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Thinking In Bets is a book by professional poker player Annie Duke. Its a book about better decision making under uncertainty.

Hindi and English have several similar yet distinct phonemes.

We did a 3-day Royal Caribbean cruise from Singapore with a stop in Penang, Malaysia. This was my first time cruising in Asia. Unlike the Caribbean and French Polynesia, most passengers were from Chinese and India. And this reflected well in the activities as well as food choices. The quizzes were geekier, e.g., guess the airport from the codename. Food choices were way more vegetarian friendly including a Jain food counter!

Google released a new version of the Google Auth library. It had a bug that broke Google Login on Android for API 26 and earlier. This impacted my small but popular Music Player app in Google Play. It reveals the kind of problem, I have alluded to in end-to-end testing. The only way to avoid such problems is by end-to-end testing. However, I find all Android testing frameworks to be terrible....

With Axie Infinity, there is a sudden rise of play-to-earn games. At least the way I see is that the core idea is that financial benefits of in-game purchases accrue to the network instead of just the game studio. But most casual games have a very short shelf life of a few years.

The Half-Life of Facts is a provocative book that makes us realize that a lot of facts that we believe are factually true get overturned over time. It gives several examples of facts that were later proven wrong or became more precise as our measurements and understanding improved.

Chile is one most remote countries in the world to visit. It is far from Europe. It is far from Asia. It is far from North America as well. And the country is deceivingly large. Unlike the USA, Canada, or Brazil, Chile looks small because of its appearance as a narrow strip on the map. Except it is long. The length of Chile is the same as the distance from San Francisco to New York. So, it is hard to visit all of Chile in a few days. The major areas that you have to choose from are Santiago - in the middle of the country Atacama Desert - in the north Torres Del Paine National Park - in the Punta Arenas region in the south For our first trip to Chile, we decided to focus on the Santiago region.

As code changes, documentation becomes stale over time. This happens at big companies. This happens at small companies. Unlike code, documentation is not compiled or tested. The code is executed. If the code execution fails or produces incorrect results, it is fixed with much higher urgency.

The book is a memoir of John Perkins who worked as an economic hitman.

Data Loaders allow transparent batching of requests to a data provider (e.g. database). More often than not, this leads to reduced latency and better performance without forcing an explicit batching of requests for the API users, for example, your frontend developers. Many programmers relate data loaders to Graph QL for N+1 query patterns. I believe data loaders are a great idea any time you are building an API backend. Let me illustrate the concept with a simple example. And while I am using Go as an example, data loader implementations are available in many languages.