Tech — Work — Ramblings

by Mike Kalvas

I see you're not using JavaScript (which is awesome!) on one of my pages that uses it to provide a better experience. If you see something not working right, please let me know. My site should work exactly the same without it apart from any exceptions noted here.

I use prism.min.js to do syntax highlighting. It clocks in at 23kb total in size. Since the majority of the writing I do involves coding, I personally find this to be a worthwhile trade off. If you choose to keep this disabled, rest assured, the code examples are still there, they just may have some extra whitespace and obviously no syntax highlighting.

I do no tracking at all and am a zealot about keeping my pages as small as possible. If you're reading a page of mine that transfers more than about 250kb over the wire (including my most gratuitous indulgence — fonts) I've messed up.

So, if you'd like to have a slightly richer experience, consider enabling javascript for my site and I promise your trust won't be misplaced.

202207272000 Garbage in, garbage out

There's an old adage concerning the accuracy of systems.

Garbage in, garbage out.

The implication is that if you (for instance) give bad data to an algorithm, you'll get a bad result. The opposite is sometimes implied as well: if you give good data to a system, you'll get good results.

This can be a helpful heuristic for many things, but it's not necessarily true. In fact a more helpful, but more nuanced rule of thumb should be to check whether 202207271958 Stability or instability dominates a system. This alternative mantra shows how a system that has strong stabilizing or converging forces can accept "garbage" as input and give great results. Conversely a system with strong diverging, destabilizing forces can accept extremely precise inputs and still produce garbage results.