Every time I post a new behavioral experiment, or share a personal resolution of some kind, I get a few emails telling me not to be so strict with myself.

They always say something like “It’s not good to be so hard on yourself!” or “We shouldn’t be forcing ourselves to do things!”

This is a common thing to hear in our improvement-focused culture. I used to think it was a reasonable caution, but now I think it’s generally bad advice.

It seems well-meaning in most cases—people sometimes do go overboard with exercise, frugality, and personal efficiency. But I think it’s much more common for people to go under-board in some or all of those areas, and you can bet the person giving you a hard time is one of them.

We often hear about the importance of “balance” in our self-improvement efforts. But what exactly are we balancing? Good behaviors and bad ones? Are we looking for lives that are equal parts wisdom and recklessness?

Can you imagine someone saying “I don’t think we should force ourselves to brush our teeth every day. You have to live a little!”

Little language inspired by Rust that compiles to Go.

We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

Если код работает, это не значит, что задачу пора закрывать. От двадцати минут, потраченных сверху, вреда не будет — прод не сгорит, менеджер подождет. Зато спасет день коллеги, который вкатывается в проект.

Equity or cash? These days, it seems that working for equity is the way to become a millionaire. I don't think it's true.

Психополитика – это совокупность властных инструментов управления неолиберальным «субъектом достижений», основанных на императиве «ты можешь», самодисциплине и самостимуляции для повышения эффективности в стремлении к новым свершениям, что мотивируется идеей о том, что каждый человек – предприниматель самого себя и жизнь каждого должна стать успешным экономическим проектом.

Егор, психолог, общается с людьми на психологические темы.

A fresh take on typesetting

An index lookup requires three steps: (1) the tree traversal; (2) following the leaf node chain; (3) fetching the table data. The tree traversal is the only step that has an upper bound for the number of accessed blocks—the index depth. The other two steps might need to access many blocks—they cause a slow index lookup.

Fun fact: There is no limit clause in the SQL standard.

Everyone uses limit.
And yet, according to the standard, we should be using fetch

Коллекция интерактивных штуковин. Очень красивое

This site contains writings on the topic of reducing suffering, including the suffering of non-human animals and far-future beings. Most content is by Brian Tomasik, though a few pieces are written by others.

Интерактивная карта, которая показывает изохроны пути от выбранной станции Нью-Йоркского метрополитена, используя данные GTFS из Управления городского транспорта Нью-Йорка

Бесконечно-зумный арт