Getting weather data from my Acurite sensors was shockingly easy
I’ve had a Pi and SDR earmarked for ‘getting weather data from my weather station’ for a long time now. I don’t know why I waited so long, because it was shockingly easy. I have a Acurite 5-in-1 weather station (with separate lightning detector) mounted about 15′ in the air in my back yard. It […]
BYU study: Why some people choose not to use artificial intelligence
A photo illustration created by AI depicting someone skeptical of using AI.Photo by Nate Edwards/BYU Photo Generative artificial intelligence is everywhere, but not everyone is ready to embrace it — and it’s not just people who fear that AI might replace their jobs or that ChatGPT will become sentient and take over the world. In […]
Soldier’s wrist purse discovered at Roman legionary camp
Archaeologists have discovered a fragment of a soldier’s wrist purse at the site of a temporary Roman camp in South Moravia, Czech Republic. The camp was established by the 10th Legion, who was stationed in the area between AD 172 and 180 during the Marcomannic Wars, a campaign against the Germanic Marcomanni, the Quadi, and […]
BusyBeaver(6) Is Quite Large
For overdetermined reasons, I’ve lately found the world an increasingly terrifying and depressing place. It’s gotten harder and harder to concentrate on research, or even popular science writing. Every so often, though, something breaks through that wakes my inner child, reminds me of why I fell in love with research thirty years ago, and helps […]
Is being bilingual good for your brain?
Reams of papers have been published on the cognitive advantages of multilingualism. Beyond the conversational doors it can open, multilingualism is supposed to improve “executive function”, a loose concept that includes the ability to ignore distractions, plan complex tasks and update beliefs as new information arrives. Most striking, numerous studies have even shown that bilinguals […]
Jane Street’s sneaky retention tactic
Hedge funds will go to great lengths in pursuit of profits, whether it is by counting cars in satellite photos of parking lots or shipping gold across the Atlantic. Building a compiler—a piece of software that turns human-written code into programs a computer can execute—for your homegrown language? That still raises eyebrows.
Restoring a ZX Spectrum+ Toastrack
I talk a lot about Commodore machines in this blog; they left a bigger dent in me growing up, but like most kids of my generation living in Portugal in the 80s, the first computers I played with were actually Sinclairs—first my friend’s ZX81 and then a ZX Spectrum 48K that my parents offered me. […]
Parsing JSON in Forty Lines of Awk
JSON is not a friendly format to the Unix shell — it’s hierarchical, and cannot be reasonably split on any character (other than the newline, which is not very useful) as that character might be included in a string. There are well-known tools such as jq that let you correctly parse JSON documents in the […]
Addictions Are Being Engineered
How silicon valley is putting a price tag on your attention – and relationships Every few months, a new social platform promises to “fix” the problems with existing ones. BeReal would bring authenticity. Clubhouse would bring intimacy. Each follows the same trajectory: pure intentions, venture funding, growth pressure, algorithmic manipulation, inevitable corruption. I know because […]
The Coming Storm: How Mediterranean Water Collapse Could Reshape Britain
Andreas Gregoriou stands in what used to be his family’s vineyard outside Limassol, Cyprus. The January sun beats down on cracked earth where grapevines once grew. His grandfather planted these vines in 1952. His father expanded the vineyard in the 1980s. Now, Andreas is being paid €42,000 by the government to let it die. “They […]