The Berkshire buff and fake contests of skill
We look at what it took to get article previews into the RSS feed of the main Entropic Thoughts site. We analyse the Henley Royal Regatta statistically. We get skeptical about fake contests of skill.
The best fizz buzz is monoidal
Learn about how to compose a fizz buzz that is extendable and contractable.
Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #12
Hello! If this newsletter reads strangely or vontains odd typos, it is because it is typed on a new, fascinating keyboard. Read on to find out! New in my...
Understanding systems and parametric polymorphism
We learn about private tutoring, learning, and what makes parametric polymorphism different from ad hoc polymorphism.
Spaced repetition beginner guide and separating projectiles
We learn what's important for practicing spaced repetition, and then what's important for ballistic projectiles that separate into two parts.
OOP in Ada and OODA in Boyd
We learn a little about classes, encapsulation, inheritance, and memory management in Ada.
Your math proficiency, visualised
We take a look at the results of the maths survey you have been patiently responding to in the past three weeks. Then we learn a tiny bit of differential equations together.
MVC is a mistake, more math questions, and colours
MVC is very popular, but since it draws module boundaries along technical concerns it is a bad way to do modularisation.
Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #11
Notes on fully remote work, forecasting, book writing, and then a dump of 14 or so interesting links.
Long live lines of code!
We look at how lines of code is a useful measurement, then I ask you more about your maths abilities, and we learn to combine studies that are not individually significant.
LLMs are not getting better, SQL in Haskell, and maths!
We note an oddity in the data on how often LLMs write mergeable code, learn how to write complicated SQL in Haskell, and then talk about maths for a few seconds.
Rebasing magically, banner images, and escalating failures
We learn a little about Magit, the truly magical git interface that also teaches you git. Then we deliberately choose to make a problem works.
Teaching children to bicycle, your age, and probability of Artemis disaster
We discuss how to effectively teach children cycling, I ask about your age, and you learn how likely it is that we see crew loss in an Artemis mission. Well, and older estimation of it, anyway.
Flake checks, dark/light theme preferences, and expert modeling
We learn how to lint with shell scripts in Nix projects, I hopefully learn your preference for themes in your development environment, and we look at fast and frugal heuristics.
Strange touchscreen input methods and poker probabilities
I really wish for a true iambic morse code keyboard for Android, but in the meantime since none exists, we'll have to make do with KeyBee. Which, in fairness, is actually very good!
Summarising data and evaluating suppliers
We discuss how to summarise data into two numbers that explain most of it (it's not the mean and standard deviation!) and then touch on how to evaluate suppliers.
Equations, laws of succession, and calling out targets
We demystify a common way of solving systems of equations, we discuss laws of succession to (a) forecast better and (b) dispel a myth about frequentism. Then we learn how to call attention to things, military-style.
Survival analysis of the supreme court
We learn the probability that any justice of the SCOTUS resigns, and how to improve on Kubernetes ReplicaSets.
Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #10-3
Part 3 of 3. ACX 2026 forecasting rationales.
Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #10-2
Part 2 of 3. Multi-criteria shortest path: label-correcting Dijkstra.