30. December 2019

A long email about a lot of unfinished business

My latest newsletter is out. Even though it was partly composed of posts I originally put on Patreon, it still took a lot of writing (for me) to complete.

After reading it back, I realized that it has the tone of a year-end wrap-up. Since that is what is happening with the bloggers, I figured I might as well post it here.

Plus, because it was so hard to finish, so I’m gonna drop it everywhere I can.)

With no further ado, here it is.

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11. October 2019

Russell's Paradox

Back in 1902, mathematicians defined a set as follows:

A collection of distinct objects, where an object can be anything, including a set.

So, here are some sets under that definition:

{ 4, 5, 6 } { a, b, c, d } { 8, a, 🌍, “The concept of FOMO”, 🤔 }

But also:

A = { 0, 1, 2, A }

Where A is a set that has the element A, which is…itself.

For decades, mathematicians thought this was fine, until Bertrand Russell pointed out a paradox.

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11. August 2019

Running your own email server (so you can have an automated mailing list)

Earlier this month, I needed to be able to send automated email in order to send daily roundups of stuff produced by my bots. Most of the APIs I saw for sending lots of email was for mass marketing (with the kind of pricing and data policies you’d expect to come along with that). So, I thought, email is well-established*, so it must be in reach of the common developer! I’ll just set up my own email server and mailing list.

Well, you know how this is going to go.

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