“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.” ...

… three foci of phenomena: the human mind, collections of computer programs, and the computer. Every computer program is a model, hatched in the mind, of a real or mental process. These processes, arising from human experience and thought, are huge in number, intricate in detail, and at any time only partially understood. They are modeled to our permanent satisfaction rarely by our computer programs. Thus even though our programs are carefully handcrafted discrete collections of symbols, mosaics of interlocking functions, they continually evolve: we change them as our perception of the model deepens, enlarges, generalizes until the model ultimately attains a metastable place within still another model with which we struggle. ...

子曰：“笃信好学，守死善道。危邦不入，乱邦不居。天下有道则见，无道则隐。邦有道，贫且贱焉，耻也；邦无道，富且贵焉，耻也。” 半轮秋月挂山崖，孤鸟悲鸣为有家。一己哀愁随落叶，百年世事入残霞。2022.10.2.

What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more. – Alan J. Perlis (1922–1990) book SICP

$ git clone https://github.com/quickjs-ng/quickjs $ cd quickjs $ make $ $./build/qjs tests/microbench.js TEST N TIME (ns) REF (ns) SCORE (%) empty_loop 500000 9.20 date_now 100000 37.00 prop_read 100000 7.28 prop_write 100000 5.73 prop_create 10000 69.25 prop_delete 50000 71.60 array_read 50000 8.62 array_write 20000 17.19 array_prop_create 100 26.30 array_length_decr 200 12.39 array_hole_length_decr 200 19.25 array_push 100 45.00 array_pop 100 66.40 typed_array_read 50000 8.36 typed_array_write 20000 17.20 global_read 200000 3.98 global_write 100000 9.20 global_write_strict 200000 3.90 local_destruct 1000 182.83 global_destruct 5000 63.20 global_destruct_strict 2000 170.00 func_call 50000 18.04 closure_var 50000 18.44 int_arith 200 10.00 float_arith 200 12.50 set_collection_add 100 252.50 array_for 2000 10.35 array_for_in 500 93.72 array_for_of 2000 17.61 math_min 100 34.20 regexp_ascii 1 669.80 regexp_utf16 1 677.40 string_build1 200 82.80 string_build2 200 85.20 sort_bench 1 1.55 int_to_string 50000 73.00 float_to_string 5000 570.00 string_to_int 50000 42.70 string_to_float 50000 55.40 bigint64_arith 10 316.00 bigint256_arith 10 306.00 total 4201.09 $

Come across two authors: William Dalrymple (1965-) and Michael Axworthy (1962-2019). Going to read their books about Iran and India. Dalrymple has a podcast, EmpirePodUK. It is super. A good chunk of the depression we are feeling comes not just from watching fellow human being massacred with impunity but also the realisation that those who tasked with ‘representing’ us only represent money & power, that the wishes of millions of us is of no consequence to them ...