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.
Mario colours and engine-off procedures
We do a nerdy dive into Mario title colours and marry them with entropy. Then we rehearse the first step when an engine quits in a single-engine aircraft. In case our children pull the throttle when we're on the simulator, or something.
Sigh... monty hall. And functional programming!
We learn an intuition for the Monty Hall problem that is actually intuitive, in contrast to all other intuitions. At least I think so. We also look at why functional programmers get by with less formal verification.
Stock market index value and lean development
We look at the risk-adjusted returns of stock investments and how they compare to other instruments. We also learn a neat way to phrase the purpose of lean development.
Insurance and the deadly effect of speed
We learn how to make insurance decisions and we get our yearly safe driving tip, where we look at the mathematical shape of the number of deadly accidents as a function of increased road speed.
Org parsing, shorthand generation, and paired comparisons
I get annoyed by a breakage in Org which turns out to be reasonable. We look at a swoosh generated by JavaScript. And we learn how paired comparisons get their power.
Haskell and SQLite for the win, starring corecursion
We learn how to make a side project low maintenance with clever use of boring technology. We also get an aimless look at how to achieve corecursion with foldr.
Entropic Thoughts Premium Newsletter #5
We get a hint of my latest obsession (text adventures), learn a thing or two about Haskell and the EA movement, and get a review of Code That Fits In Your Head, a book with a good premise but which falls a little flat.
Group decision-making and writing time
We get a free, easy-to-use tool to decide on things anonymously in groups. We learn a little about the time required to read and write a page of technical text.
Mobile-friendly sidenotes, and distance estimation with milliradians
We learn how to make mobile-friendly sidenotes without requiring JavaScript (though requiring some HTML templating.) We also learn to estimate distances with no external tools but our hands and a little mental arithmetic!