You have arrived at the mid-week hump. Have a $container of $beverage and enjoy some reading before you speed along with the rest of your life.

New articles

Deprecate Like You Mean It

Python has gone and broken their backwards compatibility over something silly again. I propose a solution based on systems theory to get people to actually heed deprecation warnings.

Full article (1–2 minute read): Deprecate Like You Mean It

Packaging Perl and Shell for NixOS Deployment

It's not obvious to a NixOS beginner how you're meant to package scripts for deployment to a NixOS system. But it's actually quite a nice exercise in figuring out how Nix is supposed to work. Come along for the ride!

Full article (12–25 minute read): Packaging Perl and Shell for NixOS Deployment

Flashcard of the week

I'm actually hugely behind on my flashcard repetitions. Almost 1500 flashcards to review. So you'll get a bunch of good ones today but with less context for each.

How far does one have to walk to get exposed to one micromort of risk due to traffic injuries?

30 km

This one surprises me. Maybe the UK (which is where the number comes from) is particularly hostile to pedestrians? The same source estimates cycling to be roughly as dangerous per distance as walking, but driving a car 10× as safe!

Which is the first phase of offense for the platoon?

Movement to contact

That's when the elements of the platoon fan out to locate the enemy. Once located, the decision will be made to either fix them through maintained contact, or to break contact.

What is Désiré André's reflection argument?

Any random walk that ends up above a threshold C must have passed the threshold C, and each such path has a buddy path that instead of passing C, reflected down again. Thus the probability of touching C is twice that of ending up above C.

How do you calculate impact speed (km/h) from fall distance (m)?

v = 16sqrt(s)

This ignores air resistance. I use this sometimes as a reference for e.g. "how bad would it be to crash a car into a wall at 20 km/h?" Well, 20/16 squared is something like a fall height of 1.5 metres. So an ouchie, but not critical if restrained in a modern car.

What are two reasons we shouldn't be concerned about how expensive it is to estimate small proportions?

(a) We usually only care about whether the proportion is, say, < 5 %, not whether it is specifically 2 % or 3 %. (b) When looking at rare cases, differences in opinion about what counts as one of those rare cases adds more uncertainty than the sampling error alone.

Especially the latter point is insightful in that typical Deming way.

Which are the three most common PostgreSQL objects?

Tables, views, and sequences.

What are two examples of prompts that elicit verbal elaborations?

"What is your goal?" or "How did you know that?" or "How did that go?" or "Is that normal?"

Some of my favourite questions when watching someone else do something! (But if you're trying to record how they're doing something, you should ask those questions only later, once they're done. They're the kind of questions that are likely to change someone's approach to the problem they're solving.)

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