Via Ami Sampath, I saw that Sri Lanka now has an estimated 2.5 million total internet users, nearly 12% of the population. This is up 47% from last year, which is no joke. Sri Lanka actually has almost island-wide Internet access (through mobile broadband) and decent if never excellent speeds. Mobile phones boomed and saturated here, so those companies have been competing on data, and good thing, because there is demand.

Chrestomathy means literally ‘useful to know’. Rather broad, yes, so in practice it means a collection of good literary passages, like a Readers Digest I guess. What I’m more interested in is program chrestomathy, this is a collection of programs written in different programming language. It lets you see how different computer languages solve the same problem. Here are some examples.

I’ve started writing some fiction. Perhaps started is too ambitious. I wrote some shit that isn’t true. I got this book Plotto that suggests classic dramatic arcs, something I’ve always had trouble with. I’ve been messing with some skeleton plots. Here’s what I’ve started around “a person influenced by the occult and mysterious”. I’m interpreting that as an intersection between meditation, drugs and the Internet.

I’m writing an article about Google’s new Privacy Policy. Tell me if you have any comments. Reading it, it seems like they’re actually trying to be transparent. The broader point is not the privacy policy but the fact that they’re combining all of their services into one account. Google AdWords comparatively sucks compared to Facebook Ads (for many things) because the latter targets people (rather than clicks). Advertisers can reach people demographically, by interest, which is what they want. Google seems to be trying to bridge that gap by getting a better sense of you.

I recently got a physical book in the mail. It cost me twice as much as the Kindle version and took three weeks longer to arrive (I live in Sri Lanka), but I bought it anyways. Why?

This year I joined this Codecademy, specifically by signing up for Code Year. They send me a lesson every week, which I put off but eventually do. It’s a simple, gradual and fun way to learn programming, in this case JavaScript.

In predicting the future (which I kinda suck at, but you don’t know that yet), it helps to think of stupid problems. What are problems so stupid that someone, somewhere must think of a solution to them? For example, transport. A Swedish study found that “couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce.” This is a stupid problem. What’s to be done about it?

I went to a recent Android Forum (by Etisalat) and I was impressed to see hundreds of young people there. It reminded me of nothing more than attending Microsoft forums five years ago. Which got me thinking. Is Android (ie, Google) the new Microsoft?

Thatha has a post about 3D printing and 3D piracy. Apparently the Pirate Bay now has a section for 3D schematics, for 3D printers. Lest you think this is years away, there are working 3D printers on sale for around $1000, though the model I want costs $1,750. Which is what 2D printers used to cost.

I read something interesting: “What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value” (Tim Maudlin).