Evan Martin

Evan Martin

@neugierig.org

I aim to mostly use this account to announce the blog posts found on my website: https://neugierig.org

214 followers33 following88 posts

Evan Martin
@neugierig.org

A social media researcher was once talking to me about LiveJournal, and they pointed out that LJ's clunky user interface effectively served as a screen for the kind of person who would sign up for it. For me at least, that made it a utopia of curious alternative nerd types.

Zach Weinersmith@zachweinersmith.bsky.social

I miss Old Internet a lot, but admittedly a major part of that is that the early internet had a very weird opt-in procedure that you can't recreate, the result of which is that the default user was a curious dorkwad. Plus, there was no money to be made, so no branding/positioning all the time.

Evan Martin
@neugierig.org

Mostly it appears to just correlate with money, e.g. a school in east Portland/Gresham with a 7% pass rate also has a 60%"kid living in poverty" rate. There are some surprising random high-scoring schools scattered about, mostly magnets or other nontraditional settings.

Evan Martin reposted

Rado Kirov
@radokirov.bsky.social

Calling Bay Area math enthusiasts interested in weekly sessions doing rigorous foundational mathematics the modern way - with computer-verified proofs in Lean. (An experiment in rigorous math education outside traditional academia)

Evan Martin
@neugierig.org

Dunno if anyone from Figma sees my posts, but Figma started (maybe some months ago, not sure) doing a thing where when you make a new document the UI lets you switch tools, but then a second later it switches back to the selection tool. Repro: create new document, hit 'f', watch it switch back.

Evan Martin
@neugierig.org

More regular posts are on Mastodon, but: I've been using the Jujutsu VCS for a decently long time at this point and I still like it a lot. Every time I poke into some new corner I'm pleasantly surprised by the good design decisions. I conclude it's a genuinely good tool, worth your time.

Evan Martin
@neugierig.org

I'm a little anxious about this one because I'm not confident in the argument and I don't like people yelling at me on the internet, but I figure it's better to just make the argument and get corrected than it is to weasel-word every assertion with "maybe"s.

Evan Martin
@neugierig.org

Recently I randomly had the need to judge which of a set of servers had the least latency from me. I reached deep into my memory and decades back recalled there was some tool used by Debian ... something... netsomething... ah, "netselect". ...of course it's by @apenwarr.ca , ha!

Evan Martin
@neugierig.org

It's the combination of: - the lovely pair of graphs at the top, Rashomon views of the same problem - the "clever" algorithms aren't necessarily that much more complex, just need to frame the problem right (the Hilbert curve) - the general "less can be more" idea is just my aesthetic