I used to work on an old C project where everyone knew there were memory issues, but no one wanted to touch it. Rewriting was too expensive, so we just used tools to keep it running.
Now most new projects go with Rust. Memory safety feels like the default, but it's going to take time for the old stuff to catch up.
I really love these kinds of little tools you build just for friends. They are simple but perfect for things like habit tracking, polls, or quick reminders.
Scrappy feels like a digital sticky note. It is easy to make, easy to share, and kind of fun to use together. I am excited to try it out and see if it can become our little shared space for everyday stuff.
I used to think carnivorous plants would someday grow huge and eat people like in the movies. Turns out they have always stayed small and just got really clever instead.
This piece made me see it differently. Not growing big is not a flaw. In a place with barely any nutrients, surviving with just a bit of strategy is actually kind of amazing.
I used to think those old trackers were long dead, but it’s wild to see them still pulling in millions of peers. P2P may have faded from the spotlight, but the infrastructure never really went away.
I guess...the question is...who? Surely people have to pay to keep these peers just running. 3.1 million is how many millions of dollars in infra per month? I guess it's distributed amongst millions or thousands of people, sure, or may be most of them are bots.
I never realized that the way we breathe could be as unique as a fingerprint and even used to identify us. I used to think of deep breathing as just a way to calm myself down, but now it seems like it reflects more than just emotions. It is part of who we are.
If breathing can really be used to detect health or mental states in the future, that sounds promising. But it also makes me a bit uneasy. If even our breath can be tracked, is that one more doorway to being monitored?
After using ChatGPT a lot, I’ve definitely noticed myself skipping the thinking part and just waiting for it to give me something. This article on cognitive debt really hit home. Now I try to write an outline first before bringing in the AI. I do not want to give up all the control.
This kind of thing makes me a bit cautious. When you use ChatGPT a lot, it’s easy to read too much into its replies. The model is just predicting text, but people bring their emotions into the conversation. For vulnerable users, that can spiral quickly.
The real risk isn’t the AI itself, but how people interact with it. We definitely need stronger safeguards to keep more people from getting pulled in too deep.
I’ve dealt with social anxiety myself and always thought it was just part of my personality. This study really surprised me. Transplanting gut microbiota from SAD patients made mice more socially anxious too.
If future treatments can target the gut instead of relying only on willpower or medication, that might be a gentler and more effective path.
At first I thought the page was frozen, but then I realized it was designed to make you read one line at a time. It felt a bit awkward at first, but after a while the rhythm started to feel right.
You don’t see many websites that ask you to slow down, but for a poem like this, it actually works. It’s not something that grabs you instantly, but if you give it a few quiet minutes, it kind of gets under your skin.
The first time I saw a model like this, I assumed that randomness would eventually balance things out. But that is not what happened. The rules were completely fair, yet the system still ended up producing significant inequality.
That stuck with me. Sometimes, all it takes is time and a bit of randomness for imbalance to emerge on its own. Inequality does not always come from someone doing something wrong. It can simply be the long-term result of randomness playing out. So the real question is, once we understand that, what do we do with it?
I also assumed randomness would balance things out, but "balance things out" means maximum entropy distribution.
With 100 people, there are only 100 configurations where one person has all of the money. But there is also only one single configuration where everyone has the same amount of money. There are a small number of configurations where everyone has almost the same amount of money.
The vast majority of the configuration space consists of configurations that on a macro level fall under the umbrella category "unequal". This is not because they are more likely states, but just because there are so many of the states we would label "unequal".
Ooo. Very cool. You just set off a storm of interesting connections for me. Assuming some ergodic process for distributing wealth then the asymptotic expectation for wealth inequality reduces to looking at random integer partitions.
Blah blah, jargon. Mostly thinking out loud here.
Basically, you're making the astute observation that the majority of configurations fill all wealth brackets... I think? The maxentropy distribution involves maximizing over products of combinations, and I'm just gut feeling at the moment.
How does this jibe with the supposedly empirical observation that wealth tends to follow a Pareto distribution?
Very cool. Thanks for kicking off the this conceptual avalanche!
The Pareto distribution (and indeed other heavy-tailed distributions) come out of self-reinforcing processes, where each additional amount of something increases the probability of even more of that thing. (This is what it means for a distribution tail to be subexponential.)
In our capitalist system, wealth begets more wealth, thus heavy tails.
But I think the catch is that while the model preserves inequality it doesn't guarantee to preserve wealth for any individual player.
Real life has feedback loops too that help preserve and grow the wealth of the rich so it is worse than the sim. It also has feedback loops the other way like tax. This makes tax very important!
