Weekly Shaarli

All links of one week in a single page.

Week 24 (June 12, 2023)

Everything Must Be Paid for Twice

I read this article when it was trending on Hacker News in 2022. It changed my consumption habits (both in terms of buying and using) a lot. Whatever I want to buy or consume, I think about the benefit it brings me versus the cost - in terms of money, my time, and mental effort. My sense of "value" has changed a lot.

Someone in the comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36353272) talks about there being a third price - the cost of disposal. I couldn't agree more. This has bothered me - I tend to get attached to possessions. Every time I move and have to make the decision to throw away familiar things, I fall into depression for weeks.

Announcement: /r/rust will be joining the blackout on June 12th. Here is our statement. : rust

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Enshittification is the new word I learned today. Beyond that, it's a really nicely written post against Reddit enshittification and advocate for diversification.

The Secret Sauce behind 100K context window in LLMs: all tricks in one place | by Galina Alperovich | May, 2023 | GoPenAI

A sundry of optimization techniques to transformer models to reduce the computation complexity associated with longer context.

Litotes - Wikipedia

A figure of speech that uses negation to convey understatement. For example, one may say "It's not a masterpiece." instead of "It's mediocre."

Getting Started - Litestream

SQLite replication through a s3-compatible storage. This seems like a good enough solution to many use cases while being a lot simpler.

Where does the french negation(ne..pas) came from? : French

In short, "ne" is the negation word, but "pas" originally means "step" (or "a small step"). "Je ne mange pas." originally mean "I didn't eat a little". The form then evolve into standard way of expression negation.

This discussion leads me to this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_Cycle.

Jespersen's Cycle describe the historical development of the expression of negation: from a simple pre-verbal marker of negation, through a discontinuous marker (elements both before and after the verb) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original pre-verbal marker.

It's interesting to note that English underwent the similar transition (e.g. "I ate not today") but now it ended up back to the first stage.