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When a deer sees an incoming car, it freezes. For us, it looks stupid. But for the deer, this instinctive reaction seems to be the best. And it would be the best reaction if the car were a predator: too big to fight, too fast to outrun. By freezing it hopes that the beast fails to spot it, or gets distracted.

Yet, the car isn’t a predator. And an otherwise rational “freeze” response puts our dear deer’s life in danger, and at the driver’s reflex mercy.

Fight, flight, and freeze are fear responses. All…

A few tips on automatic time tracking, especially for people with ADHD: how to get immediate feedback, for actions, not guilt.

tl;dr: Qbserve when I was on macOS, now RescueTime + Custom New URL Tab (Chrome extension) pointing its report, so I get immediate feedback on my productivity (motivates me to keep moving), or the depth of my slacking (motivates me to start working). Plus I use Intention, for web browsing.

I cannot stress enough the word immediate. Delayed reports (after a week, after a day, or whenever I check) sure give a bit of reality-check and insight on what…

Demons invaded Earth and ruined Doom HUD. Some alternative titles:

• A devilishly minimalistic style vs death by Candy Crush glitter.
• An immersive vs casual game.
• A dark journey vs demon piñata.

Impressions

Autumn 2019 I played Doom 2016 for the first time, and immediately fell in love. Everything was exactly in place: from the pace and mechanics, through graphics and the atmosphere, to UI and style. Gameplay just felt right — dynamic as hell, encouraging rolling up your sleeves, and getting into visceral contact with the enemy. We had all the best from Doom 1&2 (no talk, all action) plus much…

On TypeScript, ESlint, jest, TSDoc, Travis-CI, and VSCode (with inspiration from the Zen of Python)

It is fun to write fast without constraints, and run code in a flash. That is why I fell in love with Python and the Jupyter Notebook environment, a great tool for prototyping and interacting with data. However, interactive notebooks fall short when you want to write bigger, maintainable code. See the What’s wrong with computational notebooks? survey:

While I knew the concept of tests, I got discouraged by some overzealous test-driven development practices which make feature development slow and experimentation — even slower. In…

“Posągi” (1989) translated from Polish by Anna Karpiuk and Piotr Migdał

What bliss when a tyrant’s tall statues are shattered
But in each shard of bronze in each shrapnel of stone
There lingers a trace of the spark that once fluttered
In the one that was thrown from the throne

And all men who saw the almighty’s rise and fall
And all new statues cast out of metal and dust
Will carry a splinter of the same tyrant’s soul
Fact of life never to be discussed

What bliss when a tyrant’s tall statues are shattered
But a void on the plinth…

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.” — stolen from a few sources

When our Quantum Game v2.0 team first got together to work on the game, we realized we were all quite different — a physicist, a designer, a writer, and a jeweler — getting ideas across and making them stick wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. To combat that issue, we had ourselves a day of research. No, not by digging through textbooks, journal articles or reviews. We powered up a projector and played some classic video games!

It seems that some artifacts generated by artificial neural networks are eerily similar to those created by our altered states of mind, be it dreams or thanks to psychedelics.

While mentioning psychedelics (and showing trippy computer-generated images) has some entertainment value, my motivation is different, as explained in Exploring human vs machine learning (one blogpost at a time):

While each particular machine learning algorithm comes with its own artifacts and limitations, some issues are much broader. In fact, there are limitations of any learning process, machine or human alike. …

Did you play Quantum Game with Photons?

It’s a puzzle game with photons, superposition and quantum measurement, right in your browser. With true quantum mechanics underneath!

Good news: there will be part 2. You may have noticed an opening for the game. In short, we were invited by Artur Ekert and we will work late Aug — Nov at CQT in Singapore. The goal is simple:

“All I want is the coolest quantum game in the known multiverse, please!” — Artur Ekert

It will be a drag&drop puzzle game. So, what’s coming in the new version?

• More photons (2 or…