Automated Archives for May, 11th 2026
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Articles To Read
The following are articles that I saved today. Substance and quality will vary drastically.
Chess For the Day
Record: 1-0-4
Net Elo Change: -16
Games Played
Blog Posts On This Day
- May 11, 2024 (2 posts)
- May 11, 2023 (5 posts)
May 10th, 2026
I am Nostalgic for iPods
I love technology. I have a handful of my defunct eletronics from over the years, from my first Droid phone, and a few between, to my most recent Surface Duo 2. I don't have an iPod. And I should.
I am nostalgic for iPods.
I watched this video of someone customizing / refurbishing an iPod and found myself wanting one. I don't need it. I don't even need it for the purpose of breaking from streaming. We don't pay for streaming music and I have a home Plex server that I can stream our music from.
What I realized is that this is less about the technology item itself. It's not about an iPod. It's about my being nostalgic for the feeling of excitement at the unfolding of new technology. Going from a portable CD player to an iPod felt like jumping to light speed for the technology around us.
May 9th, 2026
The Hunger Games (2012)
I rewatched the movie yesterday and then this morning to finish it. I am reminded now how disappointed I was by the adaptation, it did wonderfully in creating the world and setting but so much of the written story and its nuances was lost in the adaptation.
Nature Wants Diversity
I went to bed earlier than I meant to last night. Around 6pm I was dozing off on the couch so I told Katie I would go lay down for a bit. Next thing I know it's 12:30am and I wake up. Oops.
I eventually got back to bed and slept until the dogs woke me up.
But as I was trying to fall asleep I had a thought and made a note to myself. I realized that the different human traits we perceive are the evolutionary tips of these traits, and that they represent genetics doing what we call evolution. More than that though, I realized this is also true of traits which are spectrums, not solely ones where we have different colors for example.
Nature wants diversity, it's healthy for there to be a range of something as it helps ensure survival of a species rather than relying on a monolithic genetic model that is at risk of a single critical flaw.
This isn't a new realization for the humanity, but I had never consciously recognized it in this explicit a perspective.
May 8th, 2026
Relational K Values for Elo Calculation
I woke up with a bit of an epiphany relating to the movie rating system I built. The biggest issue with the Elo system is how dynamic the top rankings are. So what I actually want is not an evenly fair system, I want favoritism for the top 50 ranking. So what I am doing is applying bands to the k-value based on the position of the higher ranked movie.
So a top 50 movie has a K value that is 25% of the total K value, which is used for a bottom ranked movie.
May 7th, 2026
Study: "ChatGPT as a cognitive crutch: Evidence from a randomized controlled trial on knowledge retention"
I was tempted to get ChatGPT to summarize this abstract... Instead I just bolded the second half which is the key takeaway from this study. Obviously, small sample size, etc. But noteworthy none-the-less.
The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence into higher education has outpaced empirical understanding of its effects on fundamental learning processes. To address this gap, this randomized controlled trial (n = 120) tested ChatGPT's impact on long-term knowledge retention in undergraduates learning AI. Participants were randomly assigned either to use ChatGPT as a study aid (AI-Assisted Group) or to use only traditional, non-AI study methods (traditional learning group). Knowledge retention was assessed with a surprise test 45 days after learning. Students who used ChatGPT scored significantly lower on the retention test (57.5 % correct) compared to those who studied traditionally (68.5 % correct), t (83) = −3.19, p = .002, Cohen's d = 0.68. This suggests that unrestricted ChatGPT use impaired long-term retention, likely by reducing the cognitive effort that supports durable memory. The findings align with cognitive offloading theory and the ‘desirable difficulties’ principle: while AI assistance may ease initial learning, it appears to undermine the effortful processes needed for robust learning. These results have important implications for how generative AI tools should be integrated into higher education.
May 6th, 2026
Movie Ranking Fun
I have officially added a page to share my top 50 movies based on my MovieRank tool. As the page explains, I built a tool which pulls in movie information and lets me bash them against each other to generate Elo rankings.
The project is inspired by a website, FlickChart.com. As I recently learned, they've updated their system, but the original structure was that when you had two movies face off, if the winner was the lower ranked movie it was placed above the movie that it beat. This ended up with some weird and undesirable movie rankings and it was very hard for movies to drop down in rankings. There are problems with an Elo based system (such as, it takes a lot of matches to generate a comprehensive ranking list) but overall I prefer this method.
As I noted, the system was recently updated, which the site owner actually shared with me on Bluesky:
May 3rd, 2026
"Bouba/kiki effect"
I came across a clip online last night of two people discussing this effect and I immediately had to dig into it.
