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:
With Trump's attempt to appoint RFK to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a lot of people are talking about how our foods and medicines are poisining us.
These days, the main food boogeyman seems to be seed oils. Yet if you try to figure out why people are so worked up, you'll find it's basically nonsense. Seed oils seem not particularly different than other oils, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to think they affect the human body differently. It reminds me of like 10-20 years ago when people were similarly worked up about corn syrup. Similarly, if you look into corn syrup, you'll find that it seems not particularly different than other sugars, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to think they affect the human body differently.
Now I love a good conspiracy, and I even believe in some myself, but nearly everything related to obesity seems to be conspiratorial thinking and motivated reasoning. People don't want to accept the most likely truth. And yet, Occam's Razor provides it for us:
People are eating more food, mostly because food is really cheap and delicious these days.
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?
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.