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The computers of yesteryear had this little feature known as blinking LED lights 🔆. They also had this other feature called noisy disks 💾 and loud fans 🪭. Uh wait. Features? Why “features” and not “annoyances”?!Front panel of a common PC case in the late 1990s. My Pentium MMX 166 was hosted in one of these.You see, ...

So, there’s no DAC on the ESP32-S3.You would think this would be a bit of a downer if if you want to get audio out and use an analog amplifier.But it’s actually surprisingly easy to output Pulse Density Modulated audio using Sigma Delta Modulation on the ESP32 and you can recover the audio signal by low pass filteri...

Picture of Fagradalsfjall taken by me in 2021I was recently asked one of the best questions someone who's lived in a bunch of countries could be asked, surprisingly for the first time:What did you learn from each place you lived in? What do people do there that you think could be applied elsewhere?For Iceland, I bel...

I first encountered Professor Wirth remotely in my first college programming course, 203 Intro to Programming. We used Pascal as our programming language. I had been programming for 6 years by then, completely by the seat of my pants, in BASIC, FORTRAN, & 6800 assembly language.Pascal came as a shock. There were lot...

Hey! It’s Sheril Mathews from Leading Sapiens. Welcome to my newsletter where I share essential frameworks to help you get smarter at the game of work. Today we’ll look at metacognition, why it’s important, and resources/strategies to get better at it. This edition is a digest of sorts, where I’ve collected a compre...

Grim experience has taught us that vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 don’t reliably offer durable sterilizing immunity against Covid. A reasonable best-guess might be that each booster dose provides a 50/50 chance of sterilizing immunity that might last as little as six months — especially if major new variants emerge. In...

As I show in The Case Against Education, the main purpose of education is signaling. Specifically, students’ goal is to convince prospective employers that they are smart, hard-working, and conformist. This only works if schools are somehow elitist. The school that equally certifies everyone certifies no one. Admins...

Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonaldaka THE SEA WOLF (nicknamed by Napoleon)born to a broke aristocratic familyjoined the Navy to get some prize money for capturing shipsinstantly got court-martialed for disrespecting his senior officergot his first command in a zone with some action after seven years in the Navy...

This instructive cartoon is from Tom Gauld’s latest, Revenge of the Librarians, published by Drawn and Quarterly, purveyor of fine comix. It’s a perfect New Year’s gift for the bookish, a little too on-the-mark for writers and their bad habits (I blush and squirm re: procrastination), and can be added to Gauld’s boo...

It was on a quiet Saturday. I received a message from the support team, telling me one of our customers has a problem. I decided it was important enough to start debugging. After 15 minutes, I understood the issue - there were some corrupted orders created in our DB, and we needed to delete them. Sounds trivial, rig...

Does this sound familiar? Your sales, marketing, and R&D teams are all in the same room with the business unit head, discussing what to put in the roadmap. The sales team is sure it knows what customers want because it’s constantly talking to its customers about their most pressing needs. The marketing team has ream...

At around the same time as news of the New York Times lawsuit vs OpenAI broke, Reid Southen, the film industry concept artist (Marvel, DC, Matrix Resurrections, Hunger Games, etc.) I wrote about last week, and I started doing some experiments together. We will publish a full report next week, but it is already clear...

Plastic rocks, Credit, NBC NewsIn 2016, a marine ecologist, Ignacio Gestoso, first noticed a new type of rock formation on the Portuguese island of Madeira, the object sprouted on the wave-like trashed rocks like barnacles, in a thin coating of plastic, a formation later known as plasticrust.A year later, Gestoso ca...