Ethan's Wiki Update #5
Hi, few small updates.
What’s New
Command Line Interface Page: What does "2>&1" mean?
‘2’ refers to file descriptor 1 (stdout) and 2 (stderr) redirect (‘>’) to ‘&1’ file descriptor 1 (stdout)
Saw this multiple times, searched for it multiple times, time to put it in the Wiki
Side Project Page: 368 Chickens
A simple, short, fun game, quite addictive honestly
My best is 235 chickens remaining
Personal Finance Page: A beginner’s guide to investing
A collection of GitHub repos explaining index fund, risk, building portfolio, tax (US focused), retirements planning and more
Two pages that are often skipped in other investing guides, but I think are important:
Your Psychology: common mistakes when investing, debunking fallacies
Guidelines for Personal Finance: buy v.s. rent, pay debt v.s. invest
With the recent downturn in the stock market, it is a good time to remind myself I believe diverse and passive investment in ETFs is the best practice for me. Do not try to time the market, time in the market is more important.
Sustainability Page: How much progress have we made on climate change?
A YouTube video by Simon Clark
Progress are made, lowering emission in energy production, heat generation, transportation, steel and cement production. Slowing down deforestation, and more
Optimism on the progress made based on facts and data over decades
Video filmed with physical, miniature model of the Earth, high quality production
AI Page: Here's how I use LLMs to help me write code
It is a difficult and unintuitive tool, to use it well requires understanding
Reasonable expectations
If a human collaborator hallucinated a non-existent library or method you would instantly lose trust in them. Don’t fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing LLMs and assuming that failures which would discredit a human should discredit the machine in the same way.
Iterative conversation, ask for options or go authoritative, vibe coding to learn
With one use case demo in the blog
Random
One nice tool in the CLI Page is https://explainshell.com. But this time I tried putting “2>&1”, it can only explain it’s a file descriptor to another file. It can’t explain ‘2’ refers to stdout and stderr, and ‘&1’ refers to stdout.
If you are interested to read more about passive investment, I suggest a paper called The Slings and Arrows of Passive Fortune, added in the personal finance page a while ago. It rebuts the critiques of passive investing in the market, and touches on how passive investment shifted and possibly improved the finance industry.
On to sustainability related topic, I would like to share the Nuclear Energy Page. I tried to collect facts and studies regarding the topic of nuclear energy. It is an interesting topic, often discussed with confirmation bias rather than judgement based on objective data.