A very touching Akhil Sharma in The New Yorker: Not long after we began dating, my now wife, Christine, and I started making up stories about the child we might have. We named the child—or, in the stories we told about him, he named himself—Suzuki Noguchi. Among the things we liked about him was that he was cheerfully indifferent to us. He did not wish to be either Irish (like Christine) or Indian (like me)....
Tomorrow we’re releasing a major project on which we’ve been working non-stop for two and a half years. No matter how many years in the trenches, release day always makes me a bit nervous. Experience does help. I know there will be problems, and we will solve them. Some customers will complain, and those will be the most vocal. The vast majority of them will appreciate the effort, enjoy the features, and stay silent....
I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms—but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—have to look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse. I can’t say I can relate as my kids of ages 21, 18, and 16 do their best to stay clear from the music I like, but anyways, Ted Gioia’s latest piece on recent music trends is super-interesting....
We have a Postgres cluster with a database for each user. Each database has a table that records events, and we want this table to only record the last 15 days. If we were on MongoDB, we could use a capped collection, but we are in Postgres, which does not have equivalent functionality. In Postgres, you have to make do with something homemade. My first idea was to install a cron job in the system....
It’s now old news that the James Webb Telescope was successfully launched on Christmas Day. But last Saturday marked another historic moment for this incredible human artifact: After a quarter-century of effort by tens of thousands of people, more than $10 billion in taxpayer funding, and some 350 deployment mechanisms that had to go just so, the James Webb Space Telescope fully unfurled its wings. The massive spacecraft completed its final deployments, and, by God, the process went smoothly....
An excellent article on Web3 has just appeared on Moxie Marlinspike’s website. Being Moxie1, he’s not just speculating and rambling about stuff. In an attempt to learn more about the so-called Web3 and the technologies around it, he went all-in and built a couple of dApps himself. Then, he produced an NFT and put it up for sale. What he found is, well, to put it mildly, fascinating. Some of his insights on technology are also interesting....
Over the years, Iperborea, one of my favorite Italian publishers, has been publishing an unofficial Nordic Tales series. Their renowned nordic fiction series includes one fairy tale volume per year, usually published in December, just for Christmas. The first book was Lapland Tales in 2014, and then they continued with Danish, Icelandic, Swedish, Faroe, Norwegian, Greenlandic and then Finnish in 2021. I’ve been greedily reading each one of them, usually as my last book of the year....
This year I’ve read twenty-one books or 5903 pages. That’s fewer books than last year (28 / 8064), the year before (25 / 8394), and the one before that (30 / 8447). Heck, I must look back at 2014 to score a win in my very own yearly reading challenge. What surprises me is not much the number of books but the pages I read, which constitutes a more relevant metric....
I found a Consider the Lobster review on Goodreads that almost precisely matches my thoughts on DFW and the book. Hence, given the lazy Christmas-break mood I am in right now, I am conceding myself the right to copy-paste and edit David’s review right away. I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently as DFW. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing – it’s also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses....
When The Digital Antiquarian released his System Shock retrospective earlier this year, I was in awe. System Shock was one of my favorite games back in the day, and yes, in the quarrel between id Software’s DOOM and Looking Glass’s System Shock, I was siding with the latter. I was so much more for immersion and storyline than shoot ’em-ups. The Antiquarian article is excellent. If you’re into gaming history or, really, into computer’s history, I urge you to read it all....