dev environment

Rick Beato discusses a theory of why some children develop perfect pitch, based on early exposure to music. He draws on his experience with his own children.

Thunderf00t critiques the MIT and Berkeley metal-organic framework device that claims to pull water from air using only solar heating. He argues the energy accounting does not work and that such devices are essentially fancy dehumidifiers.

Jonathan Blow's hour-long livestreamed response to a RustConf 2018 closing keynote about entity systems in Rust. He argues that index-based entity systems amount to manual memory management that sidesteps the borrow checker, and he talks about friction for game developers.

Thunderf00t debunks the Waterseer, a crowdfunded device that claims to condense drinking water from the air using cool ground. He argues the physics does not support its claims.

Austin Meyer, developer of the X-Plane flight simulator, explains how he was sued by a patent troll over a trivial claim about an app's license server. He walks through how the shell-company litigation works and why ignoring the suit makes things worse.

A Last Week Tonight segment on the US opioid epidemic, tracing how prescription painkillers fed addiction and heroin use. It is the first of three episodes the show devoted to the crisis.

Shaun's roughly 2.7-hour video essay on The Bell Curve. It covers intelligence, the g factor, IQ tests, IQ versus environment and the politics behind the book, with a critical reading of the sources.

Louis Rossmann, an independent Apple repair shop owner, explains why he does not use Apple products, drawing on his experience of repairing devices he considers designed to fail and hard to fix.

A follow-up review of using e-ink devices, such as Onyx Boox tablets, for productivity and as a second monitor. It covers software tips and tweaks and long-term impressions after months of use.

Thunderf00t debunks the Fontus self-filling water bottle, arguing that pulling meaningful amounts of water from air with a small solar-powered device is thermodynamically impractical.

A one-minute clip of Steve Ballmer explaining IBM's obsession with counting thousands of lines of code (KLOCs) as a measure of programmers. He explains why that metric is useless.