Grant Slatton
@grantslatton.bsky.social
Recent writing at https://grantslatton.com/latest Formerly built the world's fastest filesystem at AWS, now the fastest spreadsheet at http://rowzero.com
you're into walkable mixed use urbanism because of some dutch youtuber i'm into it because
During COVID, the rock climbing gym closed, so built this free-standing climbing pillar in our backyard
can't recommend enough getting a banker's lamp for your office increased my IQ by 5 pts the vibe of working late completely changes erudite, scholarly, sophisticated
At a cafe and two ~60 year-olds are telling each other about their physics "research" Both clearly cranks whose "research" is flux capacitor quantum dimension type stuff Men will literally invent fake physics before telling their bros they just wanna hang and chat
if i ask GPT to list the countries on the Danube river sometimes it includes Moldova, sometimes not decided to get to the bottom of it probably training data with and without it included due to this weird history
Built this record cabinet Sapele mahogany + white maple accents
I know letting Amazon have my palm scan so I can pay with my hand at Whole Foods is probably The Mark of the Beast But it’s just soooo convenient Hope Bezos doesn’t wind up being the antichrist or I am cooked
worked on a codebase once where the author had abbreviated all instances of the word "parameter" to "parm" made me want italian food every time i touched that repo
honestly we’re so blessed that god made 2^10 so close to 10^3 allows estimating thousand = 2^10, million = 2^20, billion = 2^30, etc
There are some languages that are *too* easy to rhyme in and it affects their music Spanish and Chinese come to mind It's too easy to write songs with trivial/elementary rhymes, don't have to work for it
the elites don't want you to know this, but you can trivially pop out the crappy plastic wheels of your office chair and replace them with insanely smooth-rolling skate wheels honestly probably the best < $20 home office upgrade there is
One of my favorite geography trick questions: You're traveling in the Panama Canal from the Caribbean to the Pacific What direction are you traveling? People say West, but it's actually East Panama is more squiggly than people think
An interesting trend is that hardware is still improving exponentially, but the population of earth isn’t growing much So services that scale with the number of humans will become increasingly trivial In 2045, run all of Facebook on a single server, tinyurl on a raspberry pi
wish i was born earlier so i could get some trivial greedy algorithm named after me
As a 90s kid with a stutter I was just glad to have some representation in cinema
This little criminal tried to chase the mailman, only to be captured by grandma
Me: So what's your specialty Astronomy prof: I study galactic collisions Me: Sounds exciting Prof: Not really since they take about a billion years
when you teach a kid the rules of chess, they'll start by making legal but basically random moves junior engineers are like this if they ever read a book about "design patterns" too early they'll just apply them randomly — singleton here, factory builder there, etc
New post! Bureaulogy, a new field on the study of bureaucracy grantslatton.com/bureaulogy
Bureaulogy
The study of bureaucracy
grantslatton.com
i've practiced meditation for probably ~100 hours and gotten nowhere either i'm very dumb or already enlightened
Humanoid robot butlers will be the thing that actually fixes the fertility crisis Raising kids would be way less stressful if you had zero housework to do
friend is a medical illustrator few years ago, we were wondering when AI could do her job — getting the details right is important in this use case since then, she's been noticing more and more news articles and such using AI generated medical images note the 3rd forearm bone
in my experience the best technique for being good at public speaking is to simply know the subject you are talking about extremely well it's only when you aren't confident in your mastery that you need the other techniques
i get a tube of cinnamon rolls at the grocery store and put it right at the front of the refrigerator wifey next morning: "hey honey i have a surprise for you waiting in the kitchen"
Most small businesses really aren't very well run, tons of low-hanging fruit Local diner got bought and taken over by a shrewd immigrant family They tightened the menu, installed streamlined ipad & mobile ordering, fixed the drink carbonation, etc Consistently 50% more customers now
It's kind of funny that doctors still test reflexes by just hitting your knee with a little hammer We have all our fancy MRI machines and pulse oximeters But testing reflexes? Just give it a whack