nico λ

Fentanyl laced weed has been endlessly debunked. So where does the claim come from? Who keeps on believing that weed is laced with fent? Police do. Politicians do. People who want to believe it keep on believing it. It’s confirmation bias. It sails right through their tunnel vision. Of course fent is in weed! Because there’s a plot by nefarious... See more

There is only so much powerlessness, so much indignity in the mounting pressure that people can tolerate, and God, family values, or appeals to a mythical utopian past quite frankly are not going to change a single concrete thing for them. Resorting to the dopamine rush of endless scrolling, or to the sticking-plaster medical intervention of SSRIs,... See more

He categories different biases:

• Availability bias - the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind


• Confirmation bias - confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information


• Affective bias - the tendency to make decisions based on what we wish were true

The world of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory introduce a different conception of what things are though. It turns out that elementary particles can’t be thought of as individual ‘things’ which have a volume. In fact, if particles did have a volume, physics wouldn’t work! We would end up with "surfaces" of electrons behaving in an... See more

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On Inboxes

I have two conceptual inboxes.

First one, inbox.md , is where the most interesting links end up, together with my random thoughts, waiting for a weekly review. I mainly append to that file through iOS shortcut. I can quickly share a twitter link, or jot a quick note in drafts.

Second one is a bit more convoluted. Sometimes during the day... See more

Consequently, in its idealized form the scientific method limits freedom of the will, while technology amplifies freedom of the will. Technology is by no means derived with certainty. It is the extremely particular result of someone’s will, based on rationalizing through the concrete and contingent circumstances of the world.

A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. [...] No matter what language you work in, programming in a functional style provides benefits. You should do it whenever it is convenient, and you should think hard about the decision when it isn’t

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1. Clearly describe the problem and symptoms. Begin your prompt by describing what is going wrong and what the code is supposed to do. Always include the exact error message or incorrect behavior. For example, instead of just saying “My code doesn’t work,” you might prompt: “I have a function in JavaScript that should calculate the sum of an array... See more

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