Na va-nad

Joseph’s musings 🎗️

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  • COVID, October 7, the Houthis, Iran – how travel to and from Israel has been restricted since 2019

    I’ve done some crawling and data visualization, with the help of Codex. Chart 1: Monthly International Flights and Passengers The following chart shows: Total count of international flights per month (incoming + outgoing) – on the primary axis Counts of incoming and outgoing international passengers – on the secondary axis Disruption overlays for closure/restriction periods…

  • Vibe coding in 2025 vs. vibe coding in 2026

    According to Wikipedia: The term “vibe coding” was coined by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025; Merriam-Webster listed it as “slang & trending” in March 2025; and Collins picked it as Word of the Year for 2025 (link, link, link). Back then, in early 2025, it was a more-or-less derisive term, depending on who used it.…

  • The War To End All Wars

    Before it was called World War One, WWI was called in French “la der des ders”, in English “The War To End All Wars”. Here in Israel, there is still a prevalent thought that another road, another lane, another interchange or another tunnel will “put an end to all congestion (forever)”. Road 6 was supposed…

  • Ten Years of Roadster Promises: When Will People Stop Having Faith In Elon Musk?

    Elon Musk has been so wrong about so many things for so long… But I want to focus on the Second Generation Tesla Roadster. Tesla asked for serious money for the second-generation Roadster: about $50,000 for a regular reservation, and $250,000 upfront for the Founders Series. Just the Founders batch was capped at 1,000 people,…

  • Google, what is the Strait of Hormuz?

    I was thinking overnight – I wouldn’t be surprised if the searches on Google for “Strait of Hormuz” peaked every now and then when the situation in the area gets tense. Most of the time, no one really knows or cares about what the Strait of Hormuz is. But I wasn’t ready for such a…

  • Yet another war

    Another war… Sirens… Giving blood… The situation won’t ever be the same… Until the next time…

  • A rainbow over Jerusalem

    I might have applied quite heavily the filter (increased saturation, etc.) but only in order to be truthful to the sensation. Photo taken November 14, 2025 at 8:23 AM, local time.

  • Randomness in LLMs, preamble 2

    In the previous rambling, Randomness in LLMs, preamble 1, I tried to illustrate how the LLMs I’m familiar with inherently use randomness to generate their answers and as such do effortlessly something that we humans are not very good at – at least I’m terrible at playing the categories game, or at coming up with a…

  • Randomness in LLMs, preamble 1

    I am amazed by the ease with which an LLM like ChatGPT can come up with random “ideas” – initially the LLM picks one token in a probability distribution of tokens, then it repeats this operation for the next token, etc., and in the end you get a random “thought” from a distribution of phrases…

  • Zeke Hausfather on Geoengineering

    On The Climate Brink, Zeke Hausfather writes: We are already geoengineering the planet today, but badly. Humans are cooling the climate today by emitting 75 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the lower atmosphere, almost entirely as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels. This cooling offsets about 0.5C of warming that would have otherwise occurred from…