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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • It is important to know that these are books for computer scientists more than for software engineers. They are basically mathematics textbooks, about the mathematics of algorithms. They focus on proving theorems rather than implementing useful algorithms.

    There is a book called concrete mathematics that is sort of an introduction to TAOCP. If you’re interested in the basics that may be a good place to start. It has a better title than TAOCP in that it explicitly mentions mathematics, but also an equally bad one because it’s very much theoretical rather than concrete.









  • That’s a misconception. Farmers lobbied heavily against DST. Their work does not abide by the clock; they milk when cows need milking, and they harvest when there’s enough light, no matter what some clock says.

    In Europe, DST as we know it now was first introduced by Germany during WW1 to preserve coal, then abandoned after the war, and widely adopted again in the 70s. In the US it was established federally in the 60s.

    This is all glossing over a lot of regional differences and older history. But yeah, US farmers were very much against the idea.


  • A couple of years ago I started playing through the AC games in order. Like you, I had picked several up for free (starting with Unity when the Notre Dame burned), and completed the collection (except the most recent ones) with nice discounts.

    I liked Syndicate a lot, especially after Unity which I really disliked. The not-quite-steampunk setting appealed to me, and compared to Unity it controlled much better. I absolutely hated the PC controls in Unity.

    I also liked Evie, but honestly could’ve done without Jacob. The sibling idea sounds good on paper, but I don’t think it works. And Jacob is just the less interesting one. I also feel some of the twists in their relationship came out of nowhere.

    Gameplay wise the rope launcher was fun. I disliked how often you’d get into a fight just for walking down a street, and using the rope was a good way to escape or avoid that.

    Looking back at it, I think this is my second favourite AC. The story is much less compelling than several others, but the setting and characters make up for it.



  • 10 years ago is giving Apple too much credit. They were using Intel processors then, ARM now. For now, you can still run Intel applications, but that won’t last much longer.

    More importantly, a 10 year old application is likely to use Carbon instead of Cocoa. Unless it’s an extremely simple application (i.e. hello world), it is unlikely to run.

    Then there’s the depreciation of resource forks, a new filesystem, tons and tons of extra security restrictions, etc.


  • Literal decades ago I bought Sennheiser headphones. They were great. They later orders of magnitude longer than anything I had before. They fit well, and were foldable, making them very compact when not used. And they were cheap too.

    When they finally broke down I naturally wanted Sennheiser again, but they referred me to their new brand Epos. I bought a headset this time, not just headphones. It was a lot more expensive, and I was terribly disappointed by the ergonomics. It’s also rather big, making it unwieldy when not in use. And they broke already, though I was able to fix it - they broke just out of warranty of course.

    Of course this is just one anecdote, but it really does feel like another great brand sold out and became crap.


  • Note that since I don’t use Firefox some of these may actually be available, but I don’t know about them.

    • Mouse gestures.
    • A status bar that stays on screen.
    • The ability to select part of a link’s text.
    • Tab stacking.
    • Tab tiling.
    • Opening a link in either a foreground or background tab. This is available as a toggle in the settings only.
    • Ad block.
    • Spatial navigation.
    • Customisable keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything.

    These are the ones that matter to me, there are more that I don’t personally use.



  • Ever since the first release, I’ve tried Firefox a few times. Each time I was left with a feeling of needing dozens of extensions to get it up to par with the browser I was using at the time (mainly Opera and now Vivaldi). The extensions I found were never customisable enough, and would often break and/or be abandoned after a while.

    Don’t get me wrong: Chrome, IE, Edge, and Safari are worse - each time I used them I got the urge to throw my computer out the window after just a few minutes. But Firefox is just not customisable enough to my liking, and extension are IMO not the answer.