New pages
From Rest of What I Know
- 21:28, 16 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-16/Superheap (hist | edit) [5,001 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Superheap Bloomberg RSS Feed Example.png}}|thumb|Overall, not too bad]]When friends got on Substack, one of the things that annoyed me is that it doesn't have an RSS feed. This is completely untrue. It does have an RSS feed, it's just that my friend [https://porterwestling.substack.com/ Porter] had chosen the Twitter-like version of Substack instead. But I didn't realize this and decided that I'd prefer if I received this stuff as an RSS feed anywa...")
- 21:47, 15 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-15/Spatial-Textual Memory (hist | edit) [6,952 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/11/sweden-says-back-to-basics-schooling-works-on-paper A recent bit of news has Sweden switch off computers for studying and homework to paper]. The usual criticism of computer homework and studying is: * Eye-strain from backlit displays * Trouble with focusing on a general-purpose device with recreation tools built-in These are legitimate concerns, for sure, but one thing that I've found interesting in my current use of e-re...")
- 22:47, 14 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-14/Hives 2.0 (hist | edit) [3,521 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Roshan With Hives Again.jpg}}|thumb|left|Older, heavier, hivier]] Shreyas and Karen had their final wedding on Jan 13. I was there, and apparently so was some fateful dish that I would consume. Interestingly, the last time I got hives was exactly 6 months ago to the day, and on that occasion it was the week before ''my'' wedding. In any case, since this time I don't have any strict constraints on my life, I decided to exp...")
- 21:22, 9 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-09/California Wildfires (hist | edit) [539 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Los Angeles from the Hollywood Hills during the Jan 2025 Sunset Fire.png}}|frame|center]] Yesterday, my cousin sent me this photo of the hellish view you get of LA during these latest wildfires. They've had to evacuate South out of the Hollywood Hills because of the fires.")
- 20:30, 9 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-08/Chinatown Block Party (hist | edit) [759 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Chinatown Night Market - Jan 2025 - Zhu.jpg}}|thumb|frame]] San Francisco has been organizing these street market events recently. We've been to a couple of them, most recently First Thursdays on 2nd Street, and now this the Chinatown Night Market on Wednesday, Jan 8. First Thursdays tend to be quite expensive, with food costing between $15 and $25, and sometimes more. But Chinatown delivered as usual with almost everything costing $5. File:Chin...")
- 20:11, 9 January 2025 Suffering Theology (hist | edit) [542 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Suffering Theology is the belief that increased suffering comes with increased future reward. It is a cargo cult converse of "No pain, no gain". It is likely adaptive under some circumstances since people with this belief are likely to persevere through temporary adversity to reach prosperity. It is likely maladaptive in the form where people wikipedia:Goodhart's Law|intentionally inflict suffering on themselv...")
- 19:51, 6 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-06/Athene OS (hist | edit) [4,979 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Athene-os-indigo.jpg}}|thumb|left]] Back in the day, I was the kind of teen common in the late '90s / early millennium who installed a bunch of Linux distros and looked at all the configuration options in all the menus available there. Apart from the usual drama of deleting one's parents' presentations without backups and so on, I did manage to try a bunch of fun things which history has now forgotten. Back in the day there was this operating syst...")
- 05:35, 6 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-05/Mahjong Spreadsheets (hist | edit) [1,848 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot - Mahjong Scoring Sheet.png}}|thumb|As you can see, I'm not doing too well on this particular game. It's still only East Wind prevalent, though. Lots of time. Lots of time.]] My friends and I play Mahjong quite often. We use [http://mahjong.wikidot.com/rules:chinese-official-scoring these rules for scoring] but the annoying part with using chips is that you always have to do the math and pass them around and avoid knocking them and stuf...") originally created as "Blog/2024-01-05/Mahjong Spreadsheets"
- 22:18, 4 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-04/Cheerful Is Spooky (hist | edit) [3,180 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "A fun thing about how cultures evolve is that as you age, you get to see the changes happen, and sometimes you can tie it to specific artistic choices that your own generation made. It sometimes makes me think about our own stereotypes that are perhaps accidental results of the previous generation attempting subversion. {{Tweet | name = erm | username = plumjae | text = I was in an Uber share today and a song came on that had the most sinister vibes ever and all three o...")
- 21:56, 4 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-04/Emperor Norton Not Forgotten (hist | edit) [659 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Emperor Norton Reborn.png}}|thumb|Pretty good impression]]I dropped Julie off at lunch with her girlfriends and was driving to the dry cleaner's when I spotted this chap leading a tour group. I'm a huge fan of people who're doing bits, so I went up and said hello and it turns out he's reprising the role of Emperor Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. He's got these tour groups going on around th...")
- 23:48, 3 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-03/First Past The Post (hist | edit) [1,935 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "One of the interesting thing about state proportional representation systems with first-past-the-post is that you ideally want to get as many people as you can into your state, ''including members of opposition parties''. That is, if Californian Democrats had a ruthless pursuit of power they would want as many Republicans as possible to come to the state. This is because California's number of seats in the House of Representatives is determined by its population. Simulta...")
- 01:34, 3 January 2025 Blog/2025-01-02/Politics in the New Year (hist | edit) [2,240 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "{{Tweet | name = Bernie Sanders | username = sensanders | text = Elon Musk is wrong. The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire “the best and the brightest,” but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make. | date = Jan 2, 2025 | ID = 1874918027982172626 }} When I talked about politics before the election...")
- 21:44, 2 January 2025 LLM Conversational Level (hist | edit) [2,318 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "The LLM Conversational Level (LCL) of a piece of text is the size of the smallest general-purpose LLM that can correctly decode the writer's intention in the text, given that mainstream larger LLMs also concur in the meaning. Texts where the writer's intention has changed or where the writer's intention cannot be decoded by any LLM have an undefined LCL. Conversationally, the LCL of an individual is bounded above by the LCL of a text that that individual cannot deco...")
- 18:42, 1 January 2025 Blog/2024-12-31/End of the Year (hist | edit) [17,286 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "This has been quite the year for us. == January == Julie and I spent New Year's Day last year in Torres Del Paine, hiking up to Mirado Britanico and then to Refugio Paine Grande - the mountain lodge. thumb|center|I rushed Julie to this point saying that we needed to get there before the trail closed. Fact: there was no one to close it We use to live just off 4th Street in San Francisco's SOMA district. The building we w...")
- 20:54, 23 December 2024 Vande Bharat (hist | edit) [7,777 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Recently, I visited India for my friend Shreyas's wedding in Bangalore. And then I wanted to go visit my parents in Chennai, which was a good opportunity to take India's newest superfast train: Vande Bharat. thumb|center I took the Mysore-Chennai route from Bangalore to Chennai and it was quite pleasant, but I'd gotten it into my head that this was going to be like East Asian or British trains and it's not that. I have a po...")
- 21:13, 22 December 2024 Blog/2024-12-22/Class Action Settlements (hist | edit) [1,465 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|This is the best way to receive money - electronic, immediately usable Because my data is out there on the Internet everywhere, I often get notification of class action settlements. It's usually pretty easy to check if they're real and then submit one's information. The easiest ones arrive as Venmo money. The funny thing about the whole thing is that I even do this stuff because it's never a lot of money. Still, it...")
- 19:04, 21 December 2024 Anti Pigeonhole Principle (hist | edit) [870 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "The Anti Pigeonhole Principle is that if there are <math>n \in \mathbb{N}</math> pigeons and <math>m \in \mathbb{M}</math> pigeonholes such that <math>n < m</math> then there must be some pigeonholes that are empty. For sets <math>A</math> and <math>B</math> and function <math>f: A \to B</math> with <math>|A| = n ; |B| = m</math> where <math>n < m</math>, then <math>\exists b \in B</math> such that <math>|f^{-1}({b})| = 0</math>. Also, see wikipedia:Pigeonhole pr...")
- 00:52, 28 November 2024 Blog/2024-11-27/LA Koreatown (hist | edit) [2,867 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Jun Won Dak - Indoors.jpg}}|thumb|Charming little place with 4 seats]] We're in Hollywood, Los Angeles for Thanksgiving with my cousin and decided to go to Koreatown for lunch since there isn't anything like this up in San Francisco. We walked about a little and ended up at this place Jun Won Dak, which turned out to be a small 4-person version of a bigger restaurant called Jun Won that had to close due to pandemic restrictions preventing patrons...")
- 21:46, 26 November 2024 Benevolent Terrorist (hist | edit) [4,700 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Many societies cannot do things because they are trying to preserve what came before. For anyone who has played video games or run a business, they know that things often have not just a capital cost but also an operational cost. Societies are the same: over time they accumulate many things that add operational costs. Often, these things cannot be removed despite their costs because doing so is not politically palatable. A Benevolent Terrorist serves such societies...")
- 04:18, 24 November 2024 Samsung S90C (hist | edit) [599 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "== Trouble Staying Logged In == Samsung TVs have a problem with email addresses that have a `+` sign in them. If you do that with your Samsung account then you won't be able to stay logged into your streaming service logins since your Samsung account is how your TV stores the login state (I know, crazy). This also makes Airplay unusable for things like streaming Youtube since the way to use accounts is to keep hitting the button over and over again until it suddenly lo...")
- 00:25, 21 November 2024 Blog/2024-11-20/What Stopped Me (hist | edit) [3,110 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "People often say that something or someone forced them to stop doing things. In tech, this is often because someone made fun of them not knowing something and so on and so forth. For me, I've never quit doing something because of that. I have sewn, fenced, shot a bow and arrow, rode a motorcycle, skated, wrote code, danced, and so on and loads of these things involve looking foolish to many people. And to be honest, I'd always wonder why someone "quit programming because...")
- 01:03, 19 November 2024 Legibility Is Immortality (hist | edit) [2,389 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "There are things that form the backbone of anglophone historical knowledge: the World Wars (particularly the Western Front), the Roman Empire, Jesus Christ, the Pyramids. The primary thing which these things share is English language legibility. Important works have been translated into or written in English and rendered into an accessible style. This alone determines whether they're remembered forever, or consigned to some dedicated historians record. Perhaps the most...")
- 17:12, 16 November 2024 IVF (hist | edit) [14,235 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (IVF initial draft)
- 23:44, 15 November 2024 Gene Mutations (hist | edit) [6,785 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Both Julie and I are carriers of a gene mutation in the GJB-2 gene. This makes it quite likely that our children will have what is called non-syndromic hearing loss, i.e. they will be born deaf or hard of hearing without other changes to the body. == GJB-2 Gene Problems == The Gap Junction<ref name="gap-junction" />Protein Beta-2 (GJB-2) gene codes for<ref name="dna-basics"/> the protein Connexin-26. As you can imagine, a protein can break in many ways. One common way...")
- 00:17, 15 November 2024 Blog/2024-11-14/GM Plants (hist | edit) [2,426 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:USDA Chart of Indian Cotton Production (1990-2015).png}}|thumb|India got Bt Cotton in 2002]]One of the things that amazed me when I moved to America is the anti-GMO movement here. I was born in 1988 so I was about 14 years old when Bt Cotton was introduced to India. About this time I was obsessed with reading the news (I'd finish the newspaper every day in the morning) and the back page of one of the supplements to The Hindu...")
- 22:34, 13 November 2024 Pregnancy (hist | edit) [19,531 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Initial post)
- 19:56, 13 November 2024 Purity Is Sin (hist | edit) [1,147 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Reality has fractal complexity, descending into depths as ones tools to inspect it increase in resolution. Models are facsimiles of reality that are useful to predict or describe this complexity. Their usefulness therefore comes from their simplicity. But necessarily, this means that they elide the minor harmonics. This, in turn, means that strict adherence to the model is pointless since you only use the model to attempt to run a simulation further...")
- 18:23, 13 November 2024 Observation Dharma (hist | edit) [935 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Observation Dharma is the idea of one's purpose being to act as a lens and recorder into existence through experiencing it. Even failure at one's proximate objectives meet observation dharma, though ideally such failures are visible for intelligent beings to search the universe. At least one kind of participant in Multicellular Mankind has observation dharma explicitly: explorers. But all actions that one can take could be this since all actions explore the spac...")
- 03:42, 11 November 2024 Blog/2024-11-10/A Stranger In The Night (hist | edit) [3,872 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "We had quite a bit of fun this Saturday. We played an escape room at the Palace of Fine Arts, stuffed ourselves on a pizza tasting menu at Tony's, and then played some board games. thumb|The Caltrain station, mostly normal, and the scene of the night's unexpected entertainment == The Attraction == [https://palace-games.com/the-attraction/ The Attraction] is one of the escape rooms at the Palace Games in the...")
- 18:29, 8 November 2024 Blog/2024-11-08/Brown M&Ms (hist | edit) [8,516 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Van Halen famously had a rider in their 53-page contract that said: {{Blockquote | quote=M&Ms (Warning: Absolutely no brown ones) | source=Van Halen event rider<ref name="mm-truth"> {{Cite web |url=https://www.metaltalk.net/chris-dale-myth-busting-the-van-halen-brown-mm-story.php |title=Myth-busting the Van Halen M&M story |last=Dale |first=Chris |date=Oct 1, 2020 |website=Metal Talk |access-date=Nov 8, 2024 }} </ref> }} The idea, supposedly, is that adherence...")
- 20:22, 4 November 2024 Multigenerational Optimization (hist | edit) [1,437 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Multigenerational Optimization is the idea of aiming for success in your family ''across'' generations. It is in contrast to the idea of being the solo protagonist, a view that is commonly espoused today: {{Quote box | quote = I can relate. 41F, PhD, academic, breadwinner. Great with kids but opted out cuz I want to remain protagonist of my own life. The logic in your post sounds a lot like mine. | author = Eldiadia | source = /r/fireuk<ref name="reddit_source">[...")
- 19:44, 4 November 2024 Blog/2024-11-04/Victory in Death (hist | edit) [1,440 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "I'm a near-religious believer in Multicellular Mankind. Looking back at my childhood, I think this was (and is) more innate or early axiomatic than it is a reasoned position. Like many children I once believed that ghosts or other such beings inhabited the dark. And I've definitely hit the lights and jumped into bed to dodge them (the bed being safe, especially under the covers, of course). The part that relates to this, though, is that at some point I'd decided tha...")
- 06:09, 4 November 2024 Mac OS Troubleshooting (hist | edit) [914 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "I use MacOS primarily to develop and do things on (though my desktops are Linux/Windows dual boots). Because of the way I use MacOS sometimes I end up with things that don't happen to many other people. == USB Accessory Popup Disappears == File:Screenshot MacOS Allow USB Accessory to Connect.png|thumb|center|alt=A screenshot of the USB Accessory "Allow to Connect" box from MacOS.|This thing will sometimes pop up and immediately disappear. That's because of multiple u...")
- 05:15, 4 November 2024 Nexgrill 720-1012 3 Burner Gas Grill (hist | edit) [1,334 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|The order status page is kingI have one of these since it was small enough to fit on our apartment fire escape at one of our old places and comfortably fits on our balcony now. Eventually I had to replace the grates and it wasn't obvious what to do since Home Depot no longer lists the product. Fortunately, they do list it in some places. If you've ordered through Home Depot, you can still check your order st...")
- 00:52, 4 November 2024 Blog/2024-11-03/Unconvincing Threats (hist | edit) [3,992 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "A common threat email I receive these days purports to claim that it has secret videos of me watching things I shouldn't be watching: porn. Here's the exact text I've gotten from the spammer. It's obviously bullshit, but just in case it isn't clear to anyone else who Googles the text and wants information: I have ignored these requests for months now with nothing having happened. {{Blockquote |text=Roshan George, '''I know that calling $phone_number or visiting $insert...")
- 00:45, 4 November 2024 TP-Link Kasa Smart Switches (hist | edit) [1,338 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "I have the TP-Link Kasa HS103 Smart Switches and they're inexpensive ways of making many things turn on when one button is pressed or when you want to verbally have things come on in the home. We've got a rental, so modifications aren't too easy so we use this stuff to make it more convenient. == Unable to Connect to Device WiFi == When I first set up the device, I couldn't get my iPhone to connect to the WiFi network the smart switch starts after being turned on. But...")
- 18:34, 29 October 2024 Jamboard (hist | edit) [2,608 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|The stand is surprisingly stable for how close the legs are. We had an old Jamboard from the Twitter liquidation. You can get them for about $300 a pop these days because Google has EOL'd them and they're kind of useless. They do work as TVs but the default stand is awful for this since it takes a lot of space, and the software on the thing isn't very good for this. == Stand == We bought [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CZ7X2W4B?...")
- 20:09, 28 October 2024 High Engagement Bullshit Techniques (hist | edit) [2,052 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "On social media websites like Twitter, people practice high-engagement bullshittery in pursuit of virality. Some of these techniques are quite interesting. I usually block people when I encounter them, but sometimes I fall for them and try to reply before I realize what they're doing. == Specialization of General Categories == This is where someone takes a line that has a universal category reference and then specializes it to an e...")
- 19:49, 28 October 2024 Bookmarklets (hist | edit) [1,237 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Bookmarklets in general are a bit out of fashion, but they're still quite useful. I'll add ones I like here. == Convert a Tweet into Wikitext Template == <syntaxhighlight lang=js> javascript:void(function(){const e=document.querySelector('article[tabindex="-1"]');if(!e){console.log('No tweet found on this page');return}const t=e.querySelector('[data-testid="User-Name"]'),n=t.getElementsByTagName('span'),a=n[0]?.textContent||%27%27,r=t.querySelector(%27div[dir="ltr"]%27...")
- 01:14, 24 October 2024 Multicellular Mankind (hist | edit) [5,612 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Multicellular Mankind is the notion that individual human beings are like cells in the human body. Each acts locally with little or no conception of the whole. The whole itself is a being, viewed at various levels of organization: family, nation, religion, or ethnicity. {{Tweet | username = arjie | name = Roshan George | date = Oct 16, 2024 | text = Sure, in the same sense that eating sweet stuff feels good. Humanity as an organism does better when some fraction...")
- 19:08, 23 October 2024 Outrage is the Universal Parasite (hist | edit) [3,075 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "There are some people in the world who you must conclude are smart: e.g. Elon Musk, who is the greatest industrialist of our generation; or Bill Ackman, who is a billionaire hedge fund manager. But no matter how smart someone is, one thing always makes them stupid. Here's an example of a Bill Ackman tweet that exhibits the kind of gullibility most held by a first time tourist to NYC. The cab drivers there are notorious scamsters, and while it might benefit one to exagge...")
- 17:19, 23 October 2024 Blog/2024-10-23/Some Say The World Will End In Fire (hist | edit) [3,069 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "{{Quote box |quote=Some say the world will end in fire,<br /> Some say in ice.<br /> From what I’ve tasted of desire<br /> I hold with those who favor fire.<br /> But if it had to perish twice,<br /> I think I know enough of hate<br /> To say that for destruction ice<br /> Is also great<br /> And would suffice. |author=Robert Frost |title=Fire and Ice }} A common fear many people have is the end of the world. I think most people agree with Robert Frost in that destruct...")
- 15:29, 23 October 2024 Gradients Dominate Points (hist | edit) [846 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Very few things allow precise aim, and almost all of those things are engineering problems. Things that are coordination-dominated are sloppy and imprecise and consequently, you can only apply thrust towards a target or away from the target, with little control over the minimum thrust. You'll see this in many places: * Companies are either growing or shrinking - they don't stay constant * Nations are either improving or failing - the latter especially so for those who...")
- 22:49, 22 October 2024 Hypocrisy is the Worst Crime (hist | edit) [1,447 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "A frequent thing you'll hear from people is that they respect someone that does what they say, even if it's not what they want done. The person who says one thing and does another is beloved to few, unless they're explicitly in on the con. Often this means that people are purists about subjects and will subscribe to the strongest interpretation of The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. Now, wikipedia:Homo economicus|a ra...")
- 20:11, 22 October 2024 Beware The Cuckoo (hist | edit) [4,945 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|One of these is not like the others, but good enough to blend in Security professionals are inherently aware that every backdoor in software intended for "the good guys" becomes a backdoor for "the bad guys". This is part of why Hypocrisy is the Worst Crime. == Why Cuckoos Can Exist == For most interactions we need to apply heuristics to determine what is okay and what is not okay. And depending on the co...")
