malvasia bianca

I can’t remember exactly what prompted me to subscribe to The Bill Simmons Podcast. I listened to a few random episodes a few years back when Ben Thompson was a guest on the podcast; those were interesting enough, but they wouldn’t have been enough to get me to add it to my podcast player. If […]

A random observation: I sometimes see arguments between groups of people about a situation where A harms B. (Or where A does something B doesn’t like, but whether the question of whether A is harming B is contested.) One side is focusing on A doing wrong; the other side is focusing on things B could […]

The oldest post on this blog was published twenty years ago yesterday. A quite different blog back then: shorter and more frequent posts, and while the video game posts were still there, they weren’t nearly as dominant. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to move a little bit back in that direction! Though, […]

I gave a talk at work recently riffing on Test-Driven Development, Getting Things Done, and what they have in common, and I think it went pretty well? So I got permission to distribute the slides externally; I put in pretty thorough speaker’s notes, so hopefully they make sense without the recording. Anyways, here are the […]

(Warning: this is a long post, even by my standards.) For several years (a decade?) now, my energy levels during the day have been pretty bad. A few years back, I decided to try to do something about it. Things still aren’t completely fixed, but they’re significantly better, and I also have a better understanding […]

Another blog post in the category of “stuff that I probably should not blog about”, but it’s been bouncing around in my head. So: here are two things that I like about capitalism.   The first one: I like the way capitalism acknowledges risk up front. Over the years, I’ve gotten more and more convinced […]

I broke a bone in my hand at the start of August. I was out jogging during my lunch break at work, and I tripped somehow; I’m not actually sure what happened, maybe there was some uneven sidewalk pavement, or something? At any rate, my toe got caught and my whole body pivoted around it, […]

I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts; honestly, if I had to name a single most important app on my phone, I’d probably pick the podcast app I use? Which, for most of a decade, has been Castro. Originally I started using it because I really liked their visual design; and then they […]

Since the discussion around the effects of generative models doesn’t seem to be going away, I figured I’d give in and write about my point of view of this stuff. Specifically, I wanted to talk about how I see some of the tradeoffs involved.   The first is the question of how much to worry […]

My body is decently flexible in some way; but my hamstrings aren’t one of those ways, it’s been decades since I’ve been able to touch my toes. (At least when standing; I could barely touch the toes on one foot if sitting with only one leg extended.) Which didn’t seem like the greatest thing, and […]

One more thing that I was thinking about when switching away from Twitter: what Mastodon server should I choose? And what are the criteria I should use to make that decision?   My first question: do I care about the local timeline of the server in question? Mastodon lets you watch a firehose of all […]

One problem with being unusually behind on my list of blog posts to write is that, sometimes, events in the world overtake my posts before I actually write them. I normally solve this problem by not writing about events in the world in the first place; but, a few months back (when Elon Musk bought […]

Over the last half decade, there was a lot of argument about what sort of speech is acceptable on Twitter. And not just acceptable in terms of “a good idea” versus “a bad idea”, but in terms of whether or not a given type of speech should be banned from Twitter. Some of the speech […]

A heads up to folks that I’ve stopped using Twitter (or at least stopped posting on Twitter, for now I’m still reading it) and I’ve started using Mastodon. I’ll give more details in a later post, but I figured I should at least get an announcement out. I’m at @davidcarlton@mastodon.social if you want to follow […]

(Because this post is about cohost, I typed it up there; here’s the link to it on cohost.) I’ve been signed up for cohost for about four weeks now; what’s surprised me the most is how unlike Twitter it feels. And I don’t mean that in terms of me following a much smaller number of […]

One thing that watching our response to COVID brought home to me is that dealing with randomness is really hard, in lots of different ways. Some ways in which that played out: Group randomness versus individual randomness There are lots of actions that you can take that make a difference in terms of your chance […]

I’ve been working part time (three days a week) for most of a year, so I figure that it’s about time for an update. My top-level take: definitely the right choice. I’m glad I’m not working full time (whether at my current employer or a different employer); but also I’m glad that I’m working a […]

As I mentioned a few months back, I’ve been spending a lot of my podcast listening time going through Friends at the Table, first their regular episodes and then their Patreon stuff. And now I’m done with those shows as well, or at least all of those shows that I’m interested in listening to. Which […]

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I’m now working part time. Which, of course, raises the question: what should I do on my off days? The list of options that I’ve come up with: Goof off. Get more serious about Tai Chi and/or Nei Gong Spend more time improving my music skills. Spend more […]

The company that I’ve been employed by for the last ten years went public last September, and the lockup of my shares expired in March. So that meant that one large source of leverage my employer had over me has disappeared, and the amount of money we had saved changed significantly; that change in leverage […]