A 50-year anniversary of the technology that will save us from deep fakes, reading HackerNews on Nokia 3310 in 2025, 2 blogs, and a JS1k demo.

Every year, I play Advent of Code, an advent calendar of coding puzzles by Eric Wastl. This year I wanted an extra challenge. I decided to spend hours writing horrible, unreadable, bodged-together code full of code smells, bad practices, and hacks. I decided to do Code Golf.

A friend approaches you and says something unexpected. 'I quit my job'. 'I am going to Madagascar'. 'I've been to Las Vegas last night'. 'I am relocating to Mars'. Stunned, you don't know how to react. But they eagerly expect a reaction. What do you say?

A masterpiece from Daniel Benmergui that you should play even if you are not a gamer, why 17 is a large number, 3 blogs you want to read, and more.

Tomorrow there is a local election in Denmark. The ballots are notoriously large here (I know people shorter than the ballots). 98% of the candidate posters are “A generic face with a name and party logo”, and most don’t even have a single slogan line, making it impossible to distinguish between them. It has always been hard to pick your candidate, so hard that news websites make quizzes to find your matching candidates. But this time is different, because it is the first post-ChatGPT election. And people do EVERYTHING in ChatGPT nowadays. How many people, do you think, chose the candidate by asking ChatGPT? I bet the number is not zero. And what impact is it going to have on the results?

I have beefs with many conventional critiques of python. People complain about GIL, people say python is slow. Along these lines lies the 'match-case' pattern matching. I'll be clear: match-case is bad, don't use it.

You are a developer, and your team lead sucks at their job. If only you were a team lead, you would have done way better. Rejoice! For the time has come for you to prove yourself!...

They say that we must read any books that give us pleasure, no matter how silly or weird the books are. Just to develop a habit of reading being a pleasurable experience...

Ever since Sonnet 3.7 came out, I have no doubt that the software engineer job (and thus, the job market) will change. I sincerely believe that in two years...

There are two reasons why python is 'bad'. First, it is not statically typed like C. Second, it is not as fast as C...

We live in a world where “I need 2 weeks to do it” means “I can do it in 1 hour two weeks later”, and we accept it. ...

“SQLite does not compete with client/server databases. SQLite competes with fopen().”

Banning AI research and AI companies because they might be dangerous is like banning surgery hospitals and private clinics because “People with knives cutting other people can’t be a good thing”.

We will eat any food, it is just the matter of how we cook it. Are you never going to eat olives in any form? What about olive oil?

1998 is a year, but 19.99 is a price tag.

We can't productively do creative work for more than 4 hours a day. In 2014, I graduated from university and got a job at a biotech company, where I was doing data science and developing data pipelines for large biological data sequencing, specifically). There I learned a lot about the way I personally work...

The years 2021-2029 sound to me like James Bond introducing himself. “Name’s Twenty. Twenty Five.”

The best gift I got for this Christmas is the teapot for making tea that has thermal insulation, and thus I can now make a tea, forget about it for 2 hour, and still have a cup of warm tea.

Everyone tolerates people staring at their smartphones during lectures/events. Even though they are obviously not having any emergency, but scrolling some feed.
Everyone tolerates people using laptops at the events. Even though they are obviously not taking notes, but side-channelling some work.
But try taking a book out to quietly read…

You can’t say “No” to an open bottle of wine because it comes from “Yes"terday.

To Boldly Space Where no One has Before

Do you think a space (as a text symbol, as a " “) should be the same width in the text whether it is a “bold text”, an “italic text”, or a “plain text”, for consistency? Or should it be wider in the bold case and the italic case, to accommodate for the extra heaviness or tilt? 🤔

Santa, to Cash Register

Just heard from the loudspeaker, while waiting at the checkout line:

🎵 Santa, baby… An employee to checkouts! 🎵 hurry down that chimney tonight

Filter bubbles cause funny interactions. My girlfriend saw me reading a book “The Mythical Man-Month” that she never heard about before. So, we asked our friends around, what they think this book is about.

We got two types of answers:

• either it must be something about the male hormonal cycle,
• or about a month when a man goes into nature and reconnects with his predecessors’ roots.

Both ideas are funnier than the reality - that this is a book about software project leadership and time estimation (in man-months).

Everything stays on the Internet forever.
In the summer of 2012, I presented my research project about amyloid beta at my university’s conference.
Today, 12 years later, I received an email asking about this project.

Jealousy is when you don’t want me to have it. Envy is when you want to have the same.

Smartphones have stolen from us the time and the capacity to become BORED. And that’s a bad thing...

“A scientific theory is nothing but a fairytale with the human-like characters replaced by even more magical ones”