TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
In this post, the author questions the importance of basic skills in fields such as politics, education, and programming. While it’s necessary for leaders to make things happen, teachers to teach, and programmers to write code, basic skills are not enough since they lose sight of the big picture. The author argues that an ideal […]
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Social media businesses like Twitter and Reddit rely on content that their users create for free to generate most of their value. As such, they have a social contract to provide APIs for users to download and manipulate that content. However, Twitter and Reddit charge for their APIs and use them to destroy third party […]
Laronde, a biotech firm that received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for its circular-mRNA technology, has been accused of withholding important data and misleading investors. The company claimed to have strong results in animal model experiments, but no other lab has been able to replicate these findings, and many of the raw data […]
Deliberate practice is the key to achieving expert-level performance in any field. Unlike regular practice, which involves mindlessly repeating a skill, deliberate practice is a focused and structured activity that aims for constant progress. It requires paying close attention to specific components of a skill and establishing clear metrics for measuring progress. Deliberate practice is […]
Large language models (LLMs) are extremely useful in generating supervised training data and survey/experimental data. However, this study suggests that crowdsourcing, which is commonly used to collect human annotations, may be impacted by the widespread use of LLMs among crowd workers. The concern is that crowd workers can increase their productivity and income by using […]
High availability is essential for any application, and PostgreSQL deployment options can increase high availability in various ways. In this article, the author reviews several popular PostgreSQL high availability deployment options, including single database instance, single primary instance with read replicas, multi-master with a coordinator, and multi-master without a coordinator. The article notes the difference […]
The author discovered a bug in Linux 6.4 that causes it to hang on boot, occurring about once in every 1000 boots, especially if Intel hardware is used. Surprisingly, no one else has noticed this yet, but the author found it when their nbdkit tests, which use libguestfs, started hanging randomly. To fix this, the […]
Lewis Wickes Hine’s photographs of child labor captured the oppressive working conditions and living conditions of thousands of American children over a century ago. Although the pictures might look like an embarrassing past left unconquered by Americans, Hine’s work remains relevant today, with reports of child labor violations on the rise and a surge of […]
Building a text editor can be difficult, as text editors need to solve a range of problems from trivial to mind-bogglingly difficult. A recent spiritual journey to rework internal data structures in an editor led to the discovery of useful resources for building text editors, such as Build Your Own Text Editor, Text Editor: Data […]
The turbulent relationship between Aleister Crowley and William Butler Yeats is described as both poetic and practical, with Crowley being seen as jealous of Yeats’ poetic talent. Yeats, in turn, was wary of Crowley’s “Magick” as he was seen to use it for darker purposes and was banned from the Hermetic Order of the Golden […]