It has been a while since I read a fictional novel that cut me to the core. It has been even longer since I read one that was also full of humanity and compassion. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023) did all of that. It easily ranks as the best novel I've read in the past five years. Quite possibly one of my favorite novels, period. (It ...

Here are my favorite skeptical (critical thinking and science) podcast episodes from the past few weeks! Skeptical must-listens: The Eco Well podcast recently had an informative episode for parents: "The "Sephora Kids" Phenomenon - what parents AND brands need to know. Roundtable with Aegean Chan MD and Claire Bing" https://www.theecow...

I read a book which has rekindled my passion for the subject of physics. Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey To Quantum Gravity, by Carlo Rovelli was originally published in 2014. While the book is over ten years old now, Rovelli's explanatory power and simple and clear writing stand out. Even the book's core idea, what he refers...

Do you listen to podcasts while you're scrolling memes on socials? This is the start of a newish series of blog posts called Memewhile, where I round up my favorite skeptical (critical thinking and science) podcast episodes from the past few weeks. Skeptical must-listens: Conspirituality: The Telepathy Tapes - In which infamous Facilit...

Two recent New York Times articles caught my eye. One of them was down right apocalyptic and the other claimed a government agency is knowingly poisoning Americans: A ‘Second Tree of Life’ Could Wreak Havoc, Scientists Warn https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/science/mirror-life-microbes-research.html The E.P.A. Promotes Toxic Fertilize...

Recently, I started learning about the Julia programming language. It's a programming language created in 2008 (or 2012 depending on how you want to define its start). Its official website can be found here: https://julialang.org. In this post I'll describe some of what I love in more detail by looking at a few specific examples of Jul...

I've long been an advocate for greater online privacy and cybersecurity rights. Even before I began working as a Software Engineer in Silicon Valley, I didn't like the Google and Facebook approach to commodifying user behavioral data. To think that today we live in a world where mercurial data brokers trade granular and identifying dat...

It might seem surprising, but thanks to llama.cpp and Hugging Face's LMStudio community it's pretty easy to run a large language model (LLM) on your own laptop. You don't even need much in the way of resources or technical know how. After all, the laptop I'm using is running Ubuntu and has an old Intel Core i7 4-core CPU and a paltry 1...

AI-pilling for Fun and Profit This blog post contains my thoughts on what we should do about future artificially intelligent workers (AI workers), artificial general intelligence (AGI), and superintelligent artificial intelligence (super AI). It is also a review of two self-proclaimed "AI-pilled" books: The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suley...

My friend recently told me about something an author said about George Saunder's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, "It's a book about writing, but like all great books about writing it's actually a book about thinking". Some people characterize writing as actual thought. Others make a less stark claim and say that when you write what you'r...

I recently had the pleasure of reading "The Weirdness of the World", by philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel. The central thesis, that every theory of consciousness and our place in the universe contains some aspect(s) which defies common sense, is so fascinating and far-reaching, that I'd almost recommend the book solely on the basis of the ...

I recently read "A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going", by Michael Muthukrishna: https://www.atheoryofeveryone.com/ The book starts out strong in Part I: Who We Area and How We Got Here by building a so-called Theory of Everyone that draws on interesting connections between psychol...

In my last blog post I broke down a public level 1 Meta coding challenge from their website metacareers.com. These code puzzles are intended as practice for technical interviews for engineering roles at Meta. Here I will use Python again to break down one more level 1 puzzle: "kaitenzushi". I chose to write a blog post about it, becaus...

Meta has a career portal (https://metacareers.com) and inside that portal there is a tab called "coding puzzles". These are public and intended as practice for technical interviews and they have a browser-based IDE that supports a number of languages and comes with a suite of test cases for each puzzle. Most of the test cases are hidde...

A month ago, my hobby project Infinite Sentiment started out as a simple client-side Nextjs web app that took a random passage from the novel Infinite Jest, ran it through a Hugging Face Transformers.js sentiment analysis model (fully client-side), and displayed the results along with the passage. That version can still be seen on the ...

One of the things I find fun about making front end libraries is that changes to a library are often highly visible and obvious. Version 2.0.0 of my React-Natural-Typing-Effect NPM module is no different in that it now supports a measure of internationalization (note: the below sentences are all DuckDuckGo translations of "My name is J...

My last two blog posts were called The Joy of JSFiddle and My React-Natural-Typing-Effect NPM Module and this blog post continues my focus on the client-side. However, I kick things up a notch by utilizing Hugging Face's Transformers.js which is a library that enables a vision of the future that I love: machine learning and AI that run...

I recently made a React app to grab a random passage from the novel Infinite Jest and then send it through a Transformers.js sentiment analysis model: Infinite Sentiment which is here in this repo: https://github.com/cipherphage/Infinite-Sentiment. For a kind of irreverent app I wanted an irreverant feel so I built a React component th...

I've been using JSFiddle on and off since about 2014. The reason I continue to use it is because it offers me a quick and easy front end playground (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and various front end frameworks) that automatically runs, saves my changes and is easily shared. Of course, I can always have a local HTML file with a <script> elem...

There are many ways to exhibit leadership in the realm of software engineering. When it comes to engineering management, however, it is a required aspect of the role. When I am being interviewed for engineering manager, lead engineer, or senior engineer roles I am sometimes asked to describe my leadership style. In my opinion, hiring m...

[Warning: mild spoilers throughout] I wasn't going to write a review of the new Super Mario Bros movie, which I'll refer to simply as SMB. Not because the movie was awful (it wasn't). Not because I'm mad that they ruined my childhood nostalgia (they definitely didn't). Not even because the movie was boring (the movie is for young child...

Sometime in 2020-2021 I made the switch from the latest version of Android OS on a Samsung S21 to /e/OS on a Teracube 2e. Later, in late 2022 I enrolled in Murena's beta testing of the /e/OS on a Fairphone 4. This review will cover my experience so far with the /e/OS, Murena's NextCloud cloud services as well as the Teracube 2e and Fai...

This is an old post from 2017 that used to exist on a blog that has since been deleted. Here it is, exhumed from the digital dustbin. UPDATE: it looks like this issue in Safari on iOS (see below) may have been addressed by release 10.3. So I was browsing a super cool website the other day (just kidding it was rollcall dot com) in Safar...

If you watched Ant-man and the Wasp in Quantumania (youtu.be/5WfTEZJnv_8) then you’ll be familiar with probably one of the purest examples of slapping the word quantum on anything as a shorthand explanation for how it works. How does Ant-man get small? Quantum stuff, of course! If you make yourself small enough then what will you find?...