Each of us has a window, that is ourselves. If we sample fast enough according to Nyquist-Shannon’s sampling theorem, we may reconstruct the world viewed through this window. Most of time, our views are just partial and approximate. It’s not so even because we are not fast enough and long enough. It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present. -- Charles Dickens. David Copperfield There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor. -- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. -- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations Last winter, I had this idea and started to design and to experiment. At first I’d like its name LEDO (LED origami) and it’s close to LEGO. But a quick search revealed that it’s taken. Then I’d like to name it Light Origami or Origami Pixel. During the winter, I seldom solder. But it’s spring now, the concept has been validated after severl iterations. ...

每个人的生命都是通向自我的征途，是对一条道路的尝试，是一条小径的悄然召唤。觉醒的人只有一项义务：找到自我，固守自我，沿着自己的路向前走，不管它通向哪里。– 黑塞 I can explain it only by a weakness of the scholarly mind that I have often observed in myself. I call it theory-induced blindness: once you have accepted a theory and used it as a tool in your thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult to notice its flaws. -- Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024) Steve Stewart-Williams: Psychologists have posited hundreds of cognitive biases over the years. A fascinating recent paper argues that they all boil down to one of a handful of fundamental beliefs coupled with confirmation bias. ...

German Die das Fleisch wegnehmen vom Tisch Lehren Zufriedenheit. Die, für die die Gabe bestimmt ist Verlangen Opfermut. Die Sattgefressenen sprechen zu den Hungernden Von den grossen Zeiten, die kommen werden. Die das Reich in den Abgrund führen Nennen das Regieren zu schwer Für den einfachen Mann. English Translation: Those Who Take the Meat from the Table Teach Contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined Demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry Of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss Call ruling too difficult For ordinary men. Another poem: ...

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959 Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be. ...

The world I live in Mary Oliver I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what’s wrong with Maybe? You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen. I’ll just tell you this: only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us. Franz Kafka: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? Good God, we also would be happy if we had no books and such books that make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. What we must have are those books that come on us like ill fortune, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” ...

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” – André Gide “It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Today Adam Wolff tweeted a story about deugging FB-Chat. He is a technical fellow at Electric Capital. Below is it. Before the major effort to redo the UI, FB Chat was super broken and we had no idea why. We didn’t know what was wrong, but we knew the code was a mess. We set about rewriting both the front-end and the back-end in an effort to fix it. The front-end rewrite pulled in a whole team of amazing engineers and became one of the big threads that led to reactjs. ...

To navigate life we create mental models of the world out there, and then we confuse the models for reality. What is the explore/exploit tradeoff? The gambler needs to learn new knowledge about the machines and simultaneously use what they have already learned to optimize their decisions. In the literature, these two activities are referred to as exploring and exploiting. You can’t do both things at the same time. When you explore, you are pulling new arms on the bandit trying to figure out their expected payout. When you exploit, you pull the best arm you’ve found. You need to find the right balance. If you spend too little time exploring, you get stuck playing a machine with a low expected payoff. But if you spend too much time exploring, you will earn less than you would if you played the best arm. This is the explore/exploit trade-off. ...

Aaron and Gaza Last Sunday, Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire by Israeli Embassy in D.C. to protest US involvement in Gaza genocide. He died later after being transported to a local hospital on Sunday afternoon. What are we doing to stop the Gaza war? “My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide,” he says in a video of the incident. “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” ...