Here, you will mainly find me writing about whatever interests me at the moment. Since I am a predictably simple man, most of my posts are about sports, science, and programming, with an occasional foray into politics if I'm really bored. My favorite posts include:
The 2024 election just happened, marking 20 years since the first election I voted in when I was 19 years old, the 2004 election. I thought it might be interesting to think back to my political views in 2004 and consider what changed.
Does 2024 Jeremy still agree with 2004 Jeremy, or was 2004 Jeremy young and naive?
Have we made any progress, or are we still fighting some of the same challenges today?
And are my political concerns from 2004 even still relevant today?
Coincidentally, all the mistakes favored blue states. 3 more electoral votes for blue states, and 3 fewer for red states.
This means that on election night, if Kamala wins between 269 and 272 electoral votes, the census miscount altered the result of the election. A win/tie would instead turn into a loss/tie! According to Nate Silver's latest model, there's about a 3% chance that will happen.
The "conspiracy" part depends on whether this was intentional. There's no evidence of an actual conspiracy, of course. Regardless, it is true that this "mistake" from the census gives a nice little boost to the Democrats.
Another caveat is that if the electoral vote distribution was different, the candidates might be campaigning differently, and there might not be a 3% chance of these specific situations happening. But it still wouldn't be 0%!
People are worried about carbon emissions and energy usage and shit like that. But AGI is (probably) coming. And AGI doesn't just require software and hardware, it requires energy. Lots of it.
Even if we had done smart things in energy policy, such as continuing to build nuclear power plants so that we were running almost entirely on clean energy now, we'd still be fucked just because of the coming massive increase in energy demand.
Regardless of whether AGI leads to positive or negative outcomes for humanity, you don't want someone else to get it before you, do you? The advantage of being first to AGI would probably be even larger than being first to nuclear weapons or any other transformative technology in history. So any corporation/government with any reasonable amount of resources is going to be scrambling to be first.
And that means they'll be using whatever energy they have. Coal, oil, natural gas, all will be sacrified to manifest the Sand God.
ChatGPT. Cool stuff, right? Very fun. Kind of scary too. That's the naive impression you get from playing around with it, or reading about other people's experiences. It's cute until the easily-confused chat bot says "I will not harm you unless you harm me first".
But can a fancy Markov chain actually be scary? I mean it's just predicting the next word, right?
I am working on a side project that makes heavy use of the Canvas API and I came across OffscreenCanvas which seemed to have some compelling features. Wouldn't it be nice for performance to do all of my rendering in a web worker? Well I gave it a try, but wound up not going forward with it due to several reasons:
There are three major hypotheses for the origin of COVID:
Natural zoonosis - jump from animals to humans, such as at the Wuhan wet market
Lab leak of engineered virus - leak of an engineered virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) through gain-of-function research
Other WIV-related origin - non-engineered virus exposed to humans somehow through the activities of the WIV (such as a lab leak, or infecting someone out collecting samples for WIV in some bat cave)
#1 is the mainstream opinion, advocated by most prominent scientists and government officials.
#2 is treated by some as a conspiracy theory, but certainly seems like less of a crazy conspiracy theory than it did a couple years ago.
#3 is kind of mundane compared to #2, so maybe gets less attention, but IMHO it is very plausible.
Last week I gave a talk at PWA Summit 2022 which was a purely online conference. It was pretty fun. It was a lot of firsts for me:
First talk on a non-science topic
First talk at a programming conference
First talk at a virtual conference
First talk in many years!
The topic was client side storage in web apps, which was of course motivated by my work on Basketball GM and other games which store tons of data client side. It is frustrating how difficult that is, and how easy it is to experience data loss. But as I go over in my talk, there are at least some reasons to be optimistic for the future!
If you're interested in more, here are my slides and here is a video of my presentation:
I recently uploaded my wedding photos to Facebook. Why Facebook? Cause there are a lot of pictures with a lot of different people, and I remembered that Facebook has some nifty auto tagging feature that would save a lot of time.
And after uploading the photos, what I found was that... I really haven't uploaded photos in a long time. Apparently they made the auto tagging opt-in in 2019 (of course most users will never bother to opt in) and removed it completely in 2021. Why? The most concrete answer in that blog post is:
Why make these Covid posts? Isn't the Internet saturated with hot takes already? Am I really adding anything here?
I think the only reason for me to write about Covid is so I have a record to look back on what I thought at the time, which is kind of interesting for me, but maybe not so interesting for you :)
And what I think now is that the pandemic in the US is about over.
I was playing around with this for use in my video games which store a ton of data in IndexedDB (too much to read into memory at once) and thought maybe some other people might be interested in it too, since I haven't seen any other discussion of this topic.
The goal here is to move data from IndexedDB to a file without reading all of the data into memory at once. If you are able to read your data into memory, you can create a blob and use URL.createObjectURL to download it to a file - but that's old news. This is about streaming.
The building blocks of this are two fairly new web APIs: the Streams API and the File System Access API. The File System Access API is currently only supported in recent versions of Chrome, but it's the only way to stream data to a file.
What about getting data out of IndexedDB? The IndexedDB API predates streams, so it has no built-in support for that. But it does have cursors, which allow you to iterate over data in your database, which is basically the same thing.