Science Research A lot of scientific research work is done by underpaid graduate students who don't care too much about their particular research work, and wouldn't even really trust their own data. When you're cherry-picking studies where this is the case, one can get into a reality that's quite far from what's
Reflections Ego Is Your Friend Our ego is like a trickster friend. Smart, but immature, he can be fun to hang around with, as long as you don't take everything he says for face value, but rather look at it from different angles before drawing your own conclusions. Oftentimes the truth is just the opposite
Reflections Featured My Purpose I dedicate my time to my work, to my family, and to my friends. I practice being present, take care of my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, and serve as an example.
Reflections The Cost of Accepting Counterfeits In today's Daily Stoic journal practice I got to reflect on the question What bad assumptions, habits, or advice have I accepted? …and this corresponding quotation from the philosopher Epictetus (Discourses, 1.20.8; 11): When it comes to money, where we feel our clear interest, we have an entire
AI What's Your Take on AI? I'm working at the German logistics startup Carrypicker, a freight forwarding company where we're using predictive analytics and machine learning in order to make transport more efficient. So I recently got asked what's your take on AI? Here's my answer: AI tends to be overrated, although—or maybe precisely because
Science Ketogenic Diet Study Analysis A while ago I got pointed to a news article with the headline 'Keto diets' could increase diabetes risk, and reading that article hit me with a mix of surprise and disbelief. The article is about a scientific study where scientists fed one group of mice a “ketogenic diet (KD)
politics Quantifying the US Cabinet's Representativeness Recently, I was reading this New York Times article about the current US cabinet being the least diverse regarding its members' race and gender since a long time. Out of 24 members, there are 18 white men. What is more, the other six members are in some of the lowest-ranking
economics Capitalism Capitalism doesn't incorporate any notion of social responsibility. But people use it to foster a system of social irresponsibility. So why do humans, who are inherently social beings, end up with a capitalist system that fosters social irresponsibility?
Reflections Listen I wish it had been earlier for me to get this advice: To Be a Better Listener, Embrace the Awkward Pause. Here's another related article that describes the intricacies of listening in a more detailed way: You’re Not Listening. Why is it so important to listen? Listening is key
software architecture Microservice vs. Monolithic Architectures Software developers are currently discussing architectures based on Microservices vs. monolithic architectures. In part, it was Martin Fowler who triggered the discussion with his Monolith First article. Some of the reactions show quite interesting points of views. From the ones that I took notice of, I found the following two
conferences .concat() Highlights The first ever .concat() web development conference was a blast! First of all, the organizers have been extremely thoughtful with making sure that everybody could feel safe and welcome. And then they showed that this doesn't even need to cost a lot of money. Also see the many great .concat(
security Designing Software for Security A spot-on note about software design by Colin Percival: Assessing the security of software via the question "can we find any security flaws in it?" is like assessing the structure of a bridge by asking the question "has it collapsed yet?" -- it is the most important question, to be
economics Bullshit Jobs That article on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs accurately describes the dynamics of our current economic system: The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to
politics Political Implications of Data Collection A German nazi-party requests the number of Jews living in a particular city, and a breakdown of those numbers by district. And this very data does actually exist, as it has been collected by that city. The nazi-party, which calls for the “preservation of the German identity”, is claiming that
networking Linux Capabilities One reason why people sometimes execute network services as superuser (i.e., root) is the fact that Linux, like most operating systems, doesn't allow non-privileged users to bind sockets to the so-called System Ports (a.k.a. Well Known Ports or privileged ports). One can't say that this is generally
Linux Displaying Custom Desktop Notifications on Linux Recently, I've switched from a full blown desktop environment (Ubuntu's Unity) to using just a window manager, namely xmonad. (Although I'm still keeping the standard Ubuntu desktop installed as a fallback.) Now I don't have a tray with things like status indicators anymore. Of course, I could customize xmonad to
authentication Checking System Account Passwords on Linux In this post I explain how one can check whether a system account name and password combination is correct. Although the ways to do that on other UNIX-like operating systems are mostly similar, the following explanation is specific to Linux. So how does user authentication on Linux actually work? Here
networking Tunneling SSH Connections Through Tor One good reason to tunnel SSH connections through Tor can be firewalls that block your traffic to the respective SSH destination port. As Tor is perfectly fine with only having port 80 and 443 available, and is locally running a SOCKS version 5 server by default, it can easily be