Society || Tech​

The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015, by Viewpoints Research Institute
We discuss the problem of running today’s software decades,centuries, or even millennia into the future.

Art || Design​

Wonder-Sighting in the Medieval World, by The Marginalian
Stunning Sixteenth-Century Drawings of Comets, with Carl Sagan’s Poetic Meditation on Their Science

Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet?, by The Paris Review
He didn’t publish a book of poems until he was thirty-nine, but went on to win four Pulitzers. By the end of his life, he could fill a stadium for a reading. Frost is still well known, occasionally even beloved, but is significantly more known than he is read.

Career || Programming​

Is AI a Silver Bullet?, by Ian Cooper - Staccato Signals
Claims made that LLMs will cause significant changes to software development tested against programming history

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers, by Charity Majors
A software engineer argues against the myth of the “10x engineer”

What Is Analog Computing?, by Quanta Magazine
You don’t need 0s and 1s to perform computations, and in some cases it’s better to avoid them.

Premature optimization, by Alex Ewerlöf Notes
A mental model to detect and prevent optimizing the wrong thing, at the wrong time, or for the wrong reasons

Society || Tech​

Reading Strategies for CopingWith Information Overload ca. 1550-1700, by Ann Blair
The “multitude of books” was a subject of wonder and anxiety for authorswho reflected on the scholarly condition in the sixteenth through the eighteenthcenturies. In the preface to his massive project of cataloguing all known booksin the Bibliotheca univeralis (1545) Conrad Gesner complained of that “confusing and harmful abundance of books,” a problem which he called on kingsand princes and the learned to solve.

Are we really prisoners of geography?, by The Guardian
A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, resources. But the world has changed more than they realise.

The Government Knows AGI is Coming, by The Ezra Klein Show
How the US government is preparing for AGI, and all the challenges that remain

Science​

The brain undergoes a great “rewiring” after age 40, by Big Think
In the fifth decade of life, our brains start to undergo a radical “rewiring” that results in diverse networks becoming more integrated over the ensuing decades.

Maths || Maps​

Emma Willard’s Maps of Time, by The Public Domain Review
Susan Schulten explores the pioneering work of Emma Willard (1787–1870), a leading feminist educator whose innovative maps of time laid the groundwork for the charts and graphics of today.

Philosophy || Psycology​

Grace Paley on the Art of Growing Older, by The Marginalian
Perhaps the greatest perplexity of aging is how to fill with gentleness the void between who we feel we are on the inside and who our culture tells us is staring back from that mirror.That’s what beloved writer Grace Paley (December 11, 1922–August 22, 2007) addresses with extraordinary humor and intellectual elegance in a 1989 piece titled “Upstaging Time”.

Science​

• 🇬🇧 A Skeptic's Take on Beaming Power to Eath from Space, by IEEE
  Why we shouldn’t try to stick solar plants where the sun always shines

• 🇬🇧 Why You Can Hear the Temperature of Water, by The New York Times
  A science video maker in China couldn’t find a good explanation for why hot and cold water sound different, so he did his own research and published it.

• 🇬🇧 46,000-year-old worms wriggle back to life after scientists defrost them, by The Telegraph
  The tiny creatures, discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2018, existed when woolly mammoths still roamed the planet

Art || Design​

• 🇬🇧 How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe, by The Marginalian
  How many revolutions does the cog of culture make before a new truth about reality catches into gear?

• 🇬🇧 Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature, by Locus Magazine
  In truth, the Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of technology (...). In truth, their goal was something closely related to science fiction: to challenge not the technology itself, but rather the social relations that governed its use.

• 🇬🇧 From Coffee to Cacao to Clitoria: Luscious Antique Botanical Illustrations of the Most Vibrant Flora of the Americas, by The Marginalian
  Beautiful botanical illustrations from my continent of birth.

• Playlist of Brazilian Indigenous Songs, YouTube/Spotify, by Alice Pataxó

• 🇬🇧 40 outrageous photos that changed fashion, from teenage Kate Moss to Twiggy in a mini and Lady Gaga’s meat dress, by The Guardian
  Leigh Bowery provoked, Dior’s elegant New Look inspired, Katharine Hamnett’s slogan T-shirts challenged: these are the shots that made the world see clothes differently

Maths || Maps​

• 🇬🇧 Log Scales, by Briefer
  Lucas da Costa: The first lesson I learned about logarithms is not to mention them when speaking to a large crowd. All the other lessons sucked, so I thought I'd create my own.

Society || Tech​

• 🇬🇧 Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment?, by MIT Technology Review
  Researchers are using generative AI and other techniques to teach robots new skills—including tasks they could perform in homes.

• 🇬🇧 We can have a different web, by Citation Needed
  Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

• 🇬🇧 The Gruesome Story of How Neuralink’s Monkeys Actually Died, by Wired
  Elon Musk says no primates died as a result of Neuralink’s implants. A WIRED investigation now reveals the grisly specifics of their deaths as US authorities have been asked to investigate Musk’s claims.

• 🇬🇧 What is a good image description for accessibilty in social media, by @RobotHugsComic

• 🇬🇧 A brief, weird history of brainwashing, by MIT Technology Review
  L. Ron Hubbard, Operation Midnight Climax, and stochastic terrorism—the race for mind control changed America forever.

• 🇬🇧 Fab-brik
  A company that transforms textile waste into construction material

• 🇬🇧 Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution, by The Guardian
  Study confirms Altria, Philip Morris International, Danone, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are worst offenders

• 🇬🇧 The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure, by Wired
  So many people are nearsighted on the island nation that they have already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us.

• 🇬🇧 We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned, by NPR

• 🇬🇧 Why Metadata Matters, by SSD
  Those who collect or demand access to metadata, such as governments or telecommunications companies, argue that the disclosure (and collection) of metadata is no big deal. Unfortunately, these claims are just not true. Even a tiny sample of metadata can provide an intimate lens into a person’s life.

• 🇬🇧 The Simpleton Manifesto, by Nathaniel Rachman
  For the simplist, “just saying the right thing, believing the right thing, is the substance of victory and remedy.”

• 🇬🇧 The Most Vulnerable Place on the Internet, by Wired
  Underwater cables keep the internet online. When they congregate in one place, things get tricky.

Career || Programming​

• 🇬🇧 Are recruiters better than a coin flip at judging resumes? Here's the data., by Interviewing.io
  Below are all the details, but here’s the TL;DR: we reproduced my results from 10 years ago! Our new study showed that recruiters were only a bit better than a coin flip at making value judgments, and they still all disagreed with each other about what a good candidate looks like.

• 🇬🇧 Your Makefiles Are Wrong, by Davis Hansson
  Your Makefiles are full of tabs and errors. An opinionated approach to writing (GNU) Makefiles that I learned from Ben may still be able to salvage them.

• 🇬🇧 Coding for non-programmers: Why we need better GUI automation tools, by Mat Duggan

• 🇬🇧 Dependency Time Machine, by pilotpirxie
  Tool to automatically update dependencies one by one in chronological order. Most dependencies are compatible with other packages from a similar time or pastime. This tool helps to find the latest compatible version of the dependencies and update them.

• 🇬🇧 Deep dive in CORS: History, how it works, and best practices, by Ilija Eftimov

• 🇬🇧 Moving from logs to metrics, by Martin Albisetti
  Long story short, at ShipHero we’ve moved away from using logs to debug our software and are all-in on using metrics (Honeycomb, opentelemetry-based specifically!). It’s one of those things that in hindsight seems easy to do, something that we should have done years ago, and that’s a no-brainer for any new project. But if you’ve been around software long enough you’ll understand why so many things seem easy in hindsight and super hard at the time.

• 🇬🇧 Memory allocation, by samwho
  One thing that all programs on your computer have in common is a need for memory. Programs need to be loaded from your hard drive into memory before they can be run. While running, the majority of what programs do is load values from memory, do some computation on them, and then store the result back in memory.

• 🇬🇧 It is time to fulfill the promise of continuous delivery, by Charity Majors

• 🇬🇧 Know how your org works (or how to become a more effective engineer), by Cindy Sridharan
  You can either complain and pontificate on Twitter on how the tech industry should ideally work, or you can learn how your org really works and what’s rewarded, and optimize for that. Or quit and find another job. 🤷‍♀️ This might sound cynical - but it’s what it is.

• 🇬🇧 Observability is More than Logs, Metrics & Traces, by Philipp Krenn
  You know the drill: DevOps is using tool(s) X. So obviously, observability can be solved by throwing some tools together as well; generally logs, metrics, and traces often called the pillars of observability. But observability is not a tool — it is a property of a system.

• 🇬🇧 How to write technical blog posts, by Quincy Larson

• 🇬🇧 Practical tips to be fairly evaluated on Performance Reviews, by Mekka Okereke
  This is really, really good advice. Seriously.

General​

• 🇬🇧 Forget the four seasons: how embracing 72 Japanese ‘micro-seasons’ could change your garden (and your life), by The Guardian
  Unlike its western equivalent, Japan’s ancient agricultural calendar is governed not solely by the waxing and waning of the moon and the sun’s position in the sky, but also by the blooming of seasonal flowers and other small changes in nature against the wider backdrop of the seasons.

• Paper snowflakes cutting guide, in r/coolguides

• 🇬🇧 Shock of the old: 11 wild views of the future – from winged postmen to self-cleaning homes, by The Guardian
  Do you have to brush your own hair, own an umbrella or keep at least one hand on your steering wheel? Don’t blame these visionary thinkers

Christianity || Theology​

• 🇬🇧 How God's Presence Came to Dwell with All His People, by The Bible Project

• 🇬🇧 Why women should be church leaders and preachers, by N. T. Wright

• 🇧🇷 Law & Gospel, a Lutheran View

• 🇬🇧 List of good introductions to systematic theology that you'd recommend to a congregant, kicked-off by Jordan Rice

• Understanding the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, by Ian Paul
  [The Beatitudes] are very well known, often being cited as favourite texts, and yet there are some serious puzzles that they present us with. Why are there nine, with the last one seemingly tagged on at the end? Why is there a mixture of future and present tenses in the sayings? Why is one of the promises (about the kingdom of heaven) repeated—did Jesus run out of other good things to say? Are they encouragements under pressure, or commendations of virtue? More to the point, are they realistic, or are they (with the rest of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’) setting out an unattainable ideal?

• List of Parallel Passages in New Testament Quoted from Old Testament, by Blue Letter Bible

Philosophy || Psycology​

• 🇬🇧 Sentience, Sapience, Consciousness & Self-Awareness: Defining Complex Terms, by Less Wrong
  The terms in the title are commonly used in crucial debates surrounding morality & AI. Yet, I feel like there is no clear consensus about the meaning of those terms. The words are often used interchangeably, causing people to think they are all the same or very closely related. I believe they're not. Clearly separating these terms makes it a lot easier to conceptualize a larger "spectrum of consciousness".

Quotes || Questions​

Click on the author's name to see full context/community replies

• [I apologize even if I don’t feel like I did anything wrong] if my actions impacted someone negatively. Intention does not supersede impact.
  SupernovaMomma

• A common definition of idolatry is 'anything you love more than God'. But idolatry is actually first and foremost about trust in something other than God. If someone demandsds unconditional trust from you, they are demanding worship, even if they don't know it.
  Rachel Darnall

• For Christians, our “goal” in life is not an accomplishment, a life stage, or any type of earthly success. It is likeness to Jesus. Which means seasons of waiting are not an obstacle to our progress. In fact, they can accelerate it. Sharon Hodde Miller

• What future body augmentation are you looking forward to being a reality?
  Jack Rhysider

• What is a passage of Scripture so beautiful that commenting on it further seems fruitless?
  Justin Sytsma

• What are your tips for spotting a red flag at a company when interviewing?
  Randall Kanna Franson and kefimochi

• What's a good website to waste a whole night on?
  r/AskReddit

• What’s a movie that had the BIGGEST PLOT TWIST EVER and it still blows your mind just thinking about it ???? cavalierremedy

• Do you see yourself as a mind living in your body, or are you your body?
  Jessica Rose

Today's mothering day in England.
Neruda, I'm sorry, but as a woman I can't read the excerpt below (the original poem is quite long!) and not think about biological motherhood; about the tenderness, frailty and beauty that lies in bringing life forth in the womb. As a matter of fact, I was disappointed when the poem revealed itself as a romantic one. Of course I didn't know the meaning of epithalamium until then, much less that the poem was part of that book, but who cares for such minor details?

So sorry, not sorry. To me, this is and always will be a motherhood poem. So here goes the version that would come to life were I your editor. Would have to re-think the title, though. :D

Do you remember when
in winter
we reached the island?
The sea raised toward us
a crown of cold.
On the walls the climbing vines
murmured letting
dark leaves fall
as we passed.
You too were a little leaf
that trembled on my chest.
Life's wind put you there.
At first I did not see you : I did not know
that you were walking with me,
until your roots
pierced my chest,
joined the threads of my blood,
spoke through my mouth,
flourished with me.
Thus was your inadvetant presence,
invisible leaf or branch,
and suddenly my heart
was filled with fruits and sounds.
You occupied the house
that darkly awaited you
and then you lit the lamp.
Do you remember, my love,
our first steps on the island?
The gray stones knew us,
the rain squalls,
the shouts of the wind in the shadow.
But the fire was
our only friend,
next to it we hugged
the sweet winter love
with four arms.

NERUDA, Pablo. Epitalamio / Epithalamium. Translated by Brian Cole. In: Captain's Verses. Anvil Press Poetry, 1994​

Beyond the bend in the road
There may be a well, and there may be a castle,
And there may be just more road.
I don’t know and don’t ask.
As long as I’m on the road that’s before the bend
I look only at the road before the bend,
Because the road before the bend is all I can see.
It would do me no good to look anywhere else
Or at what I can’t see.
Let’s pay attention only to where we are.
There’s only enough beauty in being here and not somewhere else.
If there are people beyond the bend in the road,
Let them worry about what’s beyond the bend in the road.
That, for them, is the road.
If we’re to arrive there, when we arrive there we’ll know.
For now we know only that we’re not there.
Here there’s just the road before the bend, and before the bend
There’s the road without any bend.

Pessoa, Fernando. Para Além da Curva da Estrada / Beyond The Bend In The Road. Translated by Richard Zenith. In: “A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems”, Penguin Books, 2006​

I decided to clear up all my bookmarks and store them in my blog.
Here's the first wave of unread links :D

Art || Design​

• 🇬🇧 Susan Kare, the Pixel Queen
  She designed nothing less than the icons for the original Mac.
• 🇬🇧 What if the Incas had invaded Europe?, by The Guardian.
  Review of the book Civilizations by Laurent Binet. " [...] he presents something that reads more like a collection of primary sources than a conventional novel. What to call it? A historical systems novel, preoccupied with the roots of great power conflict, and the historical forces that underpin it? Or just a jeu d’esprit? It’s a bit of both, and it’s tremendous fun."
• 🇬🇧 Hope Gap (trailer), movie directed by William Nicholson.
  Recommended by @lorewilbe. "If you are a child of divorce, may I recommend this film? It's beautiful and heartbreaking and somehow a little bit healing too." Although I'm not a child of divorce, her description made me curious.
• 🇬🇧 Top 10 hacking films of all time, by The Daily Swig.
  Not sure if those qualify as "art", but they might be fun for some.
• 🇬🇧 The Art of Elsa Gramcko.
  I really enjoyed Arriba No. 27 and got curious about the painter. This article has an academic approach, though.

Science​

• 🇬🇧 The New History of the Milky Way, by Quanta Magazine.
  Astronomers now think that the Milky Way once had a massive intergalactic collision. That’s just one way they’re rewriting the history of our galaxy.
• 🇬🇧 If You Transplant a Human Head, Does Its Consciouness Follow?, by Wired.
  Have you opened that link yet?
• 🇬🇧 Meet The Hell Planet With a Magma Ocean, Supersonic Winds and Rocky Rain, by Forbes.
  Everything about this planet is mindblowing: a year takes 7 hours and it's so hot that rock vaporizes.

Maps​

• 🇬🇧 Let Your Mind Wander With These Gloriously Detailed Maps, by Atlas Obscura.
• 🇬🇧 Satellites documented COVID-19’s impact from space, by The Verge.

Antropology || Psycology​

• 🇬🇧 Poker and the Psycology of Uncertainty, by Wired.
  In some ways, poker players gamble less than most.
• 🇧🇷 The ritual drama of death for the Sanöma, by El País.
  "Through the process of “remembering to forget”, the funeral ceremony aims to destroy the marks of the deceased, forget him, erase him and, at the same time, exhaustively create his personality, the uniqueness of his corporeality."
• 🇬🇧 A 500-Year-Old Record of the Aztec Empire Comes to Life, by Atlas Obscura.
  The Digital Florentine Codex’s three languages and thousands of hand-painted illustrations provide a window into culture, war, and daily life.

Society || Tech​

• 🇬🇧 Who was Thomas Sankara?, by France24 English (10 min).
  I'm very curious about this man because of his extraordinary actions during his 4 year government (1983-1987) in Burkina Faso. Things like: banned female genital mutilation and forced marriage; literacy rates were raised from 13 percent in 1983 to 73 percent in 1987; over 2.5 million children were vaccinated against measles, meningitis, and yellow fever in just two weeks; 7,460 government primary health posts were built (almost one per village); planted 10 million trees, had an all-women motorcycle personal guard, and under his leadership, Burkina Faso was the first country in Africa to acknowledge the HIV/AIDs epidemic.
• 🇬🇧 Palantir's God's-Eye of Afghanistan, by Wired.
  The company’s software can sift through enormous amounts of data, and those metrics can be used to make life-or-death decisions.
• 🇬🇧 We need to talk about 'Cloud Neutrality', by Wired.
  A multibillion-dollar, privately-owned infrastructure is now essential to the modern internet economy. That should freak you out.
• 🇬🇧 The Last Children of Down Syndrome, by The Atlantic.
  Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning.
• 🇬🇧 Inside the Suspicion Machine, by Wired.
  Obscure government algorithms are making life-changing decisions about millions of people around the world. Here, for the first time, we reveal how one of these systems works.
• 🇬🇧 The Internet was built for connection - how did it go so wrong? by The New Statesman.
  The World Wide Web celebrates its 30th birthday this year (2021). Its users are less empowered than ever.
• 🇬🇧 People Over Robots, by Foreign Affairs.
  The Global Economy Needs Immigration Before Automation.
• 🇬🇧 Rabbit Hole, podcast by The New York Times.
  Mini series explaining how social media radicalizes people.
• 🇬🇧 Democracy and invisible codes: How algorithms are modulating behaviors and political choices, book by Sergio Amadeu da Silveira.

Theology || Christianity​

• 🇬🇧 The BEMA Podcast
  Serious Bible Geekery.

Career || Programming​

• 🇬🇧 Questions to ask in a job interview. I absolutely love this website and have been using it religiously to prepare for job inteviews.
• 🇬🇧 Why "Bring Solutions Not Problems" Doesn't Work
• 🇬🇧 Debunking the myth of anonymous data

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a café in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of a Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

Borges, Jorge Luiz. Los Justos / The Just. Translated by Alastair Reid In: “Insomnia”, Six Poems by Jorge Luis Borges, Harper’s Magazine, February, 1999​

What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
Micah 6:8