New old device

On a recent visit home, I dug this 2007 Sansa Clip out of a box.

An image of an Obama-era Sansa clip (released in late 2007, probably manufactured later) running the Rockbox custom firmware

It’s battery life is shot, but everything works, and I unearthed some critical throwback jams from the built-in 4GB of flash memory (among other things, the first four Brad Paisley albums in .wma format). As the picture shows, I also installed a bit of custom firmware called Rockbox.

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Recent reading

Mostly novels this time:

  • 조남주, «82년생 김지영», a 2016 novel about (I have struggled to phrase this in a way that isn’t too dead-on) why it is so hard to be a woman in contemporary Korean society.

    The movie version from 2019 is better known, perhaps thanks to the sanitized resolution in which the title character learns to channel her resentment into creative energy—and writes the novel that the movie is based on. In the novel, however, the final chapter reveals the narrator as 지영’s therapist, and he comes within inches of a feminist awakening as he weighs different diagnoses for her, then reverses course. Witholding spoilers, I suspect that much of the hand-wringing around the book turns on its withering, cynical last sentence.

  • 장강명, «한국이 싫어서», a novel about a woman’s decision to migrate from Korea to Australia, and for reasons that are no surprise if you’ve read the book above. This one has a happy ending.

  • Mishele Maron, “Anger Management” (paywall), a memoir by a psychologist whose job was to “goad men with a history of violence into wanting to punch me” and create the opportunity for them to examine their feelings in group counseling.

  • Greg Egan, Permutation City.

  • Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle.

I am looking for Korean bookstores that deliver within the US. So far 반디북US has proven reliable, but I’d like to have a backup option in case their rickety website finally gives way. Write if you know of any others.

Housekeeping

Completed some overdue site maintenance over the past few weeks:

  • RSS feed styling: With help from a template found on GitHub, I created a stylesheet for the RSS feed so that it looks nice when viewed in the browser. Ctrl+F “via RSS” on this page to find the link, or just scroll all the way to the bottom, or maybe try this link.

    I am not a big consumer of RSS feeds myself; I prefer to just bookmark blog URLs and read posts in their original context. But RSS is an important bit of plumbing for the indie web, and probably covers accessibility use cases that I haven’t anticipated.

    (Technically, I am serving an Atom feed rather than RSS, but people use the terms interchangeably.)

  • Upgraded to Jekyll 4: Jekyll is a tool for building a static HTML site out of Markdown files. The built-in GitHub functionality for hosting a Jekyll blog uses an old version of Jekyll which has some end-of-life dependencies, and they are stuck searching for an upgrade path that doesn’t break existing sites.

    I followed this wonderful guide to switch my publication workflow to a GitHub Action that lets me manually manage my Ruby and Jekyll versions. It’s a great tutorial that also helped clear up several misunderstandings about Ruby, Gems, and rbenv.

  • Removed embedded YouTube videos: I replaced embedded YouTube videos with simple links to improve page load times and user privacy.

A handy class of submodular functions

In this post, we will show that functions of the form

f(X)=1−∏i∈Ω∖X(1−pi)∏i∈X(1−qi)f(X) = 1 - \prod_{i \in \Omega \setminus X} (1 - p_i) \prod_{i \in X} (1 - q_i)

are submodular for pi,qi∈[0,1]p_i, q_i \in [0, 1] where each pi≤qi,p_i \leq q_i, and examine an application of this small result that demonstrates its practical value.

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Recent reading

Finished reading, but still thinking about:

  • 정유정, «종의 기원», a thriller.
  • 김연수, «이토록 평범한 미래», a collection of short stories.
  • 권여선, «레몬», a thriller.
  • 신경숙, «엄마를 부탁해», a classic.
  • Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a tinkerer’s manifesto.
  • Paul Abel, “I thought I wanted to be a professor. Then, I served on a hiring committee.”
  • From the September issue of The Sun, “No Small Wonder” (paywall), an interview with psychologist Dacher Keltner, a student of awe. It pairs nicely with Bewilderment below.

Currently reading:

  • Richard Powers, Bewilderment, a novel of astrobiology, biofeedback, and conservationism.
  • 정유정, «내 심장을 쏴라», a thriller.
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