Archive

🥰 Looks like my favorite ASCII diagramming tool got a major facelift!

Aside from dark mode and fancy arrows, it can now draw boxes using extended ASCII characters. Very nice!

New from me and @AnikVJoshi: We analyzed the results of the Indian Assembly elections and what it means for the BJP, the Congress, and the regional parties.
TL;DR: The BJP has a lot of work to do. Congress is in trouble and they know it.

On Freedom House, the “independent” NGO funded and staffed by the US government that decides which countries are democracies. Since its beginning, it’s represented the foreign policy establishment, including when it helped lie the US into Iraq.

@btbytes @anangbhai That's Dev Patel starring as the Arthurian Green Knight (from Gawain and the Green Knight)

DuckDB is a high-performance analytical database system

This is a very interesting interview with an actual practitioner (the BMC chief) on crisis management was for Wave 2. Also busts some myths given that the political lens predominates discourse (e.g., there is more Union state cooperation than we think)

some amount of tourism in ancient china, too. people wanting to get out of the towns and enjoy nature. these were people with money, ofc. literati types.

mass tourism is certainly a modern invention, but there was a certain amount of tourism in both ancient greece and rome (egypt was a favorite destination). romans even went to seaside resort towns in the summers.

On the BBMP bed booking scam and more-- a new (or very old) story from the Kathasaritsagara:

In 1862 Charles Darwin received a flower from Madagascar with the nectar located in an extremely deep crevasse. He predicted the existence of a moth with an extraordinarily long tongue to reach the nectar. Xanthopan morganii was discovered 150 years later

Imperial College London got in hot water when the press exposed that researchers were using their academic credentials to write marketing material for promoting token investments on the shady crypto broker eToro. (18/)

@btbytes

Just reading Apple vs Epic. I don't like Apple attacks against @itchio . is great community of content creators and they don't deserve to be dragged down by Apple and Epic money issues.

This is fantastic news!

Why the world’s most vaccinated country is seeing an unprecedented spike in coronavirus cases looks like issue is lower effectiveness vaccines r the problem

4 Years After an Execution, a Different Man’s DNA Is Found on the Murder Weapon

@serioustaurean @KushagraAniket After the previous tweet. I watched a random clip on youtube.. funny yet very relatable. haha.

i might actually watch the whole series now..

Stalin's liquidation of the kulaks was not entirely motivated by economic or class concerns. He was also driven to eliminate "the natural leaders" of the peasants who might have organized against communist subjugation.

Life achievement unlocked! Cited in the Economist.

Next up: go a whole week without messing up the mute button on Zoom.

“that's really what fashion ultimately is: a signal of how much access to information you have. Not just in the world of clothing. There’s fashions in management styles. There's fashions in academic topics. There's fashions in all kinds of things”

timeless video about sqlite in prod and single VM production apps

Reminder that instead of preparing for pandemic diseases, FDA has spent years trying to make food taste worse under the now mostly debunked theory that salt causes heart disease.

#MadhavDeshpande announced on (the link is accessible also to people who are not members of the mailing list) that he will be giving a talk in Sanskrit on पाणिनीयव्याकरणे विचारस्वातन्त्र्यम् on May 6 at 7pm [Indian Standard Time].

Francis Collins’ email in @naturenews is jaw-dropping! The Head of US NIH calling with @gatesfoundation "we control 90% of research funding" on their collective economic power, to force scientists in the global south to their knees. Scientific colonialism!

This would be an awesome feature for tabulate/pandas.DataFrame.to_markdown

is much better than for reading ebooks. Finished a great historical fiction by @vasudhendra7 - Tejo Tungabhadra. Kannada books as ebooks are a delight now to read.

is much better than for reading ebooks. Finished a great historical fiction by @vasudhendra7 - Tejo Tungabhadra. Kannada books as ebooks are a delight now to read.

Did my squirrel service. Please do yours too.

"'Shtisel' has managed the ultimate artistic feat of pinning butterflies under glass. It has captured life, real and vivid, poignant and complex, full of aching joy and sadness. Look, it says: this is life. It is short. It is endless."

Please donate to:

It's official, two of my colleagues and I have founded a new company in software verification: Proofcraft!

Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song riff seems to be inspired by Beatles Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Reprise. First time I am noticing this :o

Never forget: every base is base 10.

My latest @ProSyn column examines Western media's troubling double standard: Coverage of tragedies in non-Western societies is usually filled with graphic and harrowing images that generally would not be shown following similar disasters in the West.

Rust crossed 10% in our codebase :-P

“Steroid use too early may be causing drop in oxygen: AIIMS chief Randeep Guleria” #Covid19 #India

We haven't told people the scale that @AWSIdentity works at before, but today we're disclosing that we authenticate and authorize over 400 million API calls EVERY SECOND. You guys gotta stop building stuff or we're going to run out of compute. 😅

Instead of spending millions on school ionizing air purifiers, sometimes you can just open a window. Great piece in ⁦@KHNews⁩ today.

@karatalaamalaka @asc89 it is mere performative in-group signalling

"English manners were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Skin in the Game