Links

Sam Enright assembled a friendly Beginner’s Guide to Miles Davis. If you’ve always been curious about jazz but never really managed to get into it, then this resource might serve as a good starting point. I cannot say I’m one hundred per cent aligned with his choices, but we’re close. One remarkable statement I concur with is this one: Jazz is so interesting to me because of its fusion of intricate underlying structure with improvisation and spontaneity. As Ken Burns put it, jazz is “familiar, but brand new every night”. Moreover, I enjoy the intellectual demandingness of jazz as a genre. Jazz musicians seem to be the most thoughtful and intelligent of any genre. Many of the more Avant Garde songs mentioned in this post don’t sound good unless you’re really concentrating. Some of it sounds cacophonous to a newcomer. This is why jazz is considerably more difficult to get into than other genres and has a lack of listenership among the youth. ...

Linus Torvalds’ reply to an anti-vaxxer on the Linux kernel list is a must-read. Pre-2018, Linus would have destroyed the poor chump. He’s discouraging further discussion (Kernel list is not the place for that) while providing crystal clear and detailed mRNA vaccine information, all without renouncing to an opening salvo of his good-ole, grumpy style. As John Gruber affirms, this is one rant we can all get behind.

The article I’m linking today is authored by Aaron Stannard and focuses on the drama currently going on in the .NET Open Source ecosystem. We’ve all been there. A dependency we took aeons ago goes unmaintained or changes its licensing model. Why does this happen? Because at some point, projects need to become sustainable or else they fail. […] it’s inexpensive for maintainers to support a small number of users with relatively similar demands - but once a project achieves critical mass and the demand on the maintainers exceeds their desire to supply, something will have to give. ...

Trade Wars 2002 was a great 1991 online game I hosted on one of my BBSes back in the day. Not sure if it was Lorien or Phoenix BBS; it might have been the latter given the game’s release date. I totally forgot TW2002 until yesterday when I spotted this 1991: Trade Wars 2002 article on the 50 Years of Text Games newsletter. I humbly confess that, until yesterday, I never made the obvious connection between TW2002 and Eve Online. That’s quite startling considering that I’ve been a beta player first and then an avid Eve player for a few years (Eve was also the last game I seriously played on a computer.) ...

My brilliant friend Salvatore Sanfilippo (otherwise known as antirez of Redis fame) has an interesting write-up on his website. How similar is programming to prose writing? After getting his own feet wet with novel writing, he is convinced that the two activities share many common traits. One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and writing novels have many common traits and similar processes. ...

For decades Scandinavian countries have been renowned for their educational systems, low levels of corruption, sustainable economy, social justice, overall quality of life. According to Jukka Savolainen on Slate, the reason why Finns have now been dominating the World Happiness Report four years in a row has little to do with these factors and more with their life expectations. Savolainen perspective is interesting because he is a Finn living in the US. He experienced the Scandinavian system first hand, then moved to a (very) different culture. ...

Only 24 people have journeyed far enough to see the whole Earth against the black of space. The images they brought back changed our world. Here is a selection of the most beautiful photographs of Earth — iconic images and unknown gems — digitally restored to their full glory. Toby Ord’s recent Earth Restored project is a must-see.

Consider the 10x10 grids of green and white boxes below. How would you make them symmetrical? Most people would add green boxes to the emptier half of the grid rather than remove them from the fuller half. Even when the latter would have been more efficient. The case, along with a similar problem revolving around the stability of a peculiar lego structure, is reported by an intriguing Nature article on the topic of psychology and human behaviour. The paper linked to the piece demonstrates that people consistently consider changes that add components over those that subtract them. ...

The name SQLite is a nice name, but the “lite” part is misleading, it sounds like it is only useful for tiny things - which is very wrong. SQLite should be named AwesomeSQL, because that is what it is. SQLite is probably the only database you will ever need in most cases Yeah. This article resonates with me. SQLite is the de-facto standard engine for embedded systems. But it should also be the go-to database for all those websites and services that don’t need to scale to multiple machines. Which, in the real world, happens way more frequently than we all imagine. ...

What a fascinating read. It sits right at the intersection of two of my (too many) vicious interests: Jazz music and books. Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book. ...