How Dutch is the Dutch King?| Rik's Weblog
Blog posts about open source software, statistics, history, and related topics. [About me](/about/). Contact: [email](mailto:huijzer.xyzcontact.stylishly377@passmail.net).| Rik's Weblog
The Social Media Good, Bad, and Ugly| Rik's Weblog
While writing a book, I wanted to get some feedback from other people on it. To make the feedback process easy, I therefore ordered a few copies at a local printing house. This wasn't too expensive so seemed like a good deal. However, after having to wait a few days on the result, it all didn't seem like such a good deal after all. Having to wait multiple days is a waste of time, as is having to order a batch for a better price. That got me thinking whether it is possible to print a book at h...| Rik's Weblog
Does Whitney Webb fear for her life after exposing corruption?| Rik's Weblog
According to Chase Hughes, one of the best defenses against misinformation, psyops, propaganda, or whatever you want to call it is to be very good in spotting logical fallacies. He reports that you should first remember that "emotional response suppresses critical thinking". So teach yourself to stay calm when you see the news. Furthermore, train yourself to spot the following fallacies: 1. **Appeal to emotion.** Our brain is more inclined to believe information if it looks scary. So be caref...| Rik's Weblog
"Let's get real about free speech"| Rik's Weblog
If you follow Value Investing, you basically estimate a company’s fair value and then decide whether you decide to buy or not based on that. After this point, the crowd may be ignoring you, going with you, or going against you. The stock will jump up and down each day. And somehow you just have to sit there and take the psychological beatings. If the price goes up, you have to remind yourself that that doesn’t guarantee you were right. If the price goes down you have to look through your ...| Rik's Weblog
Contact: [email](mailto:huijzer.xyzcontact.stylishly377@passmail.net). ## Publications - Storopoli, Huijzer and Alonso (2021). Julia Data Science. \ ISBN: 9798489859165 (html, pdf) - Huijzer, Blaauw, and den Hartigh (2023). SIRUS.jl: Interpretable Machine Learning via Rule Extraction. Journal of Open Source Software, 8(90), 5786, (html, pdf) - Huijzer, de Jonge, Blaauw, Baatenburg de Jong, de Wit, den Hartigh (2023). Predicting Special Forces Dropout via Explainable Machine Learning (html, pd...| Rik's Weblog
Quoting Alasdair S. Roberts: > Louis Brandeis is credited with writing that “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” But why did Brandeis say that sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants? Because he was referring to a statement by James Bryce in his 1888 book, _The American Commonwealth_. The quote: > Public opinion is a sort of atmosphere, fresh, ...| Rik's Weblog
ustice This is my hand-written (zero AI) summary of the book _On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice_ (2024) by Adam Kirsch. I've tried to extract the main ideas as well as possible, but would still encourage readers to buy the book for more details and a better written text. ## On Settler Colonialism After the October 7th attack, many people were first introduced to the concept of settler colonialism. However, it has been an well-known concept among academics for two decades...| Rik's Weblog
How Is a Cult Defined and How Can People Get Out?| Rik's Weblog
From _Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'brainwashing' in China_ by Robert Jay Lifton (1989): > For an individual person, the...| Rik's Weblog
This is my hand-written (not AI) summary of The madness of crows by Douglas Murray. Throughout the summary, I’ve tried to extract the core of the ar...| Rik's Weblog
A strong argument in favor of capitalism is that “power corrupts” and a free market introduces competition to the market, so it distributes power. Based on this video.| Rik's Weblog
From _On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice_ by Adam Kirsch: > If the definition of a progressive movement is that it believes the...| Rik's Weblog
The idea of communism is that inequality is reduced by getting rid of rich people. Once communism gets under way, everybody is equal. Except the gover...| Rik's Weblog
Transcript of a speech by Frans Timmermans in 2015. Frans Timmermans is the former Executive Vice President of the European Commission for the Europea...| Rik's Weblog
I propose a toast to simple, ordinary, modest people, to the "little cogs" who keep our great state machine in motion. . . . No one writes about them, they have no high titles and few offices, but they are the people who maintain us. . . . I drink to the health of these people.| Rik's Weblog
From pathsofstoicism: > Best mental reset I’ve learned: > > If your mind is loud — **Write**. > > If your mind is empty — **Read**. > > If your...| Rik's Weblog
In a 1983 lecture (transcript), Yuri Bezmenov explains how Russian propaganda typically aims to weaken opposing societies. Here I want to go through h...| Rik's Weblog
Western Society This is the transcript of a lecture by Yuri Bezmenov (alias Tomas Schuman), a Soviet KGB defector. He "explains in detail his scheme...| Rik's Weblog
Stephen Kotkin at 47:00: > And in the process of doing it, [Stalin] caused famine and was undermining, potentially, the party's own rule. > He just k...| Rik's Weblog
Jordan Peterson at 1:14:16: “The honest podcasters they’re trying to get smarter and they are bringing their audience along for the ride.”| Rik's Weblog
Very interesting speech by Konstantin Kisin about the West:| Rik's Weblog
Jan Terlouw about "touwtjes uit de brievenbussen"| Rik's Weblog
I've listened to many podcasts with historians over the years and I just realized one thing that my favorite historians all have in common: you can ju...| Rik's Weblog
There is this common narrative that social media promotes misinformation since you can end up in a bubble. But non-social media also doesn’t have to...| Rik's Weblog
In 2017, Stephen Kotkin gave a 5 hour long talk about _Spheres of Influence_ at the IWM Vienna. The talk is long not because he repeats the same ideas...| Rik's Weblog
After World War II, people introduced the phrase "never again". Never again should the whole world fight a war against each other. Never again should...| Rik's Weblog
beneficial to society than some institution that says things. An individual can be held accountable and thus needs to show integrity. For example, whi...| Rik's Weblog
Harsh Dwivedi: > Windsurf sold for \$3 Billion| Rik's Weblog
A few months ago I suddenly wondered where have our heroes gone? Or at least where are the heroes that stand up and do the right thing regardless of t...| Rik's Weblog
f about 6% over the last 20 years, according to| Rik's Weblog
I'm trying to get jas (just an installer) published in the snap package registry for a few weeks now. This is how the process is going so far. Accord...| Rik's Weblog
ew EV plant in Mexico were put on hold after Trump got re-elected. Then suddenly in March, China’s Ministry of Commerce jumped ahead and withheld ap...| Rik's Weblog
if it is faster to verify the output than it is to do the work yourself.”| Rik's Weblog
nsustainable and that it’s an extremely difficult thing to do. He concluded with: “It’s a job I don’t want, but it’s a job I think should be...| Rik's Weblog
reach a point of action […]”| Rik's Weblog
Recently, there was another security incident with GitHub Actions. This time, an attacker managed to modify the `tj-actions/changed-files` action. Aft...| Rik's Weblog
In a [recent post](/posts/11), I showed how CeTZ-Plot can be used to plot data from a CSV file. I posted this on Reddit and got some interesting comme...| Rik's Weblog
Whenever I need to plot some data, I usually prefer to have a tool that - is fast, - is easy to install, - is reliable, - is flexible, - is fr...| Rik's Weblog
File uploads for fx are now implemented in pull request #21. Here is an image that is hosted on this site: | Rik's Weblog
An old joke from [Ronald Reagan](| Rik's Weblog
e that punctures the battery and sprays water on the cells directly (| Rik's Weblog
pturedlambda.dev/blog/zig-allocators-rust_ergo/>) by Tommy Breslein for example would not have worked as one or more tweets. As a YouTube video maybe...| Rik's Weblog
To make working with Bash scripts less problematic, I've switched to these default shebang and settings: ```bash #!/usr/bin/env bash set -euxo pi...| Rik's Weblog
ony is exactly my social media experience as well. A few people are famous and get all the attention while the rest are "nobodies". I think it's a bit...| Rik's Weblog
as many features as possible in order to make more money, and the interaction of existing features adds an unimaginable amount of cognitive load" (| Rik's Weblog
re perfect for the place: "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."| Rik's Weblog
Hello world| Rik's Weblog
Every programming language has its 'killer' domain| Rik's Weblog
I was just now listening to an argument that got me more and more interested as the argument went on. The author did a great job of first taking the o...| Rik's Weblog
I have spent quite some hours building open source software. With that, a lot of things have gotten easier over time. For example, setting up tests, C...| Rik's Weblog
Recently, I was thinking again about where AI is going. I was wondering what I as a developer should, or should not, be building. I wrote a [post](/po...| Rik's Weblog
Now that DeepSeek released their new model, I'm thinking again about where AI is heading. For some technologies such as electric cars or batteries, I...| Rik's Weblog
When generating a website (typically HTML and CSS files), it is often useful to have a live reload feature. This means that your browser will automati...| Rik's Weblog
One of my favorite things to do is to automate as much as possible. So when I started writing blog posts, I thought it would be a good idea to run the...| Rik's Weblog
A few months ago, I spent some time on trying to predict the [changes in batteries](/posts/batteries) over time. My aim was to estimate when electric...| Rik's Weblog
One of my favorite books this year has been _Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes_ by Morgan Housel. I've read some of his blog posts at Collab...| Rik's Weblog
A few years ago, a good friend of mine happily moved to Microsoft Office 365. It was great, he said, because his files were synced across all his devi...| Rik's Weblog
The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve is a well-known tool used to evaluate the performance of binary classifiers. Its history is clear. A...| Rik's Weblog
Charles Darwin made it a habit to immediately write down anything that conflicted with his own ideas, so his brain would not forget or ignore it. In h...| Rik's Weblog
On the 15th of February 2024, Forgejo announced that they will be decoupling (hard forking) their project further from Gitea. I think this is great si...| Rik's Weblog
From time to time, batteries make the headlines because they store too little energy, because they are too expensive, or because the costs have droppe...| Rik's Weblog
Doing a round trip of encrypting and decrypting a secret should be pretty easy, right? Well, it turned out to be a bit more involved than I thought. B...| Rik's Weblog
Ever since the introduction of ChatGPT, OpenAI has had a compute shortage. This might explain their current focus on _GPTs_, formerly known as _Plugin...| Rik's Weblog
`entr` is an extremely useful little tool that can watch files and run a command automatically upon a file change. So, for example, the following can...| Rik's Weblog
In 2019, I finished my master's thesis on the topic of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and I thought that I understood the basics of Artificial Inte...| Rik's Weblog
Yuri Vishnevsky wrote that he no longer recommends Julia. This caused lengthy discussions at Hacker News, Reddit and the Julia forum. Yuri argues that...| Rik's Weblog
> I'm lately doing for the first time some optimizations of Julia code and I sort of find it super beautiful. This is how I started a message on the...| Rik's Weblog
More and more companies start providing functionality for static site hosting. For example, GitHub announced Pages in 2008, Netlify was founded in 201...| Rik's Weblog
_Updated on 2021-12-15: Include ordered constraint._ This post discusses some latent analysis techniques and runs a Bayesian analysis for example dat...| Rik's Weblog
In my post on [Shapley values and multicollinearity](/posts/39), I looked into what happens when you fit a complex uninterpretable model on collinear...| Rik's Weblog
Nested cross-validation is said to be an improvement over cross-validation. Unfortunately, I found most explanations quite confusing, so decided to si...| Rik's Weblog
Typically, when making predictions via a linear model, we fit the model on our data and make predictions from the fitted model. However, this doesn't...| Rik's Weblog
Below is example code for fitting and evaluating a linear regression and random forest classifier in Julia. I've added the linear regression as a base...| Rik's Weblog
Linear statistical models are great for many use-cases since they are easy to use and easy to interpret. Specifically, linear models can use _features...| Rik's Weblog
Both GitHub and GitLab provide shortcuts for interacting with the layers they have built on top of Git. These shortcuts are a convenient and clean way...| Rik's Weblog
I like to complain that design can distract from the main topic and is therefore not important. However, design is important. If your site, presentati...| Rik's Weblog
To me, it is still unclear what exactly is the difference between Frequentist and Bayesian statistics. Most explanations involve terms such as "likeli...| Rik's Weblog
In this post, I walk through the steps to install NixOS on a Lenovo Yoga 7 with an encrypted root disk. This tutorial is mainly based on the tutorial...| Rik's Weblog
Linear regression works on real numbers $\mathbb{R}$, that is, the input and output are in $\mathbb{R}$. For probabilities, this is problematic becaus...| Rik's Weblog
Say that you are a statistician and are asked to come up with a probability distribution for the current state of knowledge on some particular topic y...| Rik's Weblog
According to McEnerney ([2014](#mcenerney)), academics are trained to be poor writers. Eventually, they end up in his office and tell, while crying, t...| Rik's Weblog
I keep forgetting lessons about writing. After writing a text, my usual response is to declare it as near perfect and never look at it again. In this...| Rik's Weblog
Counting is simple except when there is a lot to be counted. Combinations and permutations are such a case; they are about counting without replacemen...| Rik's Weblog
When comparing different papers it might be that the papers have numbers about the same thing, but that the numbers are on different scales. Forr exam...| Rik's Weblog
While reading texts on statistics and meta-science I kept noticing vagueness. For example, there seems to be half a dozen definitions of replicability...| Rik's Weblog
One of the most famous scientific discoveries was Newton's laws of motion. The laws allowed people to make predictions. For example, the acceleration...| Rik's Weblog
According to Andy Raskin, the greatest sales deck has five elements. In this post, I'll present an adapted version. In line with the rest of this blog...| Rik's Weblog
Correlations are ubiquitous. For example, news articles reporting that a research paper found no correlation between X and Y. Also, it is related to (...| Rik's Weblog
The first step into creating good habits is figuring out why exactly you want the habit. To me, writing blog posts seems like a good habit, but I'm un...| Rik's Weblog
In the 1970s the American government wanted to save fuel by allowing drivers to turn right at a red light (Reinhart, [2020](#reinhart2020)). Many stud...| Rik's Weblog
In general I'm quite amazed by the Julia programming language. This blog post aims to be a demonstration of its niceties. The post targets readers who...| Rik's Weblog
I have recently started paying attention to the time spent on fine-tuning my Linux installation. My conclusion is that it is a lot. Compared to Window...| Rik's Weblog
Having a compile and run shortcut seems like the most basic requirement for a developer. Most fully fledged IDE's therefore include it. For example, P...| Rik's Weblog
QoS setup using Tomato in combination with an Experiabox| Rik's Weblog
I think I’m going to skip the comment feature for fx (https://fx.huijzer.xyz). Niall Ferguson recently argued that people in technology often forget about the past and say that now everything is different even though usually it isn’t (https://youtu.be/giZC4pCqB4o). Most of the time, new things are just old things with slight variations.| Rik's Weblog
Why I wrote the fx web server| Rik's Weblog