New pages

5 December 2025

• 08:4308:43, 5 December 2025 Blog/2025-12-04/Coders And Conversationalists Switch Places (hist | edit) [4,761 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) [3,279 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) [6,042 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...")

21 October 2025

• 00:1800:18, 21 October 2025 Blog/2025-10-20/Against Note Taking (hist | edit) [5,091 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "A recent Hacker News thread was about Andrej Karpathy's advice for success at Stanford. It's got a bunch of advice but what I was particularly struck by is the absence of one piece of advice that is commonly given to students: to take notes in lectures. I had to share my usual position on this. {{HackerNews | url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640454 | author = arjie | title = Doing well...")

17 October 2025

• 08:4608:46, 17 October 2025 Blog/2025-10-17/Custom GPTs (hist | edit) [6,803 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|Complete with unique logo I was a bit sceptical about OpenAI's [https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/ Custom GPTs] when they launched but that's because I did not know that they have 'Actions'. One of the things that Julie has wanted for a while is an LLM-assisted note taker. She wants to take short hand notes while in meetings and then have an LLM organize these, put a summary at the top, and note action items and...")

16 October 2025

• 22:2822:28, 16 October 2025 Getting a Social Security Card (hist | edit) [11,190 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|I have been renamed, but my daughter has a card now. Fair trade. Our daughter, Astra Meridian, has a last name that's different from either mine or my wife. This introduces certain complexities to life, many of which we were aware of. One that I wasn't aware of is that Social Security cards are not always delivered to mailboxes. There appears to be some sort of anti-fraud device at the USPS that people report that prev...")

12 October 2025

• 18:5118:51, 12 October 2025 Blog/2025-10-12/Word Magic (hist | edit) [11,664 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "I've been reading [https://unsongbook.com/ ''Unsong''] by Scott Alexander, and I happened to also encounter Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe's essay [https://firstthings.com/voyages-to-the-end-of-the-world/ ''Voyages to the End of the World''] (VEW) around the same time. Unsong is a fun read because the setting is clearly from someone either educated in or who grew up in Jewish tradition and is using the toolkit provided by that religion to create a science-fiction world where...")
• 00:3100:31, 12 October 2025 Blog/2025-10-11/There Is A Tide In The Affairs Of Men (hist | edit) [5,666 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|Go forth and multiply; and fill the Earth and subdue it; so that you may grow at a steady rate There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at its flood, leads on to sustainable 1.9% year on year GDP growth. The Dallas Fed has released a little article arguing that AI advances will lead to an increase in human productivity and living standards<ref name=df-growth/>. I am inclined to believe this is the case. While at its...")

10 October 2025

• 03:0203:02, 10 October 2025 Blog/2025-10-09/Mysterious Letter (hist | edit) [1,212 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Mysterious Letter to Roshan.jpeg}}|thumb|right]] A few months ago I received a mysterious letter addressed to me. I do get a lot of junk mail, but this one was to an old address which usually means I forgot something important. When I opened it I found this ominous looking link. I've been receiving the classic scams blackmailing me over the videos they've recorded of me watching porn on my laptop but this was an escalation since it was snail mail....")

9 October 2025

• 23:1023:10, 9 October 2025 Blog/2025-10-09/Community (hist | edit) [4,001 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "[[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot Montage - Palms Requests.png}}|thumb|right|As you can see there is no shortage of "borrow a lump of sugar" stuff here]] A common complaint online is that there is no longer a sense of community in America and that everyone is lonely. All right, that seems believable since so many people are complaining. Another common complaint is that it's impossible for anyone to make friends and so on. A third complaint is that it's impossible to dat...")

8 October 2025

• 04:4604:46, 8 October 2025 Trumpisms (hist | edit) [5,613 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Donald Trump as President and presidential candidate has coined or popularized a whole bunch of phrases that are now in the common lexicon. == The Phrases == I'm leaving out the classic ones like Make America Great Again. === Fake News === {{Tweet | name = Donald J. Trump | username = realDonaldTrump | text = FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT! | date = Jan 10, 2017 | ID = 818990655418617856 | re...")

29 September 2025

• 23:4023:40, 29 September 2025 Blog/2025-09-29/Open Pardons (hist | edit) [3,667 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "The [https://www.justice.gov/pardon/clemency-grants-president-donald-j-trump-2025-present Presidential Pardon] is not nearly as controversial as it should be. The colony ecology of factions inevitably leads to the frontiers being optimized to. For the Presidential Pardon that means that in time, all leaders running for President will tacitly promise radical faction the pardon to allow them to operate unchecked. In the past, norms did not per...")

24 September 2025

• 20:5420:54, 24 September 2025 Blog/2025-09-24/Feed Proliferation (hist | edit) [2,374 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|left|Some random insufferable nonsense thumb|right|Well, at least you asked At some point of time, Chrome started updating to include some kind of content feed into its new tab page. I'm one of those people who has poor impulse control when I see something and I click it. Before I know it, the Doorway Effect has me and I no longer reme...")
• 20:5320:53, 24 September 2025 Jobs Would Never Stand For This (hist | edit) [415 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "Everyone who has encountered an imperfection in MacOS in the last decade has declared Jobs Would Never Stand For This. It's a bit of retconning of Steve Jobs. After all, he did tell us we should stop "holding it that way" and so on. Still, it is useful to represent the loss of attention to detail that has pervaded more recent iterations of older Apple products. Category:Concepts")

22 September 2025

• 07:0007:00, 22 September 2025 Blog/2025-09-21/Dog Whistles (hist | edit) [1,920 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "I read this tweet that talked about the politics term "dog whistle" that made me rather curious. thumb|right {{Tweet | name = TracingWoodgrains | username = tracewoodgrains | text = If you’re hearing a whistle, consider whether you may be the dog. | date = Jul 15, 2025 | ID = 1945157825077911715 | ref-name = Tweet_1945157825077911715 | block = true }} Fine, it's a natural joke with...")

15 September 2025

• 04:0804:08, 15 September 2025 Blog/2025-09-14/The Legend of Beadman (hist | edit) [4,972 bytes] Roshan (talk | contribs) (Created page with "thumb|The expression is pretty spot-on though the Beadman's fashion sense had deteriorated by the time I met him A recent Reddit story that I read reminded of a time when my friend Takashi and I encountered a colourful San Franciscan who proceeded to demonstrate a fairly typically San Franciscan activity. The Reddit post itself is a fairly reasonable PSA warning others of a pickpocket but the character involved sounded like the guy w...")