Recently

Reading I’ve not been reading a lot lately, and for some reason a lot of my recent reading seems to have been sci-fi. Well, right now I’m reading yet another sci-fi: Semiosis by Sue Burke. It’s an interesting concept and I’ll probably finish reading it, but…

Cumulative successful days, not streaks

Yesterday on the language learning app I use, I lost a streak of some 70-odd days, because I forgot to open the app. I was busy and simply forgot. And now, what was once a motivating game– to keep the number of consecutive days I’ve reviewed cards on the…

Summary of recent reading(January-March 2021)

* Diaspora by Greg Egan: Hard sci-fi about quite a few things but mostly centering around the nature of consciousness. Although it is about a number of different big ideas and spans a long, long time, the story gels together really well. A lot of the physics and maths stuff flew…

Summary of recent reading(October-December 2020)

* Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks: This is a book about how to tell better stories, by an award-winning Moth storyteller. The book also talks about how to find better stories from your life. Besides surgically analyzing what goes into crafting a great story, the book is filled with great stories from…

Summary of recent reading(July-September 2020)

* Tiassa by Steven Brust: Part of the Vlad Taltos series. This one was really good. It is written from the perspectives of different characters in the story– not first-person like the other books in the series, but the focus shifts between different different people in each chapter, and you get…

Summary of recent reading(April-June 2020)

* Deep Work(Audiobook) by Cal Newport: Somewhat of a re-read. I read most of the book a few years ago but never finished it. Like most of the books in the category, most of the value from reading this book comes just from getting nudged into assessing the things you…

Summary of recent reading(January-March 2020)

* The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha: A career book by a LinkedIn cofounder. Emphasizes networking as an essential tool to advance your career; unsurprisingly advocates using LinkedIn to do this. * Ultralearning by Scott Young: The book describes an approach to learning by immersing yourself in projects…

WebAssembly branching instructions, by example

I have been familiarizing myself with WebAssembly by writing small WAT files and looking at the WASM output for some simple C functions. WebAssembly Studio is a great tool for doing this kind of exploration. Branching in WebAssembly takes some getting used to– for one thing, the target of your…