Printing a Book at Home with Minimal Equipment| Rik's Weblog
In a YouTube comment, someone gave a great description for the Wikipedia fact-checking:  The correct description for this "context" is "the blue box of gaslighting". In general, the word "context" visible above the box is also misleading since providing "context" is often an euphemism for lying. Brought you to by a comment below a AwakenWithJP video.| Rik's Weblog
If you want to understand the Western world, just read the scriptures of the three main religions. Even when you are not religious that **DOES NOT MEAN** other people are also not religious. Billions of people read these scriptures weekly if not daily. They explain 90% of what's happening. I'm often reading books where some author put in countless hours of research to figure out a certain event, and while I'm reading it and can't help but notice that it's often exactly in accordance with the ...| Rik's Weblog
Companies are saying that the economy and AI are causing the large amount of tech layoffs, but Vanessa Wingårdh looked at the H-1B visa data and noticed that the companies are lying. She argues that the American employees are being replaced by cheaper H-1B visa workers. WSJ also reported on this due to some senators speaking up. As proof she uses the H-1B data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. When filtering by fiscal years 2023, 2024 and 2025, the number of Beneficiaries A...| Rik's Weblog
In the Netherlands, we currently have about 100 wolves walking around. Politicians say this is a "natural phenomenon" and that they walked here from their own volition. Meanwhile animals in rural areas are being killed by these wolves and even a runner has been attacked, while the government forbids the shooting of them because they want to first "establish a healthy state of conservation." The media is now even informing people about how to spot the difference between a wolf and a dog. Vario...| Rik's Weblog
Transcript from a video from Chase Hughes: > Let me say you one thing that is true. > You and that weird uncle that you argue with at thanksgiving, you are not enemies, you are both being played. > You are both being manipulated. > And the second that you realize that, the second you look across the isle and see a fellow human being instead of some caricature cartoon, is the moment that the scam starts to collapse. > > Let me be crystal clear about one thing. > The real enemy isn't your democ...| Rik's Weblog
I’ve been reading many old books lately and would summarize the situation as follows: Old books - Crappy cover, great content. Modern books - Great cover, crappy content.| Rik's Weblog
From Comedy Central Stand-Up: > Now there are just certain people I have no time for like if you're sexist or homophobic, or if you don't believe in conspiracy theories. > How don't you believe in any conspiracy theories? > I understand not all of them. > Not most of them. > But you don't believe in any conspiracy theory? > You think the government is just batting 1000 and telling us the whole truth? > That's a strong stance to take. \- Ron Funches| Rik's Weblog
According to Michael on X: > The moment that Charlie Kirk is ‘shot’ you can clearly see the blood pack vest and tube/wire leading to it under his shirt. > > Maybe not have the ‘victim’ wear a white T shirt the next time you pull a fake assassination huh? > >  > >  > >  I myself think this is plausible, because since ever since I saw the video, I just couldn't figure out wh...| Rik's Weblog
Companies are Lying About AI Layoffs| Rik's Weblog
Chase Hughes argues why the (social) media is tribalizing people and who benefits from it: . One commenter responded with: > I have found peace and I’m spreading this video every day. I am guilty. I have stopped following people. I will not let myself be coerced any longer. This video has changed my life and I will keep spreading your message Chase. God bless you.| Rik's Weblog
Taking long quiet walks - without distractions- will make you more intelligent. We all have so much information in our minds, but the brain needs time to process it. source| Rik's Weblog
An interesting event in 1904-1905. From Wikipedia: > The 1904–1905 Welsh revival was the largest Christian revival in Wales during the 20th century. It was one of the most dramatic in terms of its effect on the population, and triggered revivals in several other countries. The movement kept the churches of Wales filled for many years to come, seats being placed in the aisles in Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Swansea for twenty years or so, for example. Meanwhile, the Awakening swept the r...| Rik's Weblog
“If the situation was hopeless, their propaganda would be unnecessary.” A comment below British Ads Are Dystopian Propaganda.| Rik's Weblog
The following is an AI-based method of converting a PDF to text. There is OCR software that can more or less detect symbols without AI, but I find that AI is typically more accurate and introduces fewer strange symbols. To do this, first convert the PDF to images via ```raw pdftoppm source.pdf source -png ``` This will produce a number of PNG images. In my case, the numbers went from 001 to 304. Next, I used the following shell script to run AI on each image. Here, I'm using gemma3:4b since i...| Rik's Weblog
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
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
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