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Your weekly crème de la crème of the Internet is here!
28.01.2024 (read in browser)
On taking a break
For years now, the end of the year and subsequently January were spent in a rush: first, the rush of wrapping things up in late December, and then the rush of coming up with the new things to focus on before the new year properly settles in.
The season I tried to do things differently: I've started my new 2025 project (that is, shooting and eventually deer stalking) in November, wound down in Scottish borders in December, and skipped fancy meals on New Year's Eve by plating 3 kilograms of chilli fried chicken at 23:59.
I've also cut down on the newsletter: I wasn't happy with the quality of content in the past few months, and it's either my standards accidentaly got higher, or the Internet streams I feed from are running dry. Either way, the best option in this case is to take it slow. I will trial only monthly editions for the time being to see if the quality improves, and the paid subscribers will keep access to the full archive of previous editions but at least this way I could still be happy with the posts I put out there.
Last year I spent January trying to make croissants and even had a few decent batches. This year I decided to cook the perfect pork belly, got a few dozens of kilograms of pork bellies, and kept them in sous vide, ovens, and pans for more than 100 hours in total.
The most time consuming was the porchetta, but even though it was very tasty I wasn't happy with the crunch:
The most unusual (and also the best one) was an air-dried belly, where I slowly melted the fat through tiny holes in the skin so it puffed up throughout roasting process:
It also got the perfect ratio of leftover fat to the crackling to meat, so I will definitely keep refining it in the future:
We've also drove to Holy Island on a random Saturday – still feels wild that I could just jump in a car and drive to a different country (or island) in a matter of hours.
Pilgrims hanged out here since the abbey was established in AD 634, and the only way to access the island without a boat is via a causeway that appears during low tide.
We managed to safely drive back but apparently every year people get stuck mid-way through the crossing despite numerous signs with schedules and alerts.
Things I enjoyed reading
I am pretty sure history lessons throughout my school years pretended America didn't really exist, so I mostly learnt about American presidents from movies and South Park. This is a pretty wild story about an ex-president who went to North Korea and back to preven a nuclear war – it's surprising I couldn't find a movie with this plot.
That summit failed, and of course, in the long run Carter's trip did not succeed in removing the spectre of nuclear war, which has only grown - these days North Korea has missiles regarded as capable of hitting the US mainland.
But Carter was lauded for his political gamble. It was in sharp contrast to his time in office, when he was criticised for being too passive on foreign policy, particularly with his handling of the Iran hostage crisis.
I guess these days wars start and stop on Twitter instead.
The hardest part of passing the driving test was to get a reservation within weeks, not months, partly because their registration worm had business hours and would shut down from 23:30 till 06:30. I always blamed bureaucrats and their desire to keep things conservative in the modern technological world.
I am very sorry to all the bureaucrats in question as it was an IT limitation all along:
Over time, problems emerged with the code written by the automated tools - it was over complicated, brittle, and difficult to maintain. Because it was an automated translation, it also meant that the new system replicated the overnight batch job design from the old mainframe.
However, these new batch jobs also had inbuilt assumptions that the underlying datasets wouldn’t change during the overnight batch window. If something did change, the batch might fail and leave the entire database in an uncertain or corrupt state. Untangling this sort of failure could take days to fix and leave the entire system offline.
The author goes on trying to explain how they attempted to change the architecture as the time went on, but as I could see half a year ago, it is not there yet.
You probably know about bothies – tiny huts scattered around Scotland, where hikers could stay overnight for free, no real amenities and no reservations. I've seen them on maps but never understood how they work and what to do if you hike for hours and someone is already there. Well, thanks to this post with many pictures I know the answer:
After tea it was time to kick back in my sleeping bag and enjoy a good book. I was lucky to have the bothy to myself, which was hardly a surprise on a Monday night in late October, and so it was great to just sit and relax.
My book of choice for the evening was fittingly called ‘ Bothy Tales.’ It made for light-hearted and easy reading under my head torch and candle light, as I enjoyed the many amusing stories the author John Burns recalls. The topics of resident mice, river crossings and soakings on the way in all feature.
The chances are, someone will be there, but as there is nothing inside except for the roof and walls, you will just hang out in your sleeping bags anyway. The concept is cool though, and some of them are nicer than others (like you might find a bench or a teapot, or even a wooden bunk bed).
I think these days food blogers got quite lazy: they scroll Instagram, jump into DMs of restaurants, and then fix themselves a lunch in exchange for a 10 second story. Some of them, yes, but not the author of this post:
While many favour char siu in the siu mei pantheon when they want to pig out, siu yuk is by far the superior porcine choice. When done right that is, which is easier said than done. Pork belly is rendered into a delicately tender ivory mass and topped with an extant layer of fat that can be more quiveringly succulent than a middle-aged debutante at a Robbie Williams concert. On top of all this is the gold-hued skin, which is an integral part of the whole affair. Rubbed with salt and rendered crispy in-part by the roasting (and also in-part, depending on who you ask anyway, by the pin-prick pattern of holes that puncture the skin prior to its sodium massage). The overall effect, when done right, is of a multilayered textural treat.
How about hitting 43 Cantonese cafes around London to compare roast duck, pork, chicken, and char siu and figure out where is the best takeaway? Sounds like a task for a filming crew of one of those large YouTube projects, like Munchies, but the author here did it pretty much alone.
Now they should do deep fried Mars bars in Scotland for a similar rating.
If I were to pick a single kitchen gadget it'd be a knife, and there is always more to learn about them: from different ways to sharpening to butchering to making one. Making a proper knife from scratch (not one of those incredibly simplified "chef's" knives, but a proper one) is on my bucket list for a few years know – one day I will find the right workshop to cross it off.
I watched the forge. It took a long time, but it had our attention the way a green shoot would where only some damp sand had been seen before. Something was changing. Transformations were coming. If you want to know what rock is like deep in the earth, you can see it here in the shape-shifting of the metal. These are the energies that we are not used to in the quiet simmer of our daily lives. The energies of the deep earth and the high sun, the two sources that power our planet.
Meanwhile, just imagine, there are people who are happy with their ceramic knives and probably never tried slicing a tomato with at least VG-10 steel.
I pretty much grew up reading Pelevin (is it a good or a bad thing?) and won't deny his influence on my own perception of the world, but his latest books were too satirical for me, so I am not a huge fan. Seems like I am not alone:
More than this, Pelevin’s writing seemed to provide an ever more accurate guide to the new workings of Russian power. Generation P imagines advertising, television and politics as the key tools that corrupt, secretive interests use to create a false reality. The novel’s hero, Vavilen Tatarsky, is an aspiring poet whose literary ambitions are scrambled by the Soviet collapse. In the free-for-all of newly capitalist Russia, Tatarsky goes into advertising, “translating” American slogans into Russian ones. (“Gucci for Men: Be a European, smell better.”) In typical Pelevinian fashion, this over-the-top satire of an already-over-the-top reality soon transmogrifies into an occult, psychedelic fantasy. High on mushrooms, Vavilen discovers that the Russian government is a virtual reality scripted by writers, acting in service of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar. Vavilen gets a job scripting Russia’s simulacrum of democracy. Soon he’s writing lines for Yeltsin and for the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who treats Russia as his own private Monopoly board. The novel remains one of the best literary snapshots of the precarious, delirious, grimly hilarious mood of 1990s Moscow. Published in the US as Homo Zapiens and in the UK as Babylon, it has sold more than 3.5m copies worldwide.
I quite like the style of the author of the longread: it's very respectful but also very brutal. Pelevin spent decades observing others and hiding from attention – now the tables are turned apparently.
I never liked exams, but I am also not a competitive person at all although I definitely used to be.
"At first, it was an exam for a small elite who wanted to study English as an academic subject, like Latin or Ancient Greek," says Dr Evelina Galaczi, director of research at CUP&A.
"At the time, grammar and translation were considered the most important thing, but now the exam is much more about using English to communicate.
"The shift was gradual, but in the Second World War English became a global language and so speaking and pronunciation became much more important.
It's a fun story nonetheless, and there are some questions from the 1913 exam with correct answers at the end of the post (I'd get a strong B, which is fair enough).
Concurrent programming is tough: it's mainly tough to understand, but also to debug, and only to some extent to write. I don't think this post covers the topic completely, but it definitely does it from a perspetive very different to the one I am used to:
Model checking is a powerful tool, and I’ve come across a few resources that can help in understanding concurrency. This inspired me to write about them—not only to deepen my own understanding but also to share what I’ve learned. We’ll begin by exploring how to visualize the execution of a sequential program, then move on to visualizing a concurrent one. Finally, we’ll touch on how to reason about the correctness of concurrent programs.
That being said, many developers would probably never write or reason about the correctness of concurrent programs, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's interesting how the same thing might have a completely different context in different periods of time:
For better or worse, the public bathhouse from the Industrial Revolution was the antithesis of the preindustrial bathhouse.
As the higher social classes gradually gained access to their private water supply and bathrooms, the public bath became increasingly associated with poverty. Although shower bathhouses did not have separate sections for different social classes, they were mainly built in low-income neighborhoods, aimed at the poor only. Bathers were led to their shower cubicle by an attendant, who opened the tap, decided on the water temperature, and started a timer. People had at most 20 minutes to undress, shower, and dress again.4647 “The poor had to be clean but not enjoy it too much.” 46
In that sense, I never understoon saunas so wide spread in Russia: I could reluctantly go into one as a kid, mainly lured by the promise of unhealthy snacks available in abundance, and occasionally by a wee swimming pool, but never understood those who willingly commit to a saunce every month throughout their adult life.
Freud must have something to tell them.
I am not so sure about the profit part here, but it's definitely a fun way to learn more about the internal decision trees of chat bots and LLMs in general by trying to push them away from the setup they operate in.
Then you’ll notice that I keep a regular conversation going for a couple turns before making another suggestion.
At which point it goes full improv and we step into another reality.
I learn a lot about different chatbot platforms by trying this. And I feel like, as our devices get their own personality-driven AI chatbots that we interact with, this will end up being a valuable technique.
I struggle to find a short example to illustrate the idea but the author does a great job with their chat bot's reality-bending narration so do check them out.
Things I didn't know last Tuesday
It used to be a kingdom but now it's just a pile of drifted sand:
Khara-Khoto [...] is an abandoned city in the Ejin Banner of Alxa League in western Inner Mongolia, China, near the Juyan Lake Basin. Built in 1032, the city thrived under the rule of the Tangut-led Western Xia dynasty. It has been identified as the city of Etzina, which appears in The Travels of Marco Polo, and Ejin Banner is named after this city.
I wonder how many other places like this are abandoned and pretty much forgotten – it makes day-to-day problems feel rather insignificant in comparison.
For some odd reasons a British 1963 sketch is a German must-see for the New Year's Eve:
About time, too, many will say: while Britain has ignored this quirky cultural export for decades, it has been at the heart of the German New Year’s Eve ritual since 1972, a much loved overture to the celebrations.
I guess now I'll have to watch just to see what this all is about.
I was looking up some travel-friendly toothbrushes to save on the backpack weight (I hate checking baggage in), and came across this... gadget.
The miswak is a teeth-cleaning twig made from the Salvadora persica tree. The miswak's properties have been described thus: "Apart from their antibacterial activity which may help control the formation and activity of dental plaque, they can be used effectively as a natural toothbrush for teeth cleaning. Such sticks are effective, inexpensive, common, available, and contain many medical properties".
Sounds pretty cool and looks widespread enough for all possible pros and cons to be known, but seems a bit inconvenient to travel with as you need to sharpen it and store in a tub or something. Maybe next time.
Did you ever dream of drinking water from a 3000 years old underground glacier? Well, now you can:
Always one to think outside the box, O’Connell just introduced an extravagant “water menu” that gives diners (and nondrinkers) an ultra-rare taste of underground glaciers from around the world. A bottled Canadian iceberg is the priciest pour ($95).
Supposedly, there are 25 different waters on the water menu. Imagine the "somelier" training at the place.
I've mentioned Krampuslauf festival a few months ago, but there are more grim celebrations in the Alps as you can see:
Perchta or Berchta [...] was once known as a goddess in Alpine paganism in the Upper German and also Austrian and Slovenian regions of the Alps.
To be honest, it's hard to tell the Perchta mask apart from a Krampus one.
The Cold war? How about the Cod wars instead?
The Cod Wars were a series of 20th-century confrontations between the United Kingdom (with aid from West Germany) and Iceland about fishing rights in the North Atlantic. Each of the disputes ended with an Icelandic victory.
Wikipedia has way more background to the story but it has everything – from spies to gadgets for cutting fishing nets without being noticed.
Next time someone complains to me about their Imposter's syndrom, I will be armed with the story of this football player:
Carlos Henrique Raposo (born 2 April 1963), commonly known as Carlos Kaiser, is a Brazilian con artist and former footballer. Although his abilities were far short of professional standard, he managed to sign for numerous football teams during his decade-long career. He never actually played a regular game, the closest occurrence ending in a red card whilst warming up, and hid his limited ability with injuries, frequent team changes, and other ruses.
The dude spent 20 years "playing" for different clubs without showing up to the field even once. The only time he was forced to go, he snatched a red card even before the game started due to arguing with fans – supposedly because they were badmouthing the trainer.
What a legend.
Have you heard an English saying "horses for courses"? It means "different people are suited to different things", but the etymology of words "course" and "horse" might be quite unexpected:
Proto-Indo-European
From ḱers- (“to run”) +-ós.
So some researchers think, that these words are a prehistoric doublet, and are both deriving from "running". Both are verbal nouns, where horse is "runner", and course is "running".
Runners for running, then.
I don't really like beaches: I had my share of beach vacations throughout my life, and never particularly enjoy neither swimming in the sea (swimming pools are way more superior) nor laying on the sand (at least stones don't stick). This one might be an exception though:
There are plenty of tourist spots named after things they resemble, even if just vaguely, but that’s not the case of Popcorn Beach. This amazing place genuinely looks like it’s covered with million of white, puffy popcorn, but don’t go putting them in your mouth, as they are actually stony pieces of coral shaped like popcorn by the elements.
Some sources claim that due to viral popularity of the place over the last few years, people steal around 10 kg of corals from the beach every month. I gotta hurry then.
I was pretty traumatised by my first crab cooking experience: not because it was alive and all, I am not really squirmish, but finding the right pot to fit it in took ages, and the picking through crab meat took longer than eating it.
Use a black light when picking over crab meat. The shell bits fluoresce and "jump out" from the meat.
(photo by Carol Melancon via chefsteps.com)
This looks like a neat trick though, I might reconsider my stance on crabs afterwards.
Book of the week
I've decided to immerse myself into Asian culture for a few weeks, and John Burdett's Bangkok 8 seemed like a nice start: a slow-burning detective about, you guessed it, Bangkok, with six books in the series already:
Like a lot of people, I’m a fan of the sky train on the rare occasions when it’s of any use to me. The logic of the system is unimpeachable: to beat the traffic, rise above it. It was one of those ventures founded on foreign capital and foreign expertise for which our politicians developed a suspicious passion. For what felt like decades whole sections of the city’s roads were clogged or shut off while armies of men and women in yellow plastic hats built their concrete pillars and their state-of-the-art elevated tracks. Now the project is complete in its first phase and the gigantic city has swallowed it up as if it weren’t there at all. We all scratched our heads. All that for only two lines?
Riding it is a distinct pleasure, though. You get a great view of the city from a flying compartment with glacial air-conditioning. It’s also a study in bankruptcy if you take note of the great skeletons of unfinished high-rises that loom out of the chaos from time to time, monuments to a building frenzy that chilled with the Asian financial crisis in 1998 and never heated up again. Now these new Stonehenges are home to beggars and bag people. From the train you can see their hammocks, their dogs and their washing in the honeycombs of concrete caves, sometimes a monk meditating in his saffron robes.
I've just started the book (and didn't really read much at all throughout January, taking a break from books as well), but there is always something particular about those becoming writers later in life, when they've alreadt tried themselves in another industry (the author used to work as a lawyer in Hong Kong).
The book's main character is a Thai Buddhist detective, so most of the book is a bunch of hilarious internal dialogues and thoughts on Thai vs American mentality, which is rather entertaining.
It's quite a change from the whodunnit-style books I read in the genre though, so we will see how it goes.
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