nikhil.io

I had a lot of work to do so decided to watch both episodes back-to-back.

Star Trek, unbridled TechBro arrogance, rapid and unchecked technological progress, meditations on ancient questions of consciousness, identity, and dynamics of power, gamer culture, very satisfying comeuppance for the baddies… all folded into a funny and whip-smart script, executed with fantastic production value and brought to life by phenomenal acting (Jimmi Simpson, Cristin Milioti, and Jesse Plemons especially).

What else could one want? I’d put these on my Top Ten Black Mirror episode list¹ too. I hope they make a third but the second had a pretty conclusive and satisfying ending. Fantastic stuff.

Like if you picked some familiar tropes and asked an AI to write a screenplay.

• Weary master who’s really, really good at something.
• Master is aloof, introverted, irascible. Nobody’s interesting enough.
• Enter precocious, young, raw apprentice. They meet by random chance.
• Cue training montage.
• Apprentice surpasses Master.
• Master deals with the defeat/affront poorly. Substance abuse is triggered. May be brief but must be intense.
• Reconciliation and Wisdom. May occur at Master’s deathbed.

These are all covered in this movie, which is about a Go master and his genius pupil. Based on real-life pair Cho Hun-Hyun and Lee Chang-ho. I know absolutely nothing about the game so thoroughly enjoyed the “Hmmm, his opening gambit is unconventional and rabbit-like” dialogue. In the movie, players in Go world append rank to others’ names. Not sure if that’s the case in real life.

Browsing Wikipedia led me to these quotes by world champion Lee Sedol who turned pro at age 12 (!) and retired after he felt his “world collapsing” due to AI:

Mr. Lee, now 41, retired three years later, convinced that humans could no longer compete with computers at Go. Artificial intelligence, he said, had changed the very nature of a game that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.

“I faced the issues of A.I. early, but it will happen for others,” Mr. Lee said recently at a community education fair in Seoul to a crowd of students and parents. “It may not be a happy ending.”

“People used to be in awe of creativity, originality and innovation,” he said. “But since A.I. came, a lot of that has disappeared.”

Indeed.

He famously played AlphaGo and was defeated 4-1. Here’s the whole documentary. I liked it better than this movie and you may, too.

Solo act of Norwegian musician Helge Sten. Dark, like you’re witnessing an occult or preternatural thing, like a coven assembling. You can work to this or just meditate with it.

And a classic one at that (OS/2 and BeOS vibes). Amazing. Here’s how they did it. Gatsby!

Like a lot of kids I loved cutaway books (if that’s what they’re called). I would pester my parents for these and had quite a collection. Couldn’t and still can’t imagine the skill it takes to make them. So when I came by these high-res images by an illustrator from the 30s named Fred Freeman, I explored them posthaste on my iPad and saved them here to savor again at a later time.

Might be a tenuous connection but I think my deep love of miniatures might be related to my love of cutaways as 2D/flat dollhouses.

That blog’s a trove of cutaways. The folks who author it run a design agency and have published their own book on such illustrations called Look Inside.

I did like the mood (and soft-spoken narration) of the introduction but I absolutely loved that background music. It’s called Lambent Rag by Clark and is worth a listen and a watch¹.

The Air looks nice² but I’ll baby my iPhone 13 Mini, perfection as far as smartphones go, for as long as I can. It was released around this time four years ago and is still going strong.

I was completely mesmerized by the poster for the upcoming movie Bugonia, a “satirical absurdist science fiction dark comedy” (Wikipedia). It was designed by Vasilis Marmatakis who collaborates frequently with the movie’s director, Yorgos Lanthimos. The only film I’ve seen (and twice) by the latter is the eerie Killing of a Sacred Deer.

I went looking for Marmatakis’ other work because I had pressing and important things bearing down upon me and was delighted with my excursion. Thought I’d collect some favorites (could be his entire oeuvre down there). Other favorites are his posters for Nimic and Bleat.

Here’s an interview with him about his process and work on Poor Things¹. Here are his Top Ten favorite posters.

Was getting to know a fellow graduate student.

HIM: I found a cockroach in my apartment.
ME: Me too! Mine is named George. You?
HIM: Mine is Dead.

I ♥️ NY 🪳

Plenty of good stuff on there but this totally blew my mind. Consider this custom tag (should be lowercased and contain hyphens. Emojis are allowed!):

<cool-thing shadow>wow</cool-thing>

and this valid CSS:

cool-thing {
    display: flex;

    &[shadow] {
        box-shadow: 1px 1px #0007;
    }

    @media (screen < 480px) {
        flex-direction: column;
    }
}

The only thing missing from my beloved SASS are mixins but I suppose you can achieve that by composing attributes (like shadow above). Super cool.

Six-episode historically fictive miniseries about how nameless and faceless officers with India’s intelligence agency thwarted the development of The Bomb by Pakistan (at least for a little while).

I didn’t bother to fact-check the show but I was rather surprised at the relative lack of jingoism and mostly measured portrayal of Pakistani characters as normal people. Let’s just say I didn’t hear as much highbrow and/or phlegm-y Urdu. I also didn’t see as many prayer beads, skullcaps, henna’d beards, or sinister-looking people as I’d expected. Indian productions tend to tell you who the Bad Guys are by deploying unreasonable amounts of eyeliner/kohl onto unpleasant countenances. Didn’t see much of that either.

Excellent work by Sunny Hinduja as intelligence honcho Ali Murtaza and Suhail Nayyar as Rafiq, with a really standout performance by Kapil Radha as Rizwan. Wish they gave Rajat Kapoor more screen-time but he did play a highly private and secretive character.

Nice set design. Average, enjoyable.

My buddy GT is reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey (“easy reading, accurate translation, and iambic pentameter throughout”). He noted that Christopher Nolan is making a film about it and worried about the Gods getting excised from the adaptation. Here’s a poster.

Noting the subtitle, he continues:

No, Chris. Don’t “Defy the gods.”

Athena, Hermes, and Zeus actively help him throughout. Sure, Helios and Poseidon try to kill him but, well, that was because “Odysseus had the dumbest fucking crew of anyone who ever sailed the goddamn ocean” (to quote one of my professors).

adding that he wished he could communicate the “total venom” the Professor injected into “dumbest fucking crew”. I find mediocrity, innate or exercised, exceedingly funny. My friend knows this and goes on to make my afternoon.

"Hey, guys. This bag is a gift from those magic people. It holds every possible wind that would oppose our trip home. We’ll be home in a few hours. Don’t fuck with it.”

Later: “He’s sleeping. Maybe there’s treasure in the bag.”

*Ship is blown disastrously off course. Two hours of sailing becomes ten years.*

“Hey, guys. Athena says don’t slaughter and eat those cattle. They belong to the fucking god who controls the goddamn sun. Look, I also have a shitload of fruit and nuts to tide us over.”

Later: “He’s sleeping. Let’s eat them cows.”

*They all get murdered by a hot, angry sun god and their ship gets destroyed.*

Dumbest. Fucking. Crew. That professor also pointed out that every single horrible thing happens when Odysseus falls asleep.

“I’m gonna take a nap.”

Later: “What did you dumbasses do now?”

It’s like King Agamemnon said, “Alright, everyone, let’s pack up our shit and take our fleets home. Hey, Odysseus, a word: you’re the smartest guy I’ve ever met. Let’s, uh, balance out the fleets’ IQs. You take these guys.”

*Odysseus looks over and sees them bending over and devouring sand from the beach.*

“Oh, Athena, help me.”

I imagine this is what that last scene looked like.

View the source and the stylesheet. Really nice idea to tinker with. The last time I played with XSLT was in 2001!

“Do you take reservations?”
“How many?”
“Two”
“Just come in. Bye.” *Click*

I ♥️ NY

My friend ML adds “That or it’s ‘earliest booking we have is 2028’.”

Last night, I told the bartender that I needed to step out for a bit and if he needed my card.

“If you fuck off I’ll just have a Guinness won’t I?” and walks away.

I ♥️ NY 🍺

Been using the excellent TablePlus for a while but this one seems nice too.

Here’s one way to recycle batteries (via). I remember BestBuy having a battery dropoff but they don’t appear to accept them anymore.

I’ve used Panasonic’s Eneloop rechargeable batteries for a long while with very few complaints. The last ‘regular’ battery I purchased was an Energizer Ultimate Lithium for a 10-year AirTag in my traveling suitcase.

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

A short meditation my friend Greg Bal. The very first one is of the Pedestrian Mall in Iowa City and I absolutely love it.

Easy-peasy, thoroughly enjoyable Agatha Christie story. Charles Laughton is an unforgettable powerhouse and is perfectly cast for his character. You can’t get your eyes off him. He plays Sir Wilfrid, an upper-class twit version of Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses. Made me wish Christie wrote more stories with his character.

It’s also a big, indulgent celebration of Britishness and the country’s Justice System (just noting; feature, not bug).

There is the purposeful degradation of the pool but I don’t know how else one would do it without buying more disks for a separate pool entirely. Author helpfully provides a lot of links to places you can back up your stuff to (with prices!)

(Cached)

That’s a link to the Mahabharata, quite possibly my favorite story ever.

After many years of searching, I finally found the make and model of my childhood typewriter and am beside myself with joy. Anthropic’s free-tier Claude was of tremendous help and I am much obliged.

Behold, and in cursive!

I spent many hours taking it apart (as much as I could), studying it (as much I could), getting scolded by my Dad, and helping him put it back together. I spent untold hours writing stories and letters on this thing. One of the last things I remember authoring was a Sherlock Holmes short story, a thrilling three-pager, double-sided, written in furious haste after I found out that I’d read the entire canon¹.

It was a beautiful machine. I don’t remember what happened to it and wish I still had it. Here are a few more gorgeous glamour shots.

Elsewhere #

Here’s a Reddit post on the Typewriter, and its entry on the Typewriter Database.

Came out in 2006 and was re-released as a Kosher Edition in 2013¹ which is when I found it after looking for “mystery games” on Steam. Been on my list since then and I finally finished it.

Haven’t played a good point-and-click adventure/mystery game in a long while and this one brought back a flood of memories of my sister and I playing the excellent Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. Made me wonder if there’s an open-source engine one could use to make games like these (e.g. the SCUMM engine used in the Monkey Island games) and found out that the creators use the free Adventure Game Studio Engine for their titles.

This is a short and clever game. You can finish it, with all its alternate endings, in about an hour. Like Gabriel Knight and Monkey Island, the emphasis is more on the storytelling than anything flashy. And this is a fantastic and short story that’s serious and funny at the same time: deep spiritual questions and conundrums, Talmudic combat, Rabbinical banter, small business struggles, life in NYC, and so on.

Here’s the plot:

A former member of his congregation has died and left the Rabbi a significant amount of money. A blessing? Or the start of something far more sinister? Can Rabbi Stone just accept the money and move on? His conscience says no. Step into his shoes as he travels all over Manhattan in his attempt to uncover the truth.

I’ll be playing a lot more games by Wadjet Eye, perhaps starting with this one. They’re a two-person studio in Brooklyn and appear to be cool people.

Screenshots #

Some Yiddish Words from The Game #

I accidentally committed the faux pas of hitting reply-all on a message yesterday. One of the affected participants replied-to-all starting with a “Dear Nikhil: Thank you for connecting all of us over this issue.”

A masterclass in civility 🤌

He’s also written and published this amazing book.

In German so I needed a translation.

I have spent a lot of time trying to kill a tube of toothpaste and am now convinced that the last 10% of the tube hosts 90% of its payload. The Pareto Principle in action, in defiance of physical laws.

What I say each time I engage with the cornucopia of paste:

Here’s a lovely noise generator, for example.

My personal record is nine bills for the same, minor urgentcare visit.

Things I’ve learned: It’s not your provider’s job to deal with insurance, it’s yours. Don’t pay outright¹. You’ll keep getting clobbered until every single service provider has billed you. Call them whenever you get billed. Be polite. Request a proper itemized statement with as much detail as possible. Takes a while for things to catch up.

This is what you are to do with the limited time you have on this planet. Make sure you enjoy the Free Market ♥️

Behold this stunning 3D model of some of the activity around the really massive Black Hole at the center of our lovely galaxy. It’s called Sagittarius A* and is some 4 million times more massive than our Sun.

Humanity banded together to take a ‘photo’ of it in 2017. This video’s from that year. The data involved in making it¹ was proof-positive that there’s a Black Hole at the center of our galaxy. Professors Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel shared a Nobel Prize (with Roger Penrose) in 2020 for their work leading up to this discovery.

Each second of this is two years and it’s happening ~25,000 light years away from us. Young stars are in green, old ones are in orange. We do not know the age of the stars in magenta.

S2 #

At the end of the video, you see “Orbits extrapolated from 1893 - 2013”. There are two star orbits that they did not extrapolate and actually observed completely. These stars are named S2, which makes a full loop in ~16 years, and S102, which does this is ~12 years. Here’s a video showing S2 (note the top right!)

This is space and the numbers are always crazy so here goes: S2 has a highly egg-shaped orbit and gets to ~120 times the distance between us and the Sun² at its closest approach where, this enormous thing that’s ~14 times the mass of our Sun is moving at 3% the speed of light (~5,600 miles/second, ~9,000 km/second). At highway speeds, it would take you 10 million years to complete its orbit.

I wonder if we’ll ever truly comprehend the truly staggering scales involved in the architecture of existence. Electrons, atoms, galaxies, Black Holes. Like teaching a gnat calculus. Oh well. Here’s a guy driving to the nearest star:

Update #

Here’s a video from the European Southern Observatory that zooms in to the Giant Black Hole at The Center of Our Galaxy that shows the aforementioned star (S2) looping around it.

Inveterate mystery movie addict so decided to watch this immediately after seeing the word in the description. Nana Patekar’s a phenomenal actor. How bad could it be?

Pretty bad.

Not issuing a spoiler warning will save you time. The writers might as well have ended this limping and interminable whodunnit with “And then he woke up” to the same effect. It’s adapted from a play which I haven’t read.

What it really is, however, is a (many times hectoring) ultra-conservative commentary on parent-child relationships. The normative here is unhealthy and lopsided: parents and elders are to have no limits or boundaries in speech or action, and are to be obeyed and served immediately and without protest. Your plans for your life and career are inextricably tied to their whims and sanction, even when they’re a model of health. Pursuing your goals is tantamount to egregious neglect. At least in this universe, personal space, phone and video calls, regular visits, and healthy and respectful communication are poor substitutes to the obedience and groveling mandated by culture and tradition.

It’s an abandonment fantasy for affluent 65+ Indian parents, essentially that curse of a movie Baghban wrapped in a threadbare and dogshit ‘mystery’.

Patekar’s still got it though 💯

I’d never seen anything like the first season. A supremely well-crafted nailbiter when it was not a meditation on the human condition and gross socioeconomic disparities (and their brazen exploitation). Grim magnificence. Stood very well by itself.

Never really understood the protagonist’s motivation in the second season. There were several ways in which he could’ve achieved his objectives without resorting to the stupidest course of action possible. But then again, the show was a global sensation and needed to be milked for every ounce of shareholder value it could generate. There needed to be an entire new season. So let’s pepper some sense of justice and moral immediacy over the moronic masterplan our jaded boy chooses to resolve his trauma from Season One and pull more episodes. People are here for the rollercoaster, they won’t care. I certainly didn’t.

(Spoiler below)

The third season was as unnecessary as it was terrible. A self-indulgent, nonsensical plotline afraid of a terminus (Steven Moffat pulled the same garbage at the finale of Sherlock). It’s abundantly clear that they blew the budget by the time it came to hiring actors for the sadistic “VIPs”. Also features the calmest CGI baby ever¹. His highly likely dimwittedness aside, there was zero logical need for our hero to sacrifice himself. Even within the improbable world of the show, very little of the plot made sense in this season.

There’s talk of a prequel (of course). I’m getting off this rollercoaster. Enough’s enough 🎢

Old Dutch Ripples All-Dressed (left) are the best potato chips you can and should eat. Exquisite texture, volume, and flavor. The peer Ketchup chips (right) are a worthy second.

I am truly in awe of Old Dutch’s commitment and execution: they’re not messing around when they say “savory”. These are not meant to be consumed absent-mindedly and will arrest your attention. Every other chip is a bland and greasy bleh compared to what I’m talking about here.

Fat claim but I remain firm. You may disagree but you’d be wrong (and unsatisfied).

An electron is a particular type of regularity that appears among measurements and observations that we make. It is more pattern than a substance. It is order…

Thus we arrive at a strange place. We break things down into smaller and smaller pieces, but then the pieces, when examined, are not there. Just the arrangements of them are. What then, are things, like the boat, or its sails, or your fingernails? What are they? If things are forms of forms of forms of forms, and if forms are order, and order is defined by us… they exist, it would appear, only as created by, and in relation to, us and the Universe. They are, the Buddha might say, emptiness.

Thirty spokes share the hub of a wheel;
yet it is its center that makes it useful.

You can mould clay into a vessel;
yet, it is its emptiness that makes it useful.

Cut doors and windows from the walls of a house;
but the ultimate use of the house
will depend on that part where nothing exists.

Therefore, something is shaped into what is;
but its usefulness comes from what is not.

(Cached)

Been around since 1996!

Based on a real story. Should’ve been a 45-minute episode of a “True Stories of Marital Horror” show than a full 2-hour movie. I last saw Ivana Baquero in Pan’s Labyrinth.

Spoilers! #

Tristan Ulloa is dismayingly excellent as the vulnerable, love-struck, randy, manipulated, and jilted lover Salva, who finally confesses to the plot after finding out that his paramour, the “Black Widow of Patraix”, started a relationship with another inmate (because of course). There’s also this unfortunate turn of events:

In July 2023, she gave birth at the General Hospital of Alicante under police custody. After the delivery, she was transferred to the mother-child unit at Fontcalent prison, where she can stay with her baby until the child turns three years old.

The baby’s father is David, a prisoner convicted of a 2008 murder. Maje and David met during her previous time at Picassent prison, where they began a relationship.