The high three strings of a guitar are G-B-E, which is an interval of a third and then a fourth. The other strings of my guitar are broken right now, so I've been playing around with what chords work on these three strings.

There are three different major chords, each corresponding to a different permutation of 1-3-5: more...

Interacting with phones by talking to them has gotten enormously better over the past few years, to where for many tasks it's now the most efficient way to interact with them. For example, saying "set a reminder for 10:15pm: laundry" is really fast and switching to it has led me to set more reminders for myself.

One thing that makes this mode of interaction even better is having the speech go quickly. Not only can you talk to your phone quicker than you would talk to a person (try it!) you can set your phone to talk to you very quickly. (On Android, at least.)

On my phone this is Settings > Accessibility > Text-to-speech output > speech rate:

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The last installment of Unsong comes out today. I transcribed the words of the main song from the chapter headings: more...

The Pound Sterling (GBP) is a peculiar currency union. There are English, Scottish, Northern Irish, Manx, Jersey, and Guernsey Pounds. And not only that, but the Scottish and Northern Irish pounds are issued by a total of seven commercial banks. So there are eleven different entities issuing GBP notes!

UK law requires that Scottish and Northern Irish banks keep a Bank of England note in their vaults for every one they print. On the other hand, the Manx, Jersey, and Guernsey Pounds are just issued by their respective governments. They hold their pounds pegged 1:1 by promising to exchange their notes for Bank of England notes.

Which leaves me with a bunch of questions: more...

Things used to be a lot cheaper to build than they are now. There are a lot of contributing factors, but a big one is that we already have a lot of things, and new things have to work around the existing ones. For example, the early subways were built with cut-and-cover, where you dig up a road and then cover it up. These days people generally bore tunnels instead. Why? Because it's much less disruptive. With cut-and-cover, not only do you lose the use of the road while you're putting in the tunnel, you also have to figure out what to do about all the other underground infrastructure in your way. There's water, sewer, gas, electric, cable, and you can't just dig through them. While cut-and-cover is much cheaper if there isn't existing infrastructure, at this point there are a lot of things under our streets.

Here's Marohn of Strong Towns writing about Lafayette LA:

When we added up the replacement cost of all of the city's infrastructure—an expense we would anticipate them cumulatively experiencing roughly once a generation—it came to $32 billion. When we added up the entire tax base of the city, all of the private wealth sustained by that infrastructure, it came to just $16 billion. This is fatal.

This is the same problem: building things for the first time is much cheaper than rebuilding them while they're in use.

Can we replace infrastructure wholesale? more...

I'm now working full time in python in a medium-sized existing codebase, and I've started using jedi-mode for code navigation. What I really like about this package is that I can press C-c . to jump to the definition of something, and then C-c , to jump back again. What's especially cool about jedi is that it parses the python syntax tree, understands type hints, and can show you the definitions of things like attributes on arbitrary objects. Consider: more...