XKCD 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today

One of the all-time great XKCDs. It’s amazing that “check whether the photo is of a bird” has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, or CLIP, or ResNet+ImageNet among others).

How to Make Viral 1950’s Super Panavision 70 Videos – Full Tutorial – YouTube

Ondertussen al wat verouderd, maar het blijft grappig.

Resurrecting an Etymology: Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord,’ and Possible Wider Connections

Examined here is the possible cognancy of Homeric Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord’ and their respective feminine derivatives (w)ánassa ‘queen’ and nāśi ‘lady.’ ‘King/lord’ may reflect a PIE *wen-h2ǵ-t ‘warlord’ or the like. Further afield is the possibility that a Proto-Tocharian *wnātkä might have been borrowed into Ancient Chinese and been the ancestor of Modern Chinese wáng ‘king.’

Fraud, So Much Fraud | Science | AAAS

Charles Piller and the team here at Science dropped a big story yesterday morning, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should. It’s about Eliezer Masliah, who since 2016 has been the head of the Division of Neuroscience in the National Institute on Aging (NIA), and whose scientific publication record over at least the past 25 years shows multiple, widespread, blatant instances of fraud. There it is in about as few words as possible.

Notion’s Mid-Life Crisis | JJinuxLand

Notion is zijn weg kwijt.

Er was een tijd dat ik het elke dag, heel de dag gebruikte. Nu gaan er weken voorbij voor ik het nog eens bovenhaal, en dan is het eigenlijk ook maar voor zaken waar ik even goed Obsidian voor zou kunnen gebruiken.

RafaelGB/obsidian-db-folder: Obsidian Plugin to Allow Notion like database based on folders

Van Obsidian gesproken: dbfolder doet voor een groot deel wat Notion databases doet.

Gedoe en gepruts soms, en natuurlijk niet zo eenvoudig en proper(achtig) als in Notion, maar does the job, meestal.

I Made a tiny Nostalgic miniature PC for my desk (3D Printed) – YouTube

Ik wil ook zo’n ding.

Oh shit: AI works!

One night, while wrapping up a detailed ticket, a crazy thought hit me: “Hey, why not toss this whole ticket into ChatGPT and see what happens?”

And holy cow, it actually worked! The AI churned out the entire solution. Sure, there was a tiny hiccup – a small bug – but it was a breeze to fix.

I completed the entire task in just 30 minutes, including the time spent writing the ticket. By comparison, I estimate it would have taken Sam at least 4 hours, potentially up to 8 hours if the pull request required revisions. The efficiency gain was significant.

This was my “Oh shit, AI works” moment.

Vangelis, the Best Music Composer of the 20th Century? – YouTube

Veel te lange documentaire, soms naast de kwestie, maar Vangelis is en blijft een baas.

Vangelis was arguably the most prolific film composer of all time. His music for Blade Runner is among the most influential scores ever written. His Oscar-winning theme for Chariots of Fire is used for sporting events around the world. This all-encompassing film details his influences and inspiration with many of the most influential stars.

BBC Sound Effects

The extensive archive was initially opened to the public in 2018, with around 16,000 sounds initially made available online. It has now more than doubled in size to stock over 33,000 samples, which are available to download for free as a WAV or MP3 file. The BBC’s library features recordings dating back to the 1920s, and comprises sounds made in the broadcaster’s dedicated studio for use in specific BBC programmes, as well as field recordings captured out in the world. It’s divided into categories such as ‘Nature’, ‘Transport’, ‘Sport’, ‘Crowds’, ‘Footsteps’ and more.

Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth — Unfashionable

YC is no longer an exclusive club where membership signals legitimacy—it’s becoming a broad index of tech startups.

YC used to be the Harvard for entrepreneurship, now it’s more like Squidward community college.

The Fight to Save Chile’s Glorious White Strawberry – Gastro Obscura

Ask about the frutilla blanca anywhere else in Chile and people blink their eyes, bewildered, especially if they’re under the age of 40. Despite its storied history in the nation, this native product is now on the brink of extinction. You can barely find it outside of the two regions where it’s still grown. It’s ironic, because the offspring these white strawberries spawned is everywhere: the large red strawberry that went off and conquered the world.