The Snail Shell

Things I like a lot: - All of Janelle Shane's work with neural networks (paint colors, D&D spells, beer varieties - if you read a...

Particularly, when someone tries to tell you a thing that seems complicated is actually simple, be wary. This happens in TED talks, Malco...

( Amazon Mechanical Turk ) By this I mean, I want someone else to be able to call me up and say "call City Supervisor X and say ...

(or maybe I should say "neoliberalism" to get more clicks :P) Ok, super-extreme capitalism seems to say, markets will solve eve...

where X = a Ferrari or a beach vacation or whatever else thinking about this after seeing an ad for a vacation package at a beach resort ...

I'm finding that I'm organizing life around cleaning up. Get things into a queue, then get them out of that queue. Another way to t...

free week, rented this car, went on this trip! Planned about a day in advance. Used Atlas Obscura to look up a lot of places to go. In bet...

Leg 1 of multi-day trip: SF to Sand Mountain, Nevada There's a big sand mountain! It's like 6 stories tall. It's right off High...

previously today's targets: paint colors magic cards Colors: Azure Tabletop Orange Salmon Lamprey Yellow Every Little Green ...

Before you read this post, read Patrick MacKenzie's negotiation advice . Ok, great. You're 95% of the way there. Here are a few ...

Ok, so you want to be a Data Scientist. The best prep would be to have interned as a Data Scientist. I hadn't done that. Here are some ...

Ok, so this is for a very focused crowd, I guess, but I know a lot of people who will be in my shoes, and I feel like I learned something, ...

Each row is my series of interactions with a given company. This chart is not at all in chronological order. Legend: Computer monitor...

Ok, here the main game is: - get a card with a sweet bonus - meet the Minimum Spend - get some bonus points - downgrade it at the end o...

Sometimes I play the credit cards game, to get a little bit of bonuses without paying money. I'm a pretty-inactive member of reddit.com...

I feel like neural network humor has gotten really good. This Tumblr seems to be the epicenter. Pokemon recipes   paint D&D superhe...

"I Changed My Mind" award I feel like, in online arguments, the thing I most admire is when people change their mind in the face...

two mostly-unrelated thoughts about cities: 1. when I was moving back to Pittsburgh, I thought about "the Aikido test": say I w...

We teach kids (intentionally or not) that they are a "self." Let's leave aside the question of how to teach them that there...

1. Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse . I'm enough of a hippie to think you should actually just pay them without measurin...