SILT#00169: Both 'pyrex' and 'PYREX' are two licensed trademarks owned by the same company for a brand of cookware, but which operate in different regional segments. Which is quite interesting that you can sublicense a brand name by case differently between regions

SILT#00168: There are two points that may make `Promise.try` interesting to try out over `try...catch` in JS code: 1. both sync and async functions can be passed in, and it will be treated asynchronously; and 2. catching errors can be handled with one location rather than two (in the `.catch`)

SILT#00167: There's a weird edge case when using HTML popovers on a transparent window (like in Tauri), where a cutout appears of the popover if the transparent window is resized. To work around it, after a resize, hide the popover and resized again slight so it triggers the window to refresh state

SILT#00166: The continuum hypothesis supposes that ℵ_1 = 2 ^ ℵ_0, where the power-set of Aleph null yields Aleph one. If we use this construction inductively (start with Aleph null and take power-sets for the next number), this gives a new set of infinite cardinality numbers called the Beth numbers

SILT#00165: Consider how we might add a tagging system, a many-to-one connection. This article provides three ways to do within a database. Starts with one table holding all tags together, then two tables associating tags with key, and finally three tables, where data is associated with tagmap table

SILT#00163: I've listened to so many music and media analysis that any time I'm listening to music, even unfamiliar ones, I can imagine a whole scene where it would slot into. Now the fun part is when listening to mashups, which produces some wild combinations

SILT#00163: I always have to do a double take when scaling sprites in Unity using Pixels per Unit. One way to remember it is to think of it like an inverted zoom, larger number means smaller sprite (more pixels needed to take up one unit), while smaller number is larger sprite (fewer pixels needed)

SILT#00162: No matter how many times I see it, I am always surprised how big the nasal cavity is and how close it makes the brain to the nose. I keep thinking there is a nerve that closes the gap, but nope, there's just the olfactory bulb (which is directly part of the brain) hanging out in the nose

SILT#00161: One thing to watch out for when making a puzzle game is the Einstellung effect. Solving puzzles with complex answers makes it easier to keep reaching for complex answers when a simpler one may be possible. Unless you subvert this as part of the puzzle, make sure to have new people try it

SILT#00160: ANF (A-normal form) is an intermediate representation (like CSP or SSA), where in this programming style, at a high-level, enforces that every arg to a func be a simple values (halt on eval) and any non-trivial result of the call be bound to a var. Useful for manually defining each step

SILT#00159: How many nesting of options of booleans can fit within a byte in Rust. It's 254, due to how Rust can niche optimize: it knows that booleans can only be 0 or 1, so it can fill in the rest of the bit patterns with all the None variants. Now, if you nest this, be sure to have flatten handy

SILT#00158: I know Halloween has passed, but I stumbled across ghost and zombie marks as kinds of trademarks. Ghost marks are trademarks that shadow ordinary marks but aren't going to be used, while zombie marks are trademarks that were resurrected after being abandoned, often for name-recognition

SILT#00157: Today, I realized there's an another way to add async commands in Tauri by adding `(async)` after the command attribute. This lead me down Rust's proc macro system, where I found that attribute macros pass two token trees, one for attribute args, and the other for the item being modified

SILT#00156: In GitHub Actions, we can use `workflow_dispatch` to manually trigger a workflow. Also, we can add `inputs` beneath it to allow easy customization of items passed to a workflow (like adding separate channels or selecting features). This can be helpful in augment the automatic workflows

SILT#00155: One thing to be mindful of is knowing which coordinate system values are operating in, especially if they have the same data types. Similar to the Mars Climate Orbiter error, having the wrong coordinates lead to wrong results. May be better to make a new type to prevent any confusion

SILT#00154: I remember coming across this website once before, but now that I am working on a project using hexagonal grids, I rediscovered it, and I'll leave it here for others. It's a really good deep-dive on how hex grids works and how you can code them up: www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexago...

SILT#00153: Reading through grocery receipt had me go down a rabbit hole of looking at how food is taxed. Generally, for most states barring some exceptions, regular grocery items are exempt from sales tax, while any hot, prepared, or ready to eat foods are fully taxable

SILT#00152: Botulinum toxin is produced by the spores of C. botulinum. The spores themselves are heat-resistant, but the toxin itself denatures at a sustained 5 minutes of around 85°C (185°F), so foods may be recoverable by heating up to it (though it may be better not to risk it if it can be done)

SILT#00151: I dislike that "deadline mode" is unreasonably effective at getting me to put in the work. Even fake deadlines can't compete with the real thing. The only thing that really helps prevent overburdening it is making the smallest possible deadline that's manageable to get started with

SILT#00150: Lectio brevior potior and lectio difficilior potior are two Latin phrases that represent two possible ways of resolving discrepancies between texts, one where "shortest reading is stronger" and the other where "most difficult reading is stronger" respectively

SILT#00149: Consider the words uxorilocal and virilocality. They're fancy words for matrilocal and patrilocal, which might still feel fancy, but they mean which parents a married couple either lives near (wife's or husband's respectively). Neolocal is for living with neither, being away from both

SILT#00148: There are more games to game theory than just prisoner's dilemma; one such is the stag hunt. It's very similar to the prisoner's dilemma, but with a payoff matrix that has two Nash equilibria (both co-op or both defect). This focuses on trust. Here's a cool post that illustrates this:

SILT#00147: Custom labelers are an amazing way to help provides some additional context to your Bluesky browsing by providing small labels to a post with some information. Consider subscribing to this one for helping annotate when AI images are used bsky.app/profile/aimo...

SILT#00146: Windows, by default, has a max path limit of 260 characters, which can be a pain if you have a dependency which has a dependency that needs to make a file, but fails to without a clear reason why. Two ways to fix it: update a Windows registry value, or move the project up to shorter path

SILT#00145: Here is a website that visualize chord dissonance in a 3D plot. Might take some inspiration from this for embedding my own dynamic plot. Also had some fun creating some interesting sound like a weird train crossing bell. Link to the site: aatishb.com/dissonance/

SILT#00144: Know how to fork a dependency should it be needed, for it opens up the ability to make changes that work. Know how to integrate it, so it may serve as a new foundation for the work. Know how to contribute back, for that will help the original flourish and bring the work to others

SILT#00143: The more I dig into Tailwind, the more power it seems to be. Consider how `peer` works. It simplifies the sibling selector in CSS to apply styles based on items that occur before the current. If you want to differentiate multiple peers, use `peer/name` with the name you want to give it

SILT#00142: Sometimes, text to speech overfits to hilarious results. Consider having it read the Wikipedia article on Isomaltooligosaccharide (shorten to IMO). This leads to fun sentences like: "Therefore, some IMO preparations are only partially digested in the upper gastrointestinal tract."

SILT#00141: If you've ever needed to be on multiple Git branches at once, you can consider using git worktrees. A worktree is a copy of a checked out branch which can be looped back to the original branch after you finish. Could be useful for parallel features that don't require each other to work

SILT#00140: Continuing the floating point trend, there is an alternative called posits, which reduces the number of NaNs and tries to keep things accurate when it is closer to 0. They fall under unums (universal numbers), which provides others ways to represent real numbers

SILT#00139: Brain 16-bit floating point (bf16) is an alternate half-precision floating point number. It keeps the total exponent bits the same as the 32-bit floats, which reduces the fractional bits. This trades off representability for preserving the range, enabling faster conversion with f32

SILT#00138: Something that's obvious now when working with async-await and stdio is making sure you know what you are waiting for. In tokio, make sure not to wait on the async stdin if you expect to use it multiple times. It may hang, waiting for an EOF that may never come, blocked from moving on

SILT#00137: A code where the first letter of every line (or some first unit of text for every repeating structure) is called acrostic. There is also telestic, which is the same for the last letter of a line (or last unit of text per structure). A cool thing to see if such a pattern starts to appear

SILT#00136: For all the times I've gone to MDN, I've never looked into the tools page until today. There is the main JS playground, but it also hosts a bunch of tools to help with CSS, like creating color mixes, and generators for box shadows and borders. Here's one tool with border image generator

SILT#00135: A subtle thing that might get you when working with arrays in spreadsheets, make sure to hold down Shift when dragging formulas that use arrays, since otherwise, it will treat the items like a value, which can lead to some cryptic errors

SILT#00134: A quick note for anyone working with Deno TypeScript Jupyter notebooks in VSCode, make sure to add a deno.json file next to the notebook (even an empty one) so that the VSCode Jupyter extension know to use Deno's version of TypeScript. It will give intellisense for more modern JS feature

SILT#00133: If a gap between two teeth is too narrow to move out after flossing, go instead for pulling the full length forward. While it makes the floss a bit more slippery, it's much better than having a piece get stuck between the teeth and spending nearly 15 minutes trying to yank it out

SILT#00132: The Svelte site has some new interesting items to it. First is an official packages page for hand-picked Svelte packages. The second is a new documentation page on the official Svelte MCP (still in progress). Thanks to the Svelte team and all the amazing contributors

SILT#00131: There is something so interesting about watching a show with others than alone. The big thing I find is looking for how others react, whether certain beats hit home or strike out, picking apart how others beyond me feel. A good exercise for any experience makers to watch how others watch

SILT#00130: Here are some numbers of the day: 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. These are magic numbers (for physics) representing very stable arrangement of protons or neutrons. 126 and others above are hypothetical, pointing to possible stable elements, an island of stability among unstable elements

SILT#00129: For organizing the dynamics in small world networks, we can use dual-phase evolution to model it. Basically, networks/graphs operate in disconnected mode, where local interactions happen, and connected mode, in which all nodes are globally connected. Could be useful for simulations

SILT#00128: LLM tool use is actually much simpler than I thought. You would think that for some model to take an action, it would need to have some kind of connector for a tool to work, but really its just fancy text processing on the output to use, generally in a format like JSON or XML

SILT#00127: Pompeii was a Roman city that was buried during the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79AD. Pompei is the modern Italian city which contains the ruins of Pompeii. It's a bit unintuitive that the new city has one less "i" than the old one, but now we know the difference

SILT#00126: Mereology describes the study of parts to their whole. There are two terms within this study: (atomless) gunk (all objects are made of parts all the way down) and (worldless) junk (all objects make up wholes all the way up). Should our world be both, then we live in a hunky world

SILT#00125: In Astro, you can not only import UI framework files (.jsx, .svelte, .vue) and other .astro file, but also HTML files directly. Which, while unlike to be used in most frontend dev work, might be useful as a step to breaking down any pre-made HTML items into partials for later use

SILT#00124: A ceasefire, armistice, and peace treaty, while similar in halting a war, do different things. Ceasefires are usually temporary stop to fighting, while armistice is a more formal end to fighting but not necessarily an end to war. A peace treaty provides a more formal end to a war

SILT#00123: Sometimes an LLM spirals when faced with good advice not applicable to a situation. An agent went in circle in a Rust file, making items mut and then removing it later, guided only by error help notes. Turns out, it was a tangentially related issue with acquiring RwLock (write, not read)

SILT#00122: Here are two small Mac keyboard shortcuts I stumbled across: (1) Cmd+L when done in the Mac Terminal (and most likely others) will clear just the previous line (Ctrl+L does a full clear), (2) Cmd+Tilde will switch between windows of the same app (Cmd+Tab would switch between apps)

SILT#00121: One of the hardest part about building C++ bindings for Rust is figuring out the correct CMake incantation to get it to build, especially on Windows, from the outside. LLMs barely help out, the best I could do is manually compile step-by-step to see where it goes wrong

SILT#00120: Been watching some shows about WW2 and saw medics often pour white powder on wounds. That powder is sulfanilamide, an antibiotic used to help reduce bacterial growth until more proper health care could be given (if possible). Nowadays, penicillin is more widely used for general use