TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
In this post, the author discusses various HTTP clients available in the Elixir ecosystem. They provide an overview of their preferred clients and discuss the best choices for different use cases. The author highlights Mint as the lowest-level and most customizable HTTP client in Elixir. They mention that Mint can be useful for building higher-level […]
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In July 1983, Air Canada Flight 143, also known as the Gimli Glider, experienced a fuel shortage due to a botched metric conversion. The flight crew relied on manual dripstick checks to determine the fuel quantity, but mistakenly used the wrong conversion factor. As a result, the plane was operating with only half the necessary […]
In the 1920s, nightclubs in Berlin utilized a unique system to facilitate late-night flirtation between strangers. The Resi and the Femina were two nightclubs that pioneered this trend. At the Resi, table phones and pneumatic tubes allowed for anonymous communication between patrons. The system was a major draw of the nightclub, with phones fixed to […]
The author explores the topic of whether individual attention spans have been declining over the past two decades, particularly due to the rise of the internet. They review related research and find that attention spans may indeed be decreasing, which could have worrisome implications for knowledge work in industrialized societies. The author became interested in […]
In this blog post, the author discusses an off-by-one error in the attention formula used in modern AI models. They explain how this error affects the compression and deployment of Transformer models. The author argues that the error lies in the softmax function used in the attention mechanism and proposes a simple tweak to fix […]
In a world where cash is becoming increasingly irrelevant, the forgettability of hard currency is often overlooked. A new paper by Stanford Graduate School of Business investigates whether consumers use cash for guilty pleasures and hard-to-justify purchases to avoid confronting a record of their spending. The study builds on the concept of “motivated memory” and […]
In this article, the author explains how to change the captive portal check URL on an Android phone. They start by defining what a captive portal is – a page that needs to be accepted before being able to access the internet on public or hotel WiFi networks. The author then highlights the potential privacy […]
Birds, not primates, have the most comparable level of vocal complexity and variability to humans, according to ornithologists. Researchers have utilized large databases of bird calls, such as the one from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, to learn more about the ways in which birds communicate. Birdsongs are more complex than bird calls, with multiple […]
This web content is a guide to generating diagrams using Pikchr (pronounced “Picture”). It provides a practical and accessible tutorial on using Pikchr, a tool for creating embedded line diagrams in Markdown or other simple markup languages. The content explains how to run Pikchr scripts, view Pikchr script source code, and write Pikchr statements to […]
ProjectionLab is a powerful and intuitive financial modeling tool that is highly praised by users. It allows individuals to visualize their investments, expenses, and more over time, taking into account various scenarios. Users appreciate the level of detail and variety of variables that ProjectionLab offers, allowing them to make informed decisions and plan for their […]