The other day I found out that you can watch YouTube in Albania without ads. Personally I pay for YouTube and I think it is worth while, but I found that curious. Reasons might be that Google has no advertisement contracts in the country or it may just be too small a market to matter […]

My final 15-minute presentation for the Frontiers in Life Sciences course I’m taking is this evening, so I’ve been finishing up my slides and doing some runthroughs. Below is a practice recording of what I intend to present.

Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics for their work in the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction. Today, a friend and I went to see Philippe Aghion speak about this work at Ekonomikum in Uppsala. The lectures are organized every year by the university and are open to the public, with no pre-registration. My rough notes are below [L: As usual, my own comments are embedded like this.].

I’ve been in a kind of hyper-busy mode before Christmas. Mostly that has translated into work, but there are also quite a few other things happening.

Highlights

• I’m working on a game to predict which posts will reach the front page of Hacker News.
• I’m creating a family photo sharing app out of spite.
• I switched to a keyboard-first window manager.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: