nico λ

“The point of books is to combat loneliness” — David Foster Wallace

But the informational value of the web has been nearly destroyed. Fake News isn’t even the biggest problem. It’s the digital ecosystem’s insistence on stifling curiosity by prioritizing ANSWERS over questions.

Most impactfully, the web has been systematically re-engineered to hinder discovery in order to drive people as quickly as possible to... See more

In a field like CS theory, you very quickly get used to being able to state a problem with perfect clarity, knowing exactly what would constitute a solution, and still not having any clue how to solve it. (In other words, you get used to P not equaling NP.) And at least in my experience, being pounded with this situation again and again slowly

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This designation is based on the direction the compound rotates polarized light that's shined upon it. If it rotates the light clockwise, it's dextrorotatory, and it's referred to as right-handed. Counterclockwise = levorotatory = left handed. It's important in biochem, not only because biological systems tend to differentiate between the two, but... See more

misses the religious challenge to complacency, the heart and soul of faith. Instead of discouraging moral inquiry, religious prompting can just as easily stimulate it by calling attention to the disjunction between verbal profession and practice, by insisting that a perfunctory observance of prescribed rituals is not enough to ensure salvation, and... See more

Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code

It’s really easy to write terrible code. But it’s also really easy to write code that follows absolutely every best practice, which has been unit, integration, fuzz, and mutation-tested for good measure – your startup will just run out of money before you finish.... See more

Anyone who’s spent a few months at a sizable tech company can tell you that a lot of software seems to exist primarily because companies have hired people to write and maintain them. In some ways, the software serves not the business, but the people who have written it, and then those who need to maintain it. This is stupid, but also very, very... See more

Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even... See more