I read somewhere that the third weekend of January is the most depressing day of the year.  I guess the Holiday buzz is over, the weather is crummy, and now we're on to the new year which no longer feels that new.  My own vote is for February 1.  Because in addition to all of that, you also say, whoa, where did January go?  YMMV :)

I am so glad I've discovered Zwift.  At least I've been able to ride every day.  I am such a wimp, could not imagine going "out there" in the cold and [especially] the wind.  Today I rode around London.  It did rain, but only on my monitor!

Rediscovering old posts: as the memory turns, from Jan 2008.  Re the teeter-totter between running out of physical and logical memory.  Back then, 14 years ago, I wrote: "it is unimaginable that 2^64 wouldn't be a big enough address space for everything."  Still true.  But memory management is definitely still a thing, especially if you have a GPU to worry about too. 

Eric Sink continues his series on .NET AOT development: "A gotcha with object handles".  Yep, garbage collection is so much easier than explicit deallocation... 

Feb 2014: the wheel paradox.  So what's going on here?  I don't think I ever figured this out, back then, or if I did I never posted about it.  But now it seems evident that the inner wheel must be "slipping"; clearly the inner circumference is less.  This is kind of like exceeding the speed of light by sweeping the moon with a laser pointer. 

How excellent is this?  This is the longest straight, land-to-land line you can sail. From Eastern Canada to Western Canada, about 35,400 km.  Be sure to click through and watch the movie, and marvel as you pass Africa going "straight down" before reaching Australia. 

Perhaps apropos: You'll Soon Be Able to Sail - Yes, Sail - on the Orient Express.  Looks excellent - maybe we can sail straight from Canada to Canada :) 

PS did not know about Afar magazine, now I do!

Not surprising: Twitter now wants to become a payments platform.  Definitely Elon Musk's M.O., a good potential revenue stream.  And I'm sure the example of WeChat is inspiration. 

Nice overview by Ars Technica: The generative AI revolution has begun—how did we get here?  Of course CUDA is mentioned!  :)  Definitely a Netscape moment! 

Cool: Tech startup Paradigm lands $203M to get more patients into clinical research, accelerate drug trials.  I worked with some of the people at Deep Lens, a company Paradigm recently acquired.  They used AI to identify candidates for clinical trials, a pretty useful application. 

Wired: The spaceport at the edge of the world.  "A tiny Scottish village is betting its future on rocket launches. But the plan may threaten the fragile landscape—and a tenacious billionaire’s ambitions."  Okayyy. 

A great and interesting overview: Johnson & Johnson’s Bankruptcy Didn’t Work.  Basically, faced with huge possible product liability, J&J filed for bankruptcy even though they were hugely profitable. 

Interesting voting demographics.  As you look at these maps, it is good to remember that only 10 states elect our President. 

Scott Adams: I’ve had more great days in my sixties than the rest of my life combined. Did not predict that.  Not sure it's true for me, but it's not obviously not true. 

ESA is no longer planning to send astronauts to China’s Tiangong space station.  "For the moment we have neither the budgetary nor the political, let’s say, green light or intention to engage in a second space station; that is participating on the Chinese space station." 

John Gruber: Meanwhile, Over in Androidtown.  "Whilst we iOS users celebrate the recent releases of Thomas Ricouard's Ice Cubes, Tapbots's Ivory, and Tusker, and look forward to the imminent release of other new Mastodon clients like Shihab Mehboob's Mammoth, over on Mastodon I asked what the best clients for Android are.  Long story short: crickets chirping."  A general rumination on the difference between the design ethos of IOS and Android. 

Comments?