Viewing profile — boerseth

There's a lot of art out there that is totally uninteresting, at least to me, because it feels like the artist put little effort or thought into it or or maybe even into honing the…

This reminds me of why I despise certain works/styles of art and artists. I feel cheated if I'm made to spend more time and effort interpreting a work of art than the creator put i…

Start dancing Argentine tango. I am dead serious.

Does each service really need to collect this data from the user directly? They could instead have the user authorise them by e.g. OAuth2 to access their age with one of the de-fac…

> ... six of the fundamental concepts in mathematics ... and how they connect with our real-world intuition While the connections are interesting, I would be as interested in the d…

> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth. No. That is quite literally exponential growth, basically by definition. If x(t) is a …

It is understanably hard to stay vigilant with respect to individual everyday purchases, but services and subscriptions are an easy and continuous win.

That's a long list of numbers that seem oddly specific. Apart from learning that f-strings are way faster than the alternatives, and certain other comparisons, I'm not sure what I …

> Brainf*ck is the antithesis of modern software engineering. There are no comments, no meaningful variable names, and no structure That's not true. From the little time I've spent…

Not sure which way the difference puts the pressure. Does the fuzziness require more prudent policies, or allow us to get away with less?

Modularity and separation of concerns can extend into other domains than software. For me, it seems so much simpler to keep the two separate. You won't be forced to wash the heatin…

I don't think that intuition is entirely trustworthy here. The entire space is high-dimensional, true, but the structure of the subspace encompassing linguistically sensible sequen…

I swear this is how I've gotten good at most of my hobbies. Playing guitar for 20 years has gotten me to a great level for a hobbyist, but not at all because of any virtues like di…

The bank will probably let you order a new card to their offices instead of your home address, so all you need to do is survive for a week or so. In my case, that was very easy tha…

These past couple of years I've gotten into plenty of trouble on multiple occasions, as a result of what I would describe as a cascade of misfortune initiated by a single unfortuna…

I get it! Years ago my obsession was Classic Tetris, and it was common knowledge that watching skilled players at work would improve your own stacking and strategy. A lot of the pr…

I was gonna say. I did it with French some years ago and it worked like a charm. Later I became obsessed with Argentine tango. Unfortunately, I thought, "comprehensible input" won'…

The danger is when solutions that are convenient, but require giving up some sort of freedom, are made mandatory even for those who would like to stay free. I hope this is a lesson…

It used to be that every time I heard about some problem with training AI systems, I would be struck by how much the challenges line up and parallel the challenges involved in rais…

It may get resolved on its own. These days people study to get good grades in order to prove to future gatekeepers (like employers, or higher rungs of academia) that they know the …

My own experiment involved writing my CV in YAML, and using a Pandoc template to generate .tex and .pdf. I think I may have overcooked the thing a little, but it was good fun. I ne…

I am wondering how universally useful these qualities are across disciplines. It might be interesting to consider each of the categories in a totally different field. Take dancing …

Dancing is a good example, though not perfect. It's hard to convince a club to have a salsa/bachata/tango/swing centered evening, because the interested crowd actually comes to dan…

I doubt it was the UBI-like aspect of the pandemic that caused the depressive states. Isolation, less active lifestyles, locked inside. Imagine UBI, but with the opposite of all of…