Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #8
For this premium newsletter, I'm trying something new: I'll keep it more informal and conversational. Both to take some pressure off myself, and to see if...
Bind-to-LambdaCase, text adventures, and insurance claim frequencies
Everyone loves Haskell idioms, right? But we also love text adventures. And do you know how often major claims are made against home insurance? Soon you do!
Hazards, accidents, and data processing
We look at some fundamentals of system safety – everyone's favourite overlooked topic. Then we talk information theory because that's always a hoot.
Emacs blogging, ViewPattern argument transform, and named pipes
In case you didn't know, org-babel is amazing. How do we avoid naming intermediary values in code, which we don't care about? And what happens when we open a named pipe for writing?
Getting open data out of ECMWF, drunk driving, and mangled English
We dig into a classic faulty machine translation, we learn how to get some data out of ECMWF, and then drop an unexpected (?) statistic about drunkenness in traffic.
Procedural rhetoric and the accounting equation
We learn what procedural rhetoric is and how it affects the players of games. We also look at how to interpret the expanded accounting equation.
Technology warts are a good thing, actually
We learn why we should cherish the warts of our technologies, and what the difference is between Hong Kong and decimal odds. Plus new premium newsletter!
Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #7
A games-heavy premium newsletter, where we look into MCTS for card-shedding games, teaching children poker, house rules to make Risk more complicated, but! also an approach to teaching children computers.
Nix package debugging, getting correlation from sources of variation
We figure out how to debug a Nix package build. But more excitingly, we also learn how we can measure variation with and without an effect present and get an intuitive sense for what the correlation means!
Search index in Haskell, estimating distances with milliradians
We build a search index in 150 lines of Haskell (not much!) and use clever properties of circles to estimate distances. Also you should subscribe to the church of the radian.
Conditional for pattern, a guessing game tutorial, and the reaction phase
We learn yet another Haskell idiom: the conditional for. We move on to implementing a guessing game in Haskell to understand what is meant by "most code is impure anyway". Finally, we get some wisdom from Ward about the lead time of product development.
Making Haskell hard to read, and information technology
Do idioms make code harder to read? Is information technology plug and play? Betteridge's law gives you the answer: no and no.
Evaluating LLMs on text adventures, what overproduction does to waiting
You get to watch me spend money on API credits as we learn which LLM models can play text adventures. We also get a striking insight into why overproduction is such a insidious waste.
Keyboard review, LLMs play text adventures, and how to do what you don't know
If you're looking for a good virtual Qwerty keyboard for Android, I've got you covered. If you want to know how well LLMs play text adventures, likewise. If you want to know why Toyota focuses on learning, well, read on!
Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #6
Hello, premium subscribers! I have been spending some of my holiday time away from technology, so this premium newsletter concerns itself perhaps more than...
We drive text adventures by Perl script, and we infer Poisson rates backwards
In order to have an LLM play text adventures, we need a way to programmatically drive them. We figure it out! Then we learn how to infer a Poisson rate through just the probability of no event. It's useful, sometimes.
Homeowner's investment investigations and dangerous statistical comparisons
We look at the alternative strategies of paying off the mortgage in full first, or investing all of one's savings and paying off the mortgage in full 20 years later. We also learn what to call the dangerous power of statistics where it lets us draw conclusions without understanding anything.
On creating text adventures and predicting the past with the future
We look at what it takes to create a well-polished text adventure (and get a chance to play mine!) and we get brief but possibly useful advice from Bueno de Mesquita.
Financial calculations in Emacs; fundamental questions of information theory
We learn how to compute with compounding interest in Emacs (and discover that the HP-12c is still better.) The two fundamental questions of information theory also get a mention.
Drones, Hill plots, and optimising the wrong thing
We speculate about the cause of the Chinese push toward better drones. We look at a bunch of Hill plots. We take a hint from Optimising Oracle Performance.