. Do case studies a bit outside of your exact job function—if you're a software engineer, learn something about product management; if you're in equities, learn a bit about how credit people think. You won't necessarily apply this directly, but it will inform the work that you actually do (sometimes an equity investor looking at a deep value situation can save a lot of time by noticing that the company's bonds trade at 50 cents on the dollar—there's a chance that the bonds are a better risk-adjusted deal and a potential indicator that the company's problems are deeper than they look.)

  2. Similarly, try to have a network that skews a little bit away from what you work on. The more senior you get in your career, the less problems are framed as tasks. "Do X (which fixes Y)," becomes "Fix Y," with the specifics left as an exercise for the reader.

The Doing Deficit: How Deliberate Action Outperforms Passive Learning #learning

In truth, most of us don’t suffer from a knowledge deficit—we suffer from a doing deficit. We take online courses and read books but rarely apply what we learn. The hard part isn’t learning what to do; it’s doing what we already know. So how can we shift from passive thinking to active doing?

It's difficult to move from thinking to doing because:

Some actionable tips:

possibilities - by Elaine - manners & mystery #friendships #relationships #self-help

How do I build deeper friendships? What does “deeper” even mean? This question has been on my mind lately, and yet, I don’t subscribe to a platonic ideal of friendship. I don’t think friendships have to follow a certain path of progression to achieve a “standard of excellence.” We need all sorts of friends in our lives. The ones we catch up with infrequently over dinner and the ones who witness us week to week or day by day. The friends we only see at the climbing gym or dance studio or pickleball court and those we go on physical and spiritual journeys with. We need them all.

…

Many adults feel vaguely unfulfilled in their friendships but can’t put their finger on why. My theory is that it has something to do with expecting a lot from our romantic partners and very little from our friends, so we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. For example, if you wanted a friend to reach out to you more often, but it’s not a burning itch, you might let it pass. It bothers you from time to time, but for the most part, you ignore it. They’re probably busy, you tell yourself. On the other hand, if you wanted the person you’re dating to check in with you more, you’d probably agonize over why they’re not responding faster to your texts, unable to focus on anything else until you get an answer.

All relationships evolve from a series of back-and-forth requests ranging from low stakes (e.g. asking a friend to grab lunch) to extremely consequential (e.g. asking a friend to be the guardian of your child). Vulnerability is the beating heart of all relationships, and how comfortable you are being vulnerable with someone is a more accurate measure of closeness than time spent together.

Conviction and Knowledge

From: Tim Urban / waitbutwhy

/images/Pasted image 20241003232029.png

2024-10-02

Podcast #podcast:

Came across this substack post from somebody on X and found it super intriguing, esp the quote below: Good At Sex: Seduction Via Narrative Reinforcement (pt 7) #sex #masculinity

I view sex as a success for both of us, and thus seduction is a collaborative activity. We both want the same thing: to get around my annoying brain gatekeeper that got installed there by eons of evolution that doesn’t understand birth control and is trying to evaluate if you’re worthy of impregnating me. So please—use seduction techniques on me. Roleplay as an alpha male well enough to trick my vagina into believing that your cum will give me alpha sons.

Millennials Will Age Terribly - by Chris Jesu Lee #culture #millenial

My friend Trevor has a thing he often says, about how in today’s society, there are no elders, only olders. By that, he means there’s decreasing social worth placed on acquired skills and knowledge that comes with life experience—distinct from lived experience, which is something more of a status boost granted upon birth based on one’s identity. Therefore, as one ages, there is no upside, only downside. You just become a more out-of-touch, slower, paunchier, balder, and wrinklier version of a young person. There are no elders. Only old young people.

This passage above ☝🏽 reminded me of a concept explored in this post on Living Fossils that I posted on 2024-08-11, about how technology upends wisdom, and the faster technology changes, the less the elderly can keep up: Technology, Part III: A Fish Out of Water - by Josh Zlatkus.

But that also makes me wonder if that’s because we can’t or won’t move on. If the economic situation were as rosy as the 50s and 90s combined, how different would things be, really? There is a piece in the Cafe Hysteria Substack entitled “The Twenty-Something Teens” which looks at how 20-something women were eagerly identifying as teens (for instance, by overly identifying with the music of Olivia Rodrigo). My friends and I often talk about how the default identity that everyone tends to revert to online is that of the hysterical teen. Is that because online communication forces us to or because the freedom of the internet enables us to take our most preferred forms?

The latest Amplifier playlist: The Amplifier: 6 of 'The Greatest' Songs #music #playlist

I have long dreamed of compiling an Amplifier playlist of different songs with the same name. Watching Eilish perform “The Greatest,” probably the emotional apex of the whole show, I realized she was offering me the perfect opportunity. I started to think of the many other artists who have bestowed that imposing moniker on one of their tunes — Cat Power, Lana Del Rey and Kenny Rogers among them.

Added a github action workflow that can sync my repo from my Obsidian vault in Gdrive directly and commit the files. I can use this if I am away from my computer and updating my Obsidian vault on my mobile: debugjois.dev/.github/workflows/sync-build-deploy.yml at 9511119670d8b306bf7224a596579045542793f5 · deepakjois/debugjois.dev · GitHub

Downloaded a scientific calculator app for Android, thanks to the reco in this Reddit thread #apps #android: What is the best Android Calculator ?

Neat little app. I am using it to define formulas and plug the values in for my Math Academy quizzes: Numbat - scientific calculator #calculator #apps #math

100 XP on MathAcademy today #math #learning

Indian Physical Culture

I listened to this podcast on a walk today and it led me down a rabbithole that I wanted to write about: Podcast #1,026: 5,000 Years of Sweat — Lost Workout Wisdom From the History of Physical Culture | The Art of Manliness

The guest Conor Hefernan has written a book The History of Physical Culture: Heffernan, Conor: 9781957792224: Amazon.com: Books. In the podcast he is covering the history of physical culture broadly. The part that made me pay attention was when he started talking about Indian physical culture, especially Indian clubs that have been in use for a very long time historically. I searched online and found that the author has also written a more recent book specifically on Indian physical culture: Amazon.com: Indian Club Swinging and the Birth of Global Fitness: Mugdars, Masculinity and Marketing eBook : Heffernan, Conor: Kindle Store

The show notes contain a link to an article: Indian Club Exercises: Swing Your Way to Health | The Art of Manliness

And a video:

2024-10-01

Podcasts #podcasts :

This is such a cool project: Bop Spotter. Now all I need is an RSS feed or a playlist to capture all the songs. #music #playlist

I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below.

Heard of Shot Spotter? Microphones are installed across cities across the United States by police to detect gunshots, purported to not be very accurate. This is that, but for music.

This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time.

Started Math Academy. Took a while to get through the diagnostic test, but I guess it turned out okay. I have set myself an aggressive goal of finishing the Mathematics for Machine Learning module by December. #math

English Teacher S01E06 #tv

Using gdrive API in Go

To access a Google drive from the Go API SDK in unattended auth mode (i.e. without the OAuth dance), we need to do the following:

Added gdrive syncing support: Add sync-notes-drive subcommand · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@2ed1a1d · GitHub. Now I can update notes on my phone and sync them to gdrive.

Will soon add a github action that will use this subcommand to sync, update the website and commit the changes back to the repo. Planning to use this workflow for that: GitHub - stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action: Automatically commit and push changed files back to GitHub with this GitHub Action for the 80% use case.

2024-09-30

Podcasts #podcasts :

Industry S03E08 #tv

Old Man S02E04 #tv - kinda starting to get bored with this.

Neat idea to explicitly allowlist paths and extensions in a .gitignore file, to avoid slop like .DS_Store getting accidentally checked in because it wasn't there. #git

*

!src/
!*.rs
!*.toml
!*.lock

There is also the global gitignore file one could use: An example global gitignore file · GitHub

Update: There is now a blog post about this: https://rgbcu.be/blog/gitignore/

ADHD and Evolutionary Mismatch

This tweet is a pretty interesting take. However it's slightly offbase #adhd #evo-psych #evolution

I discovered the concept of evolutionary mismatch when I was trying to better understand my own struggles with ADHD. Even though this tweet-sized post makes some useful points, I would recommend anyone interested in exploring this further to go directly to this book, which is surprisingly accessible: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health: 9781316516560: Medicine & Health Science Books @ Amazon.com

For ADHD specifically, Chapter 5 titled Hunter Gatherers, Mismatch and Mental Disorder is especially useful.

The On Humans podcast interviewed Nikhil Chaudhary, which is where I discovered the concept of evolutionary mismatch and the whole field of Evolutionary Psychiatry: Mental Health Bonus | The Origins of ADHD, Anxiety, and Depression ~ Nikhil Chaudhary | On Humans Podcast ~ Science & Philosophy of What It Means To Be Human

There is also this video interview with Nikhil Chaudhary from the Evolving Psychiatry podcast:

Coffee badging: the new flexible work trend #work

Introducing ‘coffee badging’, a new workplace trend that sees people in flexible work environments coming into the office just for their morning coffee, getting a metaphorical ‘badge’ (think Girl Guides or Scouts), before heading off to complete their work for the day elsewhere. 

“Coffee badging is the practice of turning up at your office to show your face briefly before escaping back to your default option of working from home,” explains Liz Villani, founder of #BeYourselfAtWork and the #iAM global movement. “It’s presenteeism in the most fleeting of methods.”

The curse of the cool girl novelist - New Statesman #culture #books

A tad unfair, but it's a funny characterisation.

While the silly novels of the 19th century were “frothy” and “prosy”, their heroines inclined to “rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric”, cool girl novels are uniformly spare, and their depressed protagonists hardly speak at all. If Eliot’s silly novelists forged their prose style in rooms adorned with silk ribbon and taffeta trim, the cool girl novelists of today write from white Scandi-inspired rooms, their prose monochromatically dull.

The anti-heroine of these novels is usually a PhD student (or at least an MA), crucially distinguishing her from the common undergraduate masses. Her knowledge of intersectional theory has left her crippled by a near constant anxiety about power imbalances and inequality. She is also perpetually worried, to the point of exhaustion, nay burnout, about the plight of the individual under capitalism. Her eyes have an unmanned look about them, while her brain anxiously jumps from one devastating indictment of our society to the next. Words like ecocide and patriarchy thrum inside her skull.

2024-09-29

TIL: India’s clothing and textile industry is the third-largest sector by employment, after farming and construction. From: How India can compete in labour-intensive manufacturing #india #clothing #manufacturing

The self-help book began in the land of the stiff upper lip #self-improvement #self-help

The year 1859 was a big one for British publishing. Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was published, as was John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”. So too was a now largely forgotten book by an author named Samuel Smiles. It was boring, badly written and critically panned: one writer called books of its sort “the silliest ever known”. Naturally, readers loved it. It outsold Darwin, popularised a new term and in the process changed publishing for ever. It was called “Self-Help” and its aim was simple: to teach readers that “with Will one can do anything”. One could certainly sell more books: last year in Britain, according to figures from Nielsen BookData, 3% of all books sold were self-help.

For as long as there have been selves, they have needed help—and books have offered it. The Bible has been called the world’s first self-help book; Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” still pops up on self-help tables in bookshops. Advice such as Ephesians 4:32 (“Be kind to one another”) and Marcus’s 5.16 (“the soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts”) could sit happily in any modern manual. Other bits of counsel less so: Leviticus 18:7 (“Do not dishonour your father by having sexual relations with your mother”) may be good advice but feels less like a fridge magnet.

…

…If you believe Marcus Aurelius, that hardly matters. Wealth, ambition and achievement are, he wrote, all worthless: we are here for but the briefest moment before entering the “abyss of eternity”. There may be better ways to spend it than reading self-help books.

TIL the origins of the word "woke": After peak woke, what next?

ONE OF THE early uses of the word was by Lead Belly, who sang about the Scottsboro boys, nine young African-Americans in Scottsboro, Alabama, who were wrongly accused in 1931 of raping two white women. They got an unfair trial; all nine later had their convictions overturned or were pardoned. In a recording in 1938, Lead Belly warns black Americans travelling through Alabama to stay “woke”, lest they be accused of something similar. Even the most committed anti-woke warrior would grant that the man had a point.

P.S. - the article is also a good analysis of how woke culture has evolved since it's peak in 2021-22.

What to read about modern feminism #books #feminism

What the history of money tells you about crypto’s future #money #monetary-theory

The study of history may also disappoint crypto enthusiasts who wish to liberate money from government control. Monetary policy—the manipulation of money by the state—is almost as old as money itself. Even when coins were made out of gold or silver, governments fiddled with their weight and purity. The value of coins often departed from the preciousness of their materials. Indeed, governments sometimes diluted the silver content of smaller, more practical coins to prevent shortages.

I wish more crypto bros followed this line of logic, but they seem to be set on having their heads in the sand.

This article also talks about an interesting paper I found elsewhere: Understanding Money Using Historical Evidence

Debates about the nature and economic role of money are mostly informed by evidence from the 20th century, but money has existed for millennia. We argue that there are many lessons to be learned from monetary history that are relevant for current topics of policy relevance. The past acts as a source of evidence on how money works across different situations, helping to tease out features of money that do not depend on one time and place. A close reading of history also offers testing grounds for models of economic behavior and can thereby guide theories on how money is transmitted to the real economy.

Most electric-car batteries could soon be made by recycling old ones

Despite a slowdown in electric-vehicle (EV) sales in some countries, demand for batteries was up by around 40% globally last year, and seems likely to continue at a similar pace. Consequently, the world’s appetite for lithium, the vital ingredient in the lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that dominate the EV market, is expected to exceed 2.4m tonnes in 2030, more than twice its present level.

Where all this lithium will come from is a thorny question. Although 70% of the world’s reserves of lithium carbonate (from which it is mined) are in Argentina, Australia and Chile, processing it into a form suitable for use in batteries is a business currently dominated by China. As China also commands the processing of other important battery materials, including manganese, cobalt and nearly all battery-grade graphite, there is concern about the vulnerability of supply chains should China begin restricting supplies of certain raw materials, as it has done in the past. As a result, legislators and carmakers in Europe and North America have been trying to establish local supplies for batteries.

These efforts are about to be given a big boost. Recent breakthroughs in recycling, together with a spate of technological improvements, mean that within a decade or so most of the global demand for raw materials to build new batteries could be met by recycling old ones.

This article also has a nice deep dive in how battery chemistry and recycling processes work.

Silicon Valley sleep hackers turn to caffeine pills before bed #sleep

But are any of these supplements backed by legitimate science? A 2021 study by the B Sync folk published in Nature analyzed the effect of time-delayed nighttime caffeine on intentionally sleep-deprived men and found “improved behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and physical levels.”

Conceptually, these pills could be considered a super-extended “nappuccino,” said Cassie Hilditch, a researcher at the Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory at San Jose State University, referring to the trend of having a cup of coffee before a 20-minute catnap.

How Did Pop Culture Get So Gloomy? - by Ted Gioia

Popular culture always reflects the larger social reality. I’ll even go further, and claim that pop culture is our single best source of information about the psychological state of society. In some odd way, the revolution is televised—it emerges in songs, films, and other forms of entertainment long before the political leaders even notice.

### 2024-09-28

Hanging out at Maya Bazaar today: Namma Maya Bazaar

Podcasts #podcasts :

Some Go web dev notes by Julia Evans #go

Latest NYT Amplifier playlist which has a "musical clowning" theme: The Amplifier: Send in the Clowns #music #playlist

Does anyone have time to be a good friend anymore? | Dazed #friendship #loneliness

The article above ☝🏽 reminded me of the article in posted on 2024-09-19 about the "mainstreaming of loserdom". The same phenomena, but a different take here.

Earlier this month, after a particularly long week and amid a very unserious battle with a pesky head cold, I turned to a friend and asked the question: “Do you ever wish you could take two weeks of annual leave from seeing or socialising with anyone?” She said she thinks about it often. As a usually ‘social person’ (my mum had to pry my hands from the playground at the end of each school day), my longing to spend every spare moment lying vertically at home has been a relatively new but increasing occurrence. I cherish my deeply fulfilling friendships, and I strongly believe in the importance of nurturing my relationships even when I’m tired. Still, I often feel like I have no hours to spare after showing up for all of the week’s commitments. I realised I wasn’t craving space away from loved ones, but the ability to feel energised enough to relish in their company – more time to truly enjoy my friendships.

According to a new study led by Natalie Pennington of Colorado State University, my exhausted friend and I are not alone. Americans have an average of four or five friends (a number that has held steady since the 70s) but now only spend three hours per week with them, compared to six hours a decade ago. In other words, the growing loneliness epidemic is not about people having fewer friends (less than four per cent of respondents reported having no friends at all), it’s more just a byproduct of “having no time” to foster deeper connections.

Loving the bedside lamps in the Wirecutter review article: Our 9 Favorite Bedside Lamps of 2024 | Reviews by Wirecutter #lighting #lamps

fantasy - by Elaine - manners & mystery #relationships

This article is so relatable. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but some quotes below

A big part of my early thirties has been about learning which ladders I have no interest in climbing and accepting the shift in identity that comes with this realization. Next to the corporate ladder is the relationship ladder, with milestones like become exclusive, move in together, open a joint bank account, get married, have kids. The two enable each other, promising the vaunted security of liberal capitalism: your corporate job provides for your family, and your family compels you to work harder at your job so you can earn a bigger paycheck.

…

Attachment theory can be useful for understanding why people behave the way they do in intimate relationships, but over-reliance on it runs the risk of diagnosing any deviation from accepted convention as a problem. For example, if someone doesn’t want to get married, attachment theory might posit a fear of commitment as the culprit, a telltale sign of avoidant attachment. While this may be the case, it’s not the only possible explanation. If we accept, instead, the premise that there’s nothing wrong with not wanting to get married, then maybe the problem isn’t internal. Maybe the system we subscribe to isn’t serving our needs.

…

We all carry wounds, often unrecognized, from our past. No one is a clean slate. When triggered, we resort to coping mechanisms that once served us in childhood but have become maladaptive, even self-sabotaging. When this happens, it can feel like we’re being walloped by the past, caught in the same conflict over and over. But it does get easier. The patterns become more recognizable. You learn how to listen to your emotions. But I don’t think you ever reach a point where you feel like nothing could possibly go wrong. “Secure attachment” as an end goal is a fantasy. The work of being in a relationship with someone is to learn to love each other better as we change, and that’s an unending endeavor.

…

In choosing not to climb the relationship ladder, I’m also giving up the illusion of security that it promises and any claim I might have on another person’s heart. For the first time, I can truly say I’m at peace with it.

Quote from Ester Perel's book Mating in Captivity: #relationships

We seek a steady, reliable anchor in our partner. Yet at the same time we expect love to offer a transcendent experience that will allow us to soar beyond our ordinary lives. The challenge for modern couples lies in reconciling the need for what’s safe and predictable with the wish to pursue what’s exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.

Stumbled upon another amazing article from the same newsletter as the above post: spontaneity - by Elaine - manners & mystery #leisure

I want to spend my days writing, reading, painting, taking long walks, acting, and practicing piano. Basically, I want to live like an 18th century aristocrat. Unfortunately, I lack the means to do so. A life of leisure is a luxury few of us can afford, but that doesn’t mean we can’t spend our time in a way that’s more satisfying.

Taste is Eating Silicon Valley. - by Anu Atluru

The Dangerous Rise of “Therapy Speak” — and Why It’s Not Always Helpful | True You Journal #language #therapy

Sure, the rise in “therapy speak” has allowed many to understand their emotional and mental well-being in a new way. That’s great. But what happens when these words are misused? It not only weakens their impact, but can cause real confusion in those who are seeking genuine support and understanding. Maybe you’re not triggered, depressed or dysregulated at all.

Words discussed in the article:

2024-09-27

In India, Artisan Cheese Finds an Audience - Eater #india #cheese

How To Die Alone S01E08 #tv

Pachinko S01E06 #tv

Installed Drivesync on my Android phone and played around with updating my Obsidian vault from my phone. Next step is to sync this site directly from Google drive instead of from my local filesystem. That way I won't have to depend on having my computer around to update my daily log on the site.

2024-09-26

Podcasts: #podcasts

Fredric Jameson died this month: For the Marxist Literary Critic Fredric Jameson, Reading Was the Path to Revolution - The New York Times #literary-criticism #marxism #critical-theory

If you are a critic, professional or otherwise, the task before you is to make sense of an artifact of the human imagination — a poem, a painting, a dish of pasta, a Netflix docuseries, whatever. What does it mean? What is its value? To find the answers, it helps to know something about where it came from. Who made it? Under what conditions? For what purpose?

Those may not be specifically Marxist questions, but they are historical questions, and they begin a process of inquiry that may lead to Marxist conclusions. That love sonnet or fast-cooling plate of rigatoni is neither isolated nor static: It exists in relation to (for starters) other works of literature and gastronomy, and it changes over time. And so, of course, do you. Reading a Shakespeare sonnet in middle age is not the same as studying it in school, and what it means in the 21st century is not what it meant in the 17th. The noodles your grandmother served on Sunday are not the ones you will order at Olive Garden on Wednesday night.

Mapping that system and tracking its changes is the work of what Jameson calls “dialectical thought.” It’s a lot of work. To historicize your dinner you will need to take account of the voyages of Marco Polo, the European conquest of the tomato, the story of Italian immigrants in America and the rise of The New York Times cooking app. But of course there is, properly speaking, no pasta without antipasto; no primo piatto without a secondo; no dinner without dessert. Those matters will also need to be investigated. And we have not even raised the issue of gluten or the possibility of grated Parmesan. Or, more seriously, the unequal distribution of food in a consumer economy.

Abstract of the vulnerability paper linked above: The politics of vulnerability in the influencer economy

While workers of all stripes are compelled to embrace uncertainty under conditions of neoliberalism, ideologies of risk assume a particular guise in the platform economy, wherein laborers are exhorted to ‘put yourself out there’. Given the attendant harms associated with public visibility – especially for women and other marginalized groups – it seems crucial to explore platform-dependent laborers’ experiences of ‘putting themselves out there’. This article draws upon in-depth interviews with 23 social media influencers and content creators, sampled from across platforms, content niches and subjectivities. Our analysis revealed that vulnerability is a structuring concept in the influencer economy – one that operates at multiple, often overlapping levels. First, the commercial logic of authenticity casts personal vulnerability as a strategy for building community and accruing followers. But influencers’ individual disclosures were often entangled with their social identities (e.g., gender, race, sexuality, ability and body type), which rendered them socially vulnerable to targeted antagonism from audiences. Interviewees experienced a range of harms, from identity-based hate and harassment to concerted take-down campaigns. These personal and social vulnerabilities were compounded by the vulnerabilities of platform-dependent labor: not only did participants identify the failures of platforms to protect them, some shared a sense that these companies exacerbated harms through a commercial logic that incentivizes antagonism. After examining the emotional labor necessary to manage such platform vulnerabilities, we close by reiterating the unique precarity of platform labor, wherein participants lack the social and legal protections typically afforded to ‘vulnerable workers’.

2024-09-25

Slow Horses S04E04 #tv

Ava's latest newsletter post: the true shape of a thing - by Ava - bookbear express

I’ve been meditating on this James Hollis quote a lot lately: “An ability to tolerate the anxiety generated by ambiguity is what allows us to respect, engage, and grow from our repeated, daily encounters with the essential mysteries of life. But the payoff goes even further. Certainty begets stagnation, but ambiguity pulls us deeper into life. Unchallenged conviction begets rigidity, which begets regression; but ambiguity opens us to discovery, complexity, and therefore growth. The health of our culture, and the magnitude of our personal journeys, require that we learn to tolerate ambiguity, in service to a larger life.”

GitHub - zlwaterfield/scramble: Open-Source Grammarly Alternative #tools #llm

Some good points here that are universally applicable, although I do feel it simplifies things a bit too much. No mention of the impact of AI coding assistants and their impact: How to cope with technology FOMO – avdi.codes #tech #fomo

Looks like a useful tool to run side projects on a VPS. Also, it's written in Go: GitHub - MightyMoud/sidekick: Bare metal to production ready in mins; your own fly server on your VPS. #go #tools

GitHub - deckarep/golang-set: A simple, battle-tested and generic set type for the Go language. Trusted by Docker, 1Password, Ethereum and Hashicorp. #go #sets

There is no Black Friday - by Brett Scott

When encountering all the top-down Black Friday ads, I’m always reminded of Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation. It refers to the method of programming ideas into people’s minds by addressing them as if they already agree with what you’re saying. To understand this, let’s look at one of the purest examples of this phenomenon: Black Friday’s sister festival, Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday was written into existence by a press release from the National Retail Federation (the biggest retail trade association in the world), which said: ‘Cyber Monday Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year’.

All the subsequent commercial slogans, like ‘Cyber Monday is Here’, and ‘Are you ready for Cyber Monday?’, speak at you as if you’re already a person who agrees this thing is a reality. This generates a feeling of a movement, of a whole mass of people somewhere - presumably - who already know about this thing that you’re only catching onto now.

…

Before people say I’m being doomerist, I’m not saying that we don’t still have any organic, bottom-up culture anymore, or that platforms are unable to do anything good. We do, however, need to be vigilant about these incursions from above. We need to consider whether AI hype, Cyber Monday and any other supposedly ‘bottom-up’ upwelling might in fact just be pieces of cultural malware downloaded into our minds from the curators of a holographic mock-up of a global village. We visit, and find this spam projected into us - the stories that are supposedly important, the mood, the next new thing. Today ‘we’ all celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, but what will we be instructed to care about tomorrow?

2024-09-24

Podcasts #podcasts:

Industry S01E07 #tv

English Teacher S01E05 #tv

The NYT has a cute tribute to the classic Fjällräven Kånken backpack: The Classic Fjällräven Kånken Backpack Is Flawed. I Love It Anyway. | Reviews by Wirecutter #backpack #travel

Imperfect, yes. And yet: Day after day, week after week, year after year, I step out of the house, the city, the state, the country. I change time zones, I change jobs. I go shopping, I go sightseeing, I go to the park, I take a hike, I hop on a bike. I get stronger, I get weaker, I get older, my back disappoints me again. I have a mountain of bags to choose from—chic leather totes and crossbody bags flush with pockets and amply padded backpacks—but if I’m going out for more than two hours and up to a day, I don’t blink an eye. I choose this, my flawed little dream of a backpack.

This week's NYT Amplifier Playlist: “Willie, Waylon and the Boys: The Ultimate Outlaw Country Primer” track list #music #playlist

2024-09-23

Podcasts #podcasts:

Public Work #art #public #free

csvlens - Command line csv viewer

How streaming LLM APIs work | Simon Willison’s TILs

The following curl incantation runs a prompt through GPT-4o Mini and requests a streaming respones. The "stream_options": {"include_usage": true} bit requests that the final message in the stream include details of how many input and output tokens were charged while processing the prompt.

curl https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "model": "gpt-4o-mini",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Tell me a joke"}],
    "stream": true,
    "stream_options": {
      "include_usage": true
    }
  }' \
  --no-buffer

That --no-buffer option ensures curl outputs the stream to the console as it arrives.

Git: Cheap Task Tracking | matttproud.com (blog) #tools #git #todo

Neat trick to list all TODOs in a project

$ git tasks
content/posts/something.md:**TODO:** Resume here.
content/posts/plan-9-color-scheme.md:TODO: Consult Tufte's Envisioning Information.
...

Enabled by a script named git-tasks in PATH

#!/bin/sh
git grep -EI "(TODO|FIXME|HACK|OPTIMIZE|BUG|XXX):"

CleanupBuddy - I am always looking for an app like this when I try to clean my macbook screen. Glad this exists #tools #osx

Designing a Protocol to Get out of Slump Mode - Ness Labs - The phrase of the day is Slump Mode #productivity

termshot - Creates screenshots based on terminal command output. #tools

Opinion | Helicopter Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often - The New York Times #parenthood

I recently spoke with an anthropologist named Barry Hewlett who studies child-rearing in hunter-gatherer societies in Central Africa. He explained to me that children in those societies spend lots of time with their parents — they tag along throughout the day and often help with tasks like foraging — but they are rarely the main object of their parents’ attention. Sometimes bored, sometimes engaged, these kids spend much of their time observing adults doing adult things.

The mystery of Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s great disrupter - Great profile in the FT

There is an interesting connection between Son and the show I have been watching recently - Pachinko. Turns out Masa was a son Korean immigrants, and his dad ran a Pachinko parlor.

Masayoshi Son is a quintessential outsider. This may explain his bottomless risk appetite and his desire to prove himself, over and over again. He was born in 1957 to poverty-stricken second-generation Korean immigrants on the island of Kyushu in the western Japanese archipelago. The family home was the equivalent of a cowshed, one of dozens of makeshift dwellings on a plot of unregistered land near the railway station.

Years later, Son confessed to a friend that he suffered from a recurring dream, waking up to the stench of pig faeces in his nostrils. His friend told him it wasn’t a nightmare but a childhood memory. “We started at the bottom of society,” Son told me. “I didn’t even know what nationality I was.”

As Korean-Japanese, the Son family followed tradition and lived under a Japanese name, Yasumoto. (Son later persuaded the authorities to let him combine his Japanese first name and Korean surname — a notable breakthrough.) His father Mitsunori was a bootlegger at the age of 14, later diversifying into pig breeding, loan sharking and pachinko, a form of low-stakes gambling that offered a livelihood to Koreans shut out of the Japanese economy.

More than I want to know about fancy black hoodies (from the FT no less): Why every man needs a smart black hoodie #fashion #hoodies

Tshirts as well: The solution to finding the perfect T-shirt? Design it yourself #fashion #tshirts

Articles about o1 "Strawberry" models from OpenAI

Something New: On OpenAI's "Strawberry" and Reasoning

The new AI model, called o1-preview (why are the AI companies so bad at names?), lets the AI “think through” a problem before solving it. This lets it address very hard problems that require planning and iteration, like novel math or science questions. In fact, it can now beat human PhD experts in solving extremely hard physics problems.

To be clear, o1-preview doesn’t do everything better. It is not a better writer than GPT-4o, for example. But for tasks that require planning, the changes are quite large.

…

Using o1-preview means confronting a paradigm change in AI. Planning is a form of agency, where the AI arrives at conclusions about how to solve a problem on its own, without our help. You can see from the video above that the AI does so much thinking and heavy lifting, churning out complete results, that my role as a human partner feels diminished. It just does its thing and hands me an answer. Sure, I can sift through its pages of reasoning to spot mistakes, but I no longer feel as connected to the AI output, or that I am playing as large a role in shaping where the solution is going. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it is different.

OpenAI just unleashed an alien of extraordinary ability

The key to OpenAI’s breakthrough is a training technique called reinforcement learning, which helped the o1 models to reason in a more focused and precise way. In this article I’ll first briefly explain OpenAI’s approach, and then I’ll give some examples of difficult problems the o1 models can solve—and a few they still can’t.

The whole section on reinforcement learning is worth reading.

The Mr. Beast Memo is a Guide to the Gen Z Workforce

The Mr Beast memo is really important because it’s the first look at how a Gen Z leader operates. And he operates in the confines of a platforms - with all the same drive and passion of Bezos and Jobs, but is skewed toward metrics versus meaning. Controversy is swirling around him - but he has an algorithm to appease.

Jimp | Jimp - Jimp (JavaScript Image Manipulation Program) is a package that makes it easy to load and manipulate images in the browser and Node.js. It aims to run anywhere that JavaScript is supported. Also found out about WASM based libraries to encode/decode webp: Browser & Web Worker focussed wasm bundles derived from the Squoosh App.

Ghosting the Patriarchy: Female Empowerment and the Crisis of Masculinity #marriage #masculinity #feminism #patriarchy

Through my globally comparative research, I identify three key motivations for marriage: love, money or respect:

  1. RESPECT. In conservative communities, spinsters are eyed with suspicion and made to feel like failures. “When are you getting married?” pester a litany of Indian relatives. Chinese singles are derided as ‘leftover women’. In Catholic Ireland, unwed mothers were shamed and sentenced to forced labour in Magdalene laundries. In Mexico’s small towns, divorcees are still alienated. Fear of ostracism motivates widespread conformity.

  2. MONEY. Financial considerations are especially salient for women - if they earn less, lack government support, and expect to mother. Childcare can be deeply fulfilling, but also comes at a hit to wages, so it makes sense to get decent insurance (i.e. marriage). Mothers may then opt to stay put - tolerating abuse and infidelity. To quote a traditional saying in Mexico, “Darlo todo por los hijos” (Everything for the children).

  3. LOVE. If the society enjoys both economic growth and cultural liberalisation, then people only marry for one reason: LOVE! Soulmates join in matrimony to assure each other of monogamous commitment. Family and friends may join the festivities, but this is ultimately a celebration of love. He voluntarily sacrifices sexual variety because he cherishes a woman’s idiosyncratic personality. Companionate marriages are usually based on heartfelt appreciation, adoration and equality.

Reading the quote above ☝🏽, I feel like the concepts above nicely complement the analysis of the origins of marriage in the context of patriarchy in the Gendered Species book I read recently.

Young women are increasingly joining progressive universities, earning on par with male peers, and feeling free to pursue hedonistic pleasure. Singledom is no longer shamed or stigmatised. So why tolerate guys who shirk the washing up, send tedious texts, or otherwise fail to please..?

The age of female acquiescence is waning, supplanted by an era of female freedoms.

Importantly, this shift is zero-sum. Men are losing their patriarchal privileges, and it’s leaving a nasty aftertaste. Dating has become more competitive, breeding frustrations validated by cultural entrepreneurs on social media and podcasts.

Obviously, a lack of matches has major implications for fertility.

Great article on the connections between morality and evolutionary theory: Are Your Morals Too Good to Be True? #morality #evo-psych #evolution

2024-09-22

Podcasts: #podcasts

Speedran this DHH interview which is going around

Spending time at the hsr hacker house today: shippin' hours 02 by hsrhackerhouse · Luma

Notes while adding groq llama 3-1-70b support to podscript

The first thing I did at the shipping hours was to add support for llama-3.1-70b via Groq.

Add support for llama-3.1-70b via groq · deepakjois/podscript@d031623 · GitHub

The change itself was fairly trivial, because I had previously switched to langchaingo to call LLMs. But I did run into a few issues.

convert ytt CLI utility into a library as well

Make ytt a library and an executable · deepakjois/ytt@66f4e0a · GitHub

2024-09-21

How To Die Alone S01E05-06. S05 might have been the best episode so far. #tv

Installing Ubuntu 24.04 on a Dell Inspiron

I wanted to install Ubuntu on a Dell laptop that had a factory reset Windows installation. Ran into two issues even before the installation could begin

Anyway, after those steps I was able to get a clean Ubuntu installation on the laptop.

omakub

Omakub — An Omakase Developer Setup for Ubuntu 24.04 by DHH #tools

Omakub was seriously impressive. I installed it immediately after installing Ubuntu and it was a smooth process, and gave me a desktop which was nearly all the way there in terms of how I would have customised it. The Gnome tiling features have come a long way since I last used them, and I actually had a bit of FOMO.

I am gonna study the repo and copy some of the shell customizations and utlities for my Mac setup as well.

Parenthood and how our brain changes

The sweeping reorganisation of the brain in pregnancy, and why it matters #podcasts

Listening to the podcast above coincided with an NYT article I came across about "Dad brain": Opinion | Fatherhood Transforms Men’s Brains and Bodies - The New York Times

My research lab investigates how the brain changes when men become fathers, and we are discovering that fatherhood can be transformative for their brains and bodies. The brain and hormonal changes we observe in new dads tell us that nature intended men to participate in child rearing, because it equipped them with neurobiological architecture to do so. They, too, can show the fundamental instinct for nurturing that’s often attributed solely to mothers.

Not only that, but men’s involvement in fatherhood can have long-term benefits for their brain health — and for healthy societies. At a time when boys and men seem to be experiencing greater social isolation and declining occupational prospects, the role of father can provide a meaningful source of identity. But the transition to fatherhood can also be a time of vulnerability, which is why supporting fathers should be a priority for policymakers.

…

 Men also lost gray matter volume in new fatherhood, in some of the same regions that changed in women. But volume reductions for dads were less pronounced. The findings for mothers had been so striking that a machine-learning algorithm could tell mothers and nonmothers apart by their brain scans alone. The picture was noisier for fathers. My hunch is that men’s brain changes looked less clear-cut because fathers vary so much in their levels of engagement in parenting.

GitHub - charmbracelet/mods: AI on the command line #llm #tools - This is a great tool which is kinda similar to llm tool by Simon Willison, except it is written in Go and can be downloaded as a single binary.

Onam

Came across this interesting piece of trivia from Nayantara Menon Bagla on Twitter

The real significance of Onam: The Story of Maveli - Mavelinadu

It was a man named Sahodaran Ayyappan – a disciple of Narayana Guru, an Ezhava poet and anti-caste activist, who revived the story of Maveli in Kerala. He penned a version of the Onapaattu (song of Onam) that is a critique of the brahmanism that has burgeoned in Kerala since the 8th century CE. He calls for a return to the time of Mavelinadu, before the feudal Hindu system infiltrated the land and created notions of purity and pollution.

To people belonging to marginalised castes in Kerala, especially avarna people, Mahabali remains a symbol of a past that was untainted by the disease of brahmanism. There have been a number of attempts to sanitise this story of its revolutionary importance, and to appropriate Onam into a Hindu festival, even rebrand it as “Vamana Jayanti”. This is an insult to the cultural legacy of Maveli, and we must reclaim this story, passed on to us through generations of oral tradition. We assert that Maveli is a symbol of our historical struggle against caste, and an egalitarian shramana tradition that lingers in our memory.

A 25 yr old moves to a place in the UK where the median age is 48: I moved to a sleepy town with few people my age. My new friends – some elderly – have changed my life | Adele Zeynep Walton | The Guardian

Growing these intergenerational connections hasn’t only showed me the vast possibilities of the human experience, it has also allowed me to get out of the social media bubble of cyclical trends that is easy to get stuck in as a gen Z person. It has shown me there is more to life than the talking point of the news feed that week. As someone who has grown up online, I often make the mistake of replacing offline community with online interaction, but I’m learning that this can never be truly fulfilling.

Making friends with people of different ages has also shown me that while your 20s are scary, they’re not as serious as we often make them feel. There is always time to change our mind and start again. Learning that from my community of older friends, and knowing that they are learning from me, has helped me to get some relief from the idea that my life has been on the clock since I hit 25.