Notes

Books currently on my radar: Crafting Interpreters. Oathbringer. Blowout. Staff Engineer. Essential Calculus. This Naked Mind. Interesting books I encountered recently: Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy: I might find this book interesting because it philosophizes virtual reality. It might be a dry read though and it’s Goodreads rating is below 4, so I could be wrong. The Tyranny of Big Tech: Another book I saw in Barnes & Nobles yesterday and thought might be interesting. (It sounds similar to Blowout that I am reading these days but about an industry that is more relatable to me.) This Naked Mind: Someone on Hacker News recommended this book about quitting alcohol. If its effect turns out to be similar to how I quit smoking by reading a book, I’d be delighted. There is another book with a similar concept authored by Allan Carr.

65 inch will work best for us. Following look good on Costco: Samsung 65" Class - Q80BD Series - 4K UHD QLED LCD TV Samsung 65" Class - Q7 Series - 4K UHD QLED LCD TV LG 65-Inch Class QNED80 $800 seems to be right budget.

Ideas for toys to buy for kid: Lego blocks, possibly a giant set that will allow us to build arbitrary things. Car that he can sit in and drive. Remote-controlled vehicles. Pretend-play. Oathbringer: Reminded me an important thing today: we can’t control our destination, only the journey. The journey is all that matters.

Kiddo started attending his first daycare from July earlier this year. Next Friday, i.e. November 11, will be his last day there. (That’s because he will travel to India the week after with his mom and join a new daycare, close to home, when he comes back.) He enjoys going to the daycare a lot. When we ask him about his friends there, he keeps repeating 4 names: Hamza, Pablo, Shraddha and Aneek. He is too young to realize that he’ll lose 4 close friends forever that day but that’s probably a good thing. He’ll make lot more new ones in future but I feel sad for him.

Shower thought: I remember reading the last Harry Potter book on my laptop back in college days. That book was thick and my laptop screen much worse than what it is today - so, why am I reluctant about reading books on my laptop nowadays? Blowout: Chapter a: Talked about how US captured a few Russian spies in 2010 or something. They were incompetent both at hiding identities and collecting meaningful data for their home country. However, when they were deported to Russia (in exchange of American spies), the country probably didn’t want to accept its failure and called them massively successful in their mission. Chapter b: Earthquakes in Oklahoma increased by 20k percentage or something and the timing correlated with increased natural gas extraction. However, the scientific community - one respected person in particular - denied any link based on the data they saw. Still, drilling can cause substantial environmental issues nearby. For e.g., animal deaths, health problems for kids etc. Industry counter-argues 2 ways: At high scale, some human operator mistakes are unavoidable. All the drilling is required for energy independence of the country, while conveniently ignoring how much money they themselves are making in the process.

It was kiddo’s, and even our, first Halloween. Fortunately, we were at least somewhat prepared - kiddo had a gorilla costume, we had basic but sufficient candies and I knew what to say to the kids (“happy Halloween” and “what are your names”) - so, overall a modest success. We’ll be better prepared next year, now that we know what to do.

Crafting Interpreters: This looks to be a nice book to learn about compilers/interpreters, and hopefully the difference between the two, through implementation.

How do you partition a quadtree? All the places, i.e. points of interest such as restaurants, can be partitioned the usual way: think of them as IDs and use key-range or hash-based partitioning. What about the tree itself? That’s not entirely clear but I think this can be replicated in full on all the nodes since the data should be pretty small. How do you decide hash length for geohashing? Longer = more precision. Can lead to more empty hashes. If search radius is high, this will require searches for more number of hashes. These can run in parallel though. Results can be aggregated and ranked once at the end. Smaller length: Some hashes may have huge number of points. If we partition the hashes randomly across multiple machines (for example, by hashing the geohashes), the distribution might turn out to be uniform on average.

Primary factors: Density or dynamic partitioning: if you care about not having more than X points in a node, Quadtrees allow that. Geohashes are static in that sense. Quadtrees are probably better suited for read queries like, “find top X points near Y”. In Geohashes, I’ll probably require recursive queries if density of boxes is low (for e.g., in Yellowstone). I think both algorithms will work in all (or most) of the cases.

Blowout: Chapter 8: The main idea was that if a non-democratic country suddenly finds a huge amount of oil, it’s not as if all its problems would magically go away. On the contrary, it would make the dictator and their his family and close circle wealthy at the expense of the rest of the country. It also acts as a big incentive for these people to apply whatever means necessary to cling to power. The author uses Equatorial Guinea as a case study. BBC repeats the book almost verbatim by saying the country “is now being cited as a textbook case of the resource curse - or the paradox of plenty”. However, that makes me wonder if the author picked the worst example to make her point and if this one example is sufficient to generalize the point. I was surprised to learn that its dictator has been (and still is) in power for 43 years as of today. According to Wikipedia, “He is the longest-serving president of any country ever”. Wow! Everyone wants a cut, and continue getting that cut, unless there are checks in place through democratic institutions. Oil industry requires massive upfront capital investment. So, the companies that are able to invest in it already have enough political clout. The author also went into great lengths about how extravagant the life of the president’s son is. Chapter 9: The author repeats the idea that oil industries would prefer dealing with dictatorship to democracies because they just need to work with the person at the top and not worry about any red tape. American law forbids companies to bribe foreign nations. However, the author hints that bribery occurs through arbitrary “corporate expenses”. The industry doesn’t care about the impact of such bribes on the country’s masses because they “don’t want to meddle with their internal affairs”. The dictator of Equatorial Guinea was/is filthy rich. After 9/11, US would also welcome new sources of oil outside Middle East. (The country consumes more than what it produces.)