Author: Ankur Sethi
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Cooking (North) Indian Food
While health officials have said that COVID-19 doesn’t spread through food, especially if you heat it properly before consuming, I haven’t felt comfortable ordering food from restaurants since the government announced the lockdown in March. This means Ankush and I have been cooking all our own meals for the last two months. I’ve cooked for…
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The Weird Web
In the vast desolation of the modern Web—now controlled entirely by billionaires, venture capitalists, and media conglomerates—there still exist a few noble souls who are keeping alive the spirit of the weird, creative, and human Web of the late nineties and early noughties. No maps will lead you to the Old Web, but these hyperlinks…
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The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong…
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India is No Longer India
Aatish Taseer writes: By the time I was an adult, the urban elites and the “heart of the nation” had lost the means to communicate. The elites lived in a state of gated comfort, oblivious to the hard realities of Indian life—poverty and unemployment, of course, but also urban ruin and environmental degradation. The schools…
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Fire and Ice
This is a flame graph: Turn it upside down, and you get an icicle graph: This means the flame graph view in the Firefox and Chrome profilers is actually an icicle graph view. Who knew? I learned this tidbit of trivia when I was trying to figure out whether it’s practical to implement a flame…
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The Secret Life of Cows
https://deterministic.space/secret-life-of-cows.html TIL that you can use Rust’s Cow for representing a type that can either be borrowed or owned. This can be useful when you want to, for example, return either a static string (&'static str) or a dynamically generated owned string (String) from a function.