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

Solving Systems of Equations Faster

As reader Andrew neatly summarised it, "you learn one way that's cumbersome, and one that's mysterious wizardry". Let's demystify a little of the mystery, shall we?

Full article (1–5 minute read): Solving Systems of Equations Faster

Laws of Succession

I came across a common misunderstanding of frequentism so I had to debunk it. Along the way, we learn a useful forecasting trick!

Full article (4–9 minute read): Laws of Succession

Flashcard of the week

For a brief time a couple years ago I played the tactical shooter Squad. I'm not sure what made me enjoy it, but the sound design and the landscapes of the prettier maps were certainly a large part of it.

For the game to be fun, though, one must play in a good squad, and a good squad requires a good squad leader, and most are not very good. So I often ended up volunteering to be a squad leader.

One of the jobs of a squad leader is to relay communication between one's own squad and the rest of the team, and vice versa. At the time I looked up some communication conventions used by real armed forces. Here's a flashcard that resulted from that.

In what order is information given when calling out a target?

A target can be anything one wants to call attention to. There are four pieces of information that communicate the position of the target fairly well:

• The type of thing one is looking for ("balloon", "boat", "tree", etc.)
• A reference point which is close to the thing and either (a) very obvious and easy to find, or (b) agreed-upon in advance to be used as a reference point. ("The green building", "the red car", "the big rock", "the pier", etc.)
• The distance ("30 metres", "45 mils", "120 mils", etc.) and direction ("left of", "in front of", etc.) from the reference point.

There is a typical order to these pieces of information which is used in the Swedish military (I think?) and this flashcard asks about that order.

The answer is

(1) reference point, (2) direction, (3) distance, (4) type

so it might sound like "Park bench, to the left, five metres, plastic bag. Go put it in the rubbish bin."

Longest premium newsletter ever

The newest premium newsletter went out last weekend to great fanfare. It was so long it had to be split into three emails for deliverability reasons. This is what it contained:

• Part 1:
  • A brief review of 2025 for the blog (2 minute read)
  • Some personal notes on ZFS mirroring (3 minute read)
  • Book recommendation: Vitön by Uusma (1 minute read)
• Part 2:
  • Pathfinding using multi-criteria shortest path (25 minute read)
• Part 3:
  • Forecasts for the ACX 2026 prediction contest (35 minute read)

Subscribers also get access to all past newsletters containing various guides, book recommendations, and links to fun games. (Did you know I have three times now managed to copy the daily Morsle word at 40 WPM? Insane!)

You might not think any of the above is interesting, but you'd still like to support the blog. You can do so for $4 per month, cancelable any time with no questions asked. To upgrade, find the appropriate link below.

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