Weeknotes 24: Smooth, but Not Powersmooth

• Busy getting up to speed at my new job at Shopify. In case I never mention it again, let it be known that everyone I’ve met has been great and the amount of thought they’ve put into onboarding is really something special. Extremely excited to dig in.

• If the first rule of the Internet is that we can’t have nice things, the first footnote is that sometimes we accidentally have them for a very short time. That’s why I’ve made a habit of ensuring that the really, really, really^[1] important videos fall off a truck and find their way to my Synology. I’ve always just tried to remember to do this occasionally, but I finally took the time to automate it. Now I can add a video to an unlisted YouTube playlist and it’ll eventually find its way into my Plex library. Always be archiving, folks.

• I know exactly enough math to function, but occasionally I dip my head in to see if I could have made more of a go of the theoretical bits, and the answer is always no. Did you know numbers can be smooth? Too visceral? Perhaps you’d prefer an untouchable number. They can also be extravagant, betrothed, or just plain weird (abundant, but not semiperfect, obviously). This week’s entry: the interesting number paradox:

  if there exists a non-empty set of uninteresting natural numbers, there would be a smallest uninteresting number – but the smallest uninteresting number is itself interesting because it is the smallest uninteresting number.

  They have played us for absolute fools.

• Invasive fact I was recently exposed to: it doesn’t say anywhere that Humpty Dumpty is an egg.