Thought Bricks

The rebranding of Twitter as X is really weird. What is the description of a post on X? A tweet made sense, was sort of cute, and entered the vernacular. What is an X? The appropriation of a logo that I strongly associate with X.org seems problematic. I guess they don’t really have enough lawyers to contest it. But there seem to be many, many other companies have the rights to X as well.

I recently read Meditations: A New Translation by Marcus Aurelius. It was really interesting and impactful. It’s a sort of diary written by a Roman emperor towards the end of his lifetime (A.D. 121-180) that is presented as a collection of books. The entries vary considerably in length and subject matter but it isn’t a recording of day to day activities but more about behavioral observations and thought experiments. I discovered it as a follow on to some readings about stoicism and found that it resonated with me.

Transmission by Joy Division just came on in my music mix. It’s a great song and sounds fresh (at least to me). I’ve been listening that that band (and others like them for more than 40 years. Since I was a teenager with bad haircuts and questionable taste in clothing. Really weird to think how much has changed but how art can persist. I’m sure some of that is just nostalgia for a mispent youth.

I love to ride my bike. If I could, I would ride everyday and everywhere. It seems this is no longer that strange especially among the young. The Economist has an article on how young people are turning away from driving. The reasons seem to be economic (cars are expensive), climate related and cultural. I don’t expect the US to become The Netherlands anytime soon, but even just a slight tilt away to providing safer and better places to ride would be great.

Can drugs change fundamental aspects of our being? Are we just a bag of chemicals that can be optimized so we are the people we want to be? This Wired article by Paul Ford got me thinking about that. He had struggled with obesity and then with a switch in medications, all of a sudden, poof, his issues were solved. He no longer had the cravings for food. That’s pretty remarkable.

The Great Backyard Bird Count is taking place now. I’ve always liked birds and can identify a few common ones so this year I decided to participate in the event. It’s really nicely done. They have an app called Bird ID that helps you identify the birds and collects the data. It’s very easy. There is also a place to view the collected data that you need to have an account to access.

The Rijksmuseum has a comprehensive Vermeer exhibit that looks great. The Rijksmuseum is well worth the visit on a normal day (they have Rembrandt’s Night Watch which is one my very favorite paintings) but this is an exceptional opportunity. I would love to go but not sure that we would be able to make the trip before it closes. Short of that, they have a well done virtual tour and explanation of the main pieces.

We all know that AWS is expensive. But it used to be that it was by far the best hyperscaler and had the appeal of being novel. AWS profits reflected that. Now that it’s been around a while, the bloom has come off the rose. There are now solid competitors (especially Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) and enterprises are starting to move their infrastructure back to their own data centers.

One of the problems at the end of the chapter on asynchronous programming in Modern JavaScript for the Impatient is to: Write a loop that invokes the produceRandomAfterDelay function from the preceding exercises n times and prints the sum once the summands are available. This was an interesting problem that helped me understand JavaScript promises much better. The most important learning is that promises are deferred operations and the only way to get results out of a promise is to use then.

This article on the metric system in the US is great. I’ve read a lot of history but I’d never heard the story about pirates capturing a French scientist who was on his way to bring a meter and a kilogram to the US at the request of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a very interested in a new system of measures to replace the crazy quilt of measures we inherited from the UK but the scientist never got there.