Articles

  • A complaint about Google ditching Pixel 3 support. I have a Pixel 3 and sympathize. Google? More like Boo-gle. đź‘Ž As the author says: here I am, with another piece of premature junk, made by the company that pledges to “maximize the reuse of finite resources” and “enable others to do the same".

Books

  • I’ve been listening to Ted Chiang’s collection of short stories, Story of Your Life and Others, on Audible. So far I’ve only listened to the first one, Tower of Babylon and begun the titular story that Arrival is based on. So far the latter has me intrigued (how would language work for a being whose physiology is nothing like ours?), but I’m just at the beginning. Update: I really liked this story - exploring questions of perception, purpose and parenting.
  • I just finished The Anomaly by HervĂ© le Tellier. I loved it - exciting, thought-provoking, wonderful and concise character development. Definitely my favorite of 2022 so far (yes, the field is small, but still very good).

Podcasts

  • This episode of the Daily with David Leonhardt. His ascribing politics as the cause of all differences of opinion is reductive shows a poor grasp of confounding, but his points about the inconsistency of the left in their positions is definitely worth considering. When and how do we return to normal?

Coding

  • This kaggle notebook predicting words based on the distribution of twitter grids. Ben Hamner wrote a program that guesses Wordle’s word of the day using a list of five letter words and a sample of Wordle grids that have been shared to Twitter. Pretty clever. And pretty effective: it seems the program can guess the correct answer on the first try just about every time.