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21 January 2026

• 00:1000:10, 21 January 2026 Blog/2026-01-20/An Old Acquaintance (hist | edit) [1,573 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|I don't actually look less nerdy than this in real life I went by Julie's place of work today to see if a friend of hers, Ben M., could help me with some rails on a server of mine. He could and that was nice, but I stayed for lunch and while walking back to my table after grabbing my meal I spotted a guy who seemed familiar. I suppose it's not that much of a surprise that any two people in tech could end up interacting in a...")

17 January 2026

• 08:1308:13, 17 January 2026 Blog/2026-01-17/Citogenesis (hist | edit) [4,636 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|By the time you view the end result, you see only citations to other papers, making it appear like science Randall Munroe coined Citogenesis to reference the common tactic of putting something in Wikipedia, having reporters use it as a source un-cited, and then use that reporting to cite the Wikipedia article thereby closing the loop and making something seem real....")

16 January 2026

• 23:2923:29, 16 January 2026 Blog/2026-01-16/Otoscope (hist | edit) [1,584 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|Pretty simple device Recently, someone on the Internet mentioned a cheap otoscope. It's billed on [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KZ8TS7L?th=1 Amazon as a ear wax removal tool with a camera attached] but what it really works well as is a little camera with a handle that you can point places you can't get to: like under the sink or behind a desk. You can then take a look there and see what's going on behind the scenes that will require y...")

15 January 2026

• 08:1208:12, 15 January 2026 Blog/2026-01-15/Modeling Without Claude (hist | edit) [1,940 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "right My wife, Julie, and I both use our Bambu P1S for stuff around the house. Today she was telling me about a particular project she was working on: a set of wall-mounted blocks to attach the baby fence to. The fence we have is [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJBN95TL one of those unremarkable Amazon products from China from a brand that is a large number of consonants in a row] but it's meant to close in to...")

11 January 2026

• 06:3506:35, 11 January 2026 Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling With Claude (hist | edit) [5,699 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|The little magnets allow you to connect the different sections temporarily We've been playing quite a bit of [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2651/power-grid Power Grid] and one of the things that annoys me is when you have to pick up a power plant or move them around. I always have trouble picking one up from the second row and putting it in the first or picking up a plant because I can't put my fi...")

10 January 2026

• 01:2301:23, 10 January 2026 Shiri's Scissor (hist | edit) [860 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Shiri's Scissor is a fictional device that constructs maximally controversial statements. It is the primary macguffin in a (popular among rationalists and adjacents) science-fiction story on Slate Star Codex. In the story, scissor statements can cause otherwise aligned people to have strongly opposing views. The first example provided is that of some code quality statement where one half think that it is tautological and the other half think that it is absurd. Peop...")
• 01:1101:11, 10 January 2026 Blog/2026-01-10/The Impact of Fake Video is Overrated (hist | edit) [6,110 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "A common belief that people used to have is that people would use fake video to create outrage in the world. I was of the belief that a substantial enough amount of fake video would convince people to not trust online content and they would simply ignore it. However, neither of us was correct. In practice, there are enough human beings right now, with sufficient recording devices for us to obtain sufficient scissor incidents that intelligent people can take exactly the...")

6 January 2026

• 21:4621:46, 6 January 2026 Blog/2026-01-06/Is The Internet Dead? (hist | edit) [6,434 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "The Dead Internet theory claims that all Internet content is now posted by bots and so on in order to control the population and whatnot. I don't think the population is particularly controlled, but I do think that a lot of re-runs happen and I think that's structural. == Does This Happen? == Reddit is a pretty big social network and it's pretty public so you can pick out a top post on the front page and try to find its origin. All th...")

3 January 2026

• 23:3323:33, 3 January 2026 Blog/2026-01-03/Why I Like Joe Rogan (hist | edit) [2,637 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|Amusingly accurate I don't listen to too many podcasts, but a few times I've put the Joe Rogan Experience on while I'm driving down to the South Bay. The most typical two complaints about Joe Rogan are that he platforms terrible people and that he doesn't challenge them on their views. I'm somewhat philosophically opposed to the idea that people with reprehensible views should hav...")
• 23:0623:06, 3 January 2026 Blog/2026-01-03/Claude Management (hist | edit) [1,621 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|`gum` is pretty neat for terminal niceness. I use it in `concode` Recently, like many others I've found that Opus 4.5 is the most useful model for me. It's accurate, can talk about sensitive subjects intelligently, and its use in the Claude Code agent flow makes it far more usable than the web interface. The only problem with it is that one Claude is not...")

23 December 2025

• 22:1222:12, 23 December 2025 Slop slop (hist | edit) [2,018 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Slop slop is text that repetitively calls things slop. Because of the popularity of the word slop<ref name=mw/> to refer to AI generated text, it is now used to derisively refer to text online that one dislikes. Because human tastes differ greatly, almost every piece of work is likely to be declared 'slop' by someone at some point of time. The repetitive use of the word 'slop' to describe a text negatively rather than to use descriptive verbiage that clarifies why a...")

15 December 2025

• 05:5705:57, 15 December 2025 Blog/2025-12-11/LLMs Excel At Easy Verification Problems (hist | edit) [2,680 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "In Blog/2025-12-01/Grounding Your Agent I talked about how grounding your agent allows it to make better decisions. This is akin to the approach you would take if you were to debug code. The core device in debugging is the structure of the discovery loop. To reproduce the issue, we go through a loop that looks like: # Enter loop # If condition true, reduce example # Else terminate The end of this provides a wikipedia:Minimal Reproducible Example|Minimal Reproduc...")
• 05:4805:48, 15 December 2025 Tractables (hist | edit) [518 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Tractables are problems that are easy to solve. In Computer Science, this would be problems in P. Programmers and the like do use 'tractable' to describe non-programming straightforward-to-solve things, so this is not unusual. == See Also == Checkables Category:Concepts")
• 05:4705:47, 15 December 2025 Checkables (hist | edit) [378 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Checkables are things that are easy to verify. In Computer Science, the rigorous idea is the class of problems in NP. But normal English makes this wordy. Category:Concepts")

12 December 2025

• 20:5120:51, 12 December 2025 Setting Up A New Mac (hist | edit) [1,856 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Every now and then I set up a new Mac and I forget all the things I do. This is a list so that setup is fast. == Initial Environment == # [https://www.google.com/chrome/ Google Chrome] # [https://brew.sh/ Homebrew] == Shell == # [https://ghostty.org/docs/install/binary Ghostty] since it's a super-fast terminal emulator ##Ghostty Configuration # [https://ohmyz.sh/ oh-my-zsh] to make zsh enjoyable # [https://github.com/junegunn/fzf fzf] # [https://github.com/BurntS...")
• 07:2607:26, 12 December 2025 Blog/2025-12-12/Spaghettification (hist | edit) [4,245 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|Spaghetti - not happy to see this I ruined my hotend nozzle this week and had to replace it. == How To Destroy Your Bambu P1S Hotend == thumb|This is catastrophic Bambu Studio reloads all your filament settings when you load a <code>3mf</code> file. What I didn't notice was that it also changes what each slot on your AMS2 is mapped to. So, if your AMS2 had PETG in the A3 slot,...")

10 December 2025

• 06:5806:58, 10 December 2025 Blog/2025-12-10/Trespass (hist | edit) [3,174 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "The word "trespass" is interesting in what it has changed to. Like many other words in the law enforcement or legal space, "I will charge you with X-ing" or "I will eject you for Y" has become "I will X you" or "I will Y you". 'Trespass' is particularly interesting because it was already a transitive verb<ref name=also-noun/> which has caused me some confusion when reading other people's texts. Here's a typical use that someone might make. {{Reddit | url = https://...")

5 December 2025

• 08:4308:43, 5 December 2025 Blog/2025-12-04/Coders And Conversationalists Switch Places (hist | edit) [4,864 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|ChatGPT's safety circuits are on a hair trigger In previous iterations of mainstream chatbots, ChatGPT was the wild one you could get anything out of and Claude was the one that would keep hitting safety guardrails. When Claude Code came out, I started using Claude for code primarily and ChatGPT for discussion, but with the arrival of GPT-5.1 and Opus-4.5 the positions seem to have switched. <co...")

3 December 2025

• 21:0521:05, 3 December 2025 Blog/2025-12-03/Why Get Rich (hist | edit) [3,531 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "The point of getting rich is to be able to do more things. The people who I like and admire seem to all have this trait. For them, the amount of things you want to do is usually far larger than the things you have the resources to do. In fact, if I look among my friends, I suspect all of them have this same thing in mind. {{Tweet | name = p19k | username = peteralexbizjak | text = Genuine question: how do you plan on building revenue with your OS? If you answered this s...")

2 December 2025

• 09:1209:12, 2 December 2025 Blog/2025-12-01/Grounding Your Agent (hist | edit) [4,030 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|A trivial test bar Julie and I got a Bambu Studio recently and it's been fairly useful, providing us with a cover for some balcony lights, and a little holder for a toilet-reading book. These are models you can find online that other people have kindly provided. But one thing I've wanted is to be able to mount our Eufy E21 baby monitor at an angle so that it can look into the baby bed that is on the floor...")

29 November 2025

• 23:4423:44, 29 November 2025 Blog/2025-11-29/Things Do Last (hist | edit) [1,877 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Something that's common these days is for people to talk about how things don't last and so on and so forth, but in my experience things do last a really long time. I only recently gave away a 4790k-based system that's some 10 years old and it still works. It's just not particularly power-efficient or fast compared to a present day machine. But the thing that most struck me is this microfiber blanket I bought from Big Lots, a home goods store in North Carolina, when I m...")
• 18:4818:48, 29 November 2025 Blog/2025-11-28/A Better Class of Thief (hist | edit) [4,476 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|The brown Radpower Radster Trail I now have. I recently bought a Radpower Radster Trail since it was on sale for something like $850 post tax. That's not the cheapest thing in the world, but I did want an e-bike that I could use, be willing to lose, and that would accept a child's seat in the back at some future time. File:Line Drawing (Ikea-style) of Riese and Muller style cargo e-bike.webp|thumb|A typical R&M bike. It can a...")
• 08:5508:55, 29 November 2025 Motorcycle Theft (hist | edit) [8,766 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|A beautiful bike Many years ago, I used to ride a Ducati 695 - an elegant tool from a more civilized age. Sadly, after an unfortunate meeting with an Uber driver in a Toyota Prius the vehicle had to be retired<ref name=julie/>. But by the time of that incident, it was already a Mad Max / Borderlands looking vehicle. And the reason for that was that it was stolen. == How == I didn't have a garage back in th...")

22 November 2025

• 07:3907:39, 22 November 2025 Blog/2025-11-22/Wage Compression (hist | edit) [6,901 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb The incomes of the poor have increased faster since COVID-19 than any other group. This frequently leads to laments that everything has changed and gotten more expensive since COVID-19. If one were to listen to what most people like to say about poverty, this income increase should be accompanied by celebration. It's hard to pin down why it's not, but one can guess that it is because most people thought they were i...")
• 01:2201:22, 22 November 2025 Blog/2025-11-22/Smart Charities Tax Non-Believers (hist | edit) [3,793 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "A big difference between my personal belief system and that espoused by many online is that I think charities should accept the money of people they dislike. This allows them to trade their reputation (ultimately a substitutable and cheap quality) for money that can achieve the outcome they desire. A highly effectively altruist organization should attempt to transform even an opponent's money<ref name=wework/> into progress on the organization's aim assuming, of course,...")

20 November 2025

• 21:5421:54, 20 November 2025 Overmod (hist | edit) [6,964 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb [https://overmod.org Overmod] is a small program and directory that allows blocking and highlighting users on Hacker News. Other users can subscribe to my blocklist or create new ones if they so desire. == Why == I often find myself annoyed by people on social media who post repetitive comments that are mostly about one culture war item or another. For instance, comments like the following are not particularly interesting to...")

18 November 2025

• 23:4823:48, 18 November 2025 Geneva Plant Slag Dumping Youtube Comment (hist | edit) [3,072 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "This is a wonderful story from a guy posting on YouTube about his experience as a steelworker. I never manage to find it when I want to, so I'm mirroring it here: {{Quote |text=Great video clip. I had a job once at the US Steel Pipe Works, Geneva Plant, Utah where I took "slag temperatures" before they sprayed "devils liquor" sump water on it to cool it down. I wore wooden shoe "clogs" to protect my shoes from melting (the same kind coke oven operators wear when servici...")

14 November 2025

• 10:4410:44, 14 November 2025 Work Amplification (hist | edit) [3,424 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Work Amplification occurs when a request takes a much smaller effort to make than a response. This is a problem in interactions both in the software client/server and in a human context. Any low-effort ask that requires a high-effort response could be work amplification. == Software == In software, a host of techniques exist to reduce the scope of the problem: * caching - cut subsequent response costs at the price of freshness * debouncing - assist with accidental...")

13 November 2025

• 08:0708:07, 13 November 2025 Snoo Bassinet (hist | edit) [2,063 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|The Snoo is a godsend If there is any money you spend on baby sleep related things, spend it on [https://www.happiestbaby.com/products/snoo-smart-bassinet the Snoo]. We got ours from our friends Charles and Anne, and we gave it back to them in case they wanted a second child. Astra fit in it until she was 27 weeks old, but the last few weeks of those we stopped using the Snoo's rocking functionality. The pr...")
• 07:4407:44, 13 November 2025 UppaBaby Travel System (hist | edit) [6,034 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|The Uppababy Mesa car seat: the base is usually in the car and then you just lift the seat off and put it in the stroller and away you go thumb|The LATCH attachment points are usually hidden behind some seat protection stuff but you want your car seat's base to attach to those. The tethers at the back of the seat are really hard to use by contrast The term for a car...")

3 November 2025

• 07:4407:44, 3 November 2025 Friedman's Thermostat (hist | edit) [12,131 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Friedman's Thermostat is a control mechanism that attempts to keep an output constant but is mistakenly believed to be causing the external variation that it is controlling for. A slightly more formal description might help. {{Quote |text=Given a system with a feedback controller that adjusts the degree of an intervention C to maintain a target output O despite external variation V, we observe: * C and V are strongly negatively correlated. * C and O are uncorrela...")

1 November 2025

• 06:1906:19, 1 November 2025 Weddings At San Francisco City Hall (hist | edit) [6,686 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Roshan and Julie at City Hall just before getting wed.webp}}|thumb|Sari all the way from India, my shirt from Chinatown]] Julie Yu Kang and I did what many people do: we had a quick wedding at City Hall in San Francisco administered by a Deputy Marriage Commissioner and then we had a bigger wedding ceremony a year later after we'd planned everything. We knew we wanted to get married and have kids pretty quickly, but we still hadn't worked out a...")

30 October 2025

• 23:0223:02, 30 October 2025 Ghostty Configuration (hist | edit) [2,254 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "I got recently annoyed with iTerm2 encountering random lag and using infinite CPU slowing everything down. It happened at a moment of personal exasperation so I decided to try out [https://ghostty.org/ Ghostty] since I've tried [https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty alacritty] before and it was too minimal for me. I know some people prefer managing their panes in [https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki tmux] but I prefer having my terminal emulator provide windowing features...")

25 October 2025

• 08:1808:18, 25 October 2025 Blog/2025-10-24/Bad Apples (hist | edit) [2,399 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb There's a common adage about bad apples that goes like: {{Quote |text=One bad apple spoils the barrel }} The theory is, of course, that a rotting apple release ethylene gas<ref name=ethylene/>, they get infested with bacteria and fungi that spread, and they just slime the rest of the apples which then proceed through the same stages. And the expression is used to illustrate how the...")

24 October 2025

• 00:4200:42, 24 October 2025 Mr. Jiu's (hist | edit) [4,077 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Julie and Roshan in Chinatown after dinner at Mr. Jiu's.webp|frame|center|A quiet and clean Chinatown!}}]] We went to [https://www.misterjius.com/ Mr. Jiu's], a Michelin-starred Chinese place, for dinner for Julie's birthday. Some of the food was great, and some of it was (in my opinion) only all right, though the service and ambiance were both lovely. We chose the prix fixe menu with the roast duck and pluot sauce. I've been working on losing wei...")