thinking out loud
Where the light is coldest, and an argument has to survive being looked at in it.
It answers one narrow question — how surprising this data would look if nothing at all were going on — and we have spent a century hearing it answer a different one. The fix is not a stricter threshold, because the threshold was never the part that was lying. It is remembering which question we asked.
What happened, who wrote it down, and what the writing quietly left out.
Nepal's southern edge was described in prose for decades before anyone walked it with a chain, and the survey inherited the prose's ambiguities rather than settling them. I keep finding that the drawing is downstream of the wording — and I keep having to move my own dates when a new letter turns up.
Opinions held at reading pace, and stated as opinions.
The 2015 constitution drew seven provinces rather faster than it produced anyone whose career depended on those provinces working. That is not an argument against them. It is an argument about sequence, and I am genuinely unsure whether the sequence could have run the other way.
The same thinking out loud, said rather than written.
How NOT to Store PasswordsForty minutes on why the obvious way to keep a password is the wrong way, and why every improvement on it was also, eventually, the wrong way.Watch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)
Sleep is your superpowerThe talk that made me stop treating sleep as the thing you cut when the work runs long. Mostly it is an argument about what counts as evidence for a habit.Watch on YouTube (opens in a new tab)