Random

Emily Oster makes another common sense case.

Dostoyevsky's notes from the underground Part 2 Chapter 1 has a story about a long "vendetta" between the underground man and an officer. It was a comedy in how he was so intent on things and cared so much about an imagined slight and prepared and saved and got an advance on his salary and all this preparation... to nudge this guy slightly while walking down the street instead of completely moving aside.

It felt like a comedy to me, where someone uptight got themselves all worked up against someone who didn't hardly even know they existed, become obsessed, and the impression I got is that the officer didn't even know the other guy existed.

The way the Underground Man talks and acts is starting to make me realize he's a nerd, and almost shockingly similar to repressed nerds in the current age.

He is also highly vain about his intelligence, and how well-read he is, and he really feels like that makes him a better person than others. His imaginary feud started up in part because he didn't get into a dramatic fight that would be appropriate for a work of literature, and he blamed not just starting a fight in the bar because it wouldn't be fantastical like his stories.

I'll say I can see why it's considered a masterwork, because while it's investigating a lot of themes, it's also fairly entertaining. The first part of the book could be seen as reasonable within itself, but then you see his actual behavior it's almost cartoonish the way he is.

This article is pretty short and pretty hilarious.

I found this kind of funny...

So I've been looking up VPN stuff, and in the process, I've stumbled on ProtonVPN, from the same people as ProtonMail. They're now offering private cloud storage, and I'm wondering how private is it. e2e means I have to manage the keys on my device right? I don't know how else it could realistically work, if they manage keys, they can access my keys etc?

Oh Mexico, I miss you

A bit pretentious, but I always enjoy Esquire's "Best Bars in America" list

Logging in, seeing who else logged in, to a small community that controls its own destiny.

Lately I've been nostalgic, I guess, about how tech was in the 90s. It was less glamorous, less usable, but also way more human and civil. Everyone was just into technology and sharing cool stuff.

This little corner of the web kind of feels like that sometimes.

Reverse engineering of 3D Pinball for Windows - Space Cadet, a game bundled with Windows. Instructions in the repo for getting this running on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Put this in Random, really hit the feels hard for some childhood memories.

I ponied up and paid for it. I just wish it were based on GPT 4 instead of 3.x.

But still, it's useful enough for me to pay for quick, integrated access to. I could use gpt directly, but I like using Raycast AI because of how easily it integrates into my desktop.

If I just want a little help with q sql join, it's amazing.

I might even have cancelled Copilot, but we get that at work now on the corporate account so 🤷‍♂️