Bayesian broadcast newsletter, E02

Bayesian broadcast newsletter, E02

Gautam Bhanage

Published at www.bhanage.com 

Dec 2025

About

These are a mishmash of interesting articles I have read over a period of time, approximately over a month. Articles are referenced in no particular order. Topics are all over the place ranging from science, engineering, philosophy, programming to anything that sounds remotely interesting. None of these serve as personal recommendations or endorsements. Purely for fun.

Quotes and quips

Quotes that stuck with me recently - 

1. "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show." - Betrand russell on Mathematics

My Thoughts

Multi-link optimization (MLO) on the WLAN is somewhat of an equivalent of Multi-path TCP on the internet. While MLO helps achieve higher capacity between two peers, MTCP helps build higher reliability between peers. 

Interesting articles/links

1. Cosmic distance ladder Approaches to scale measurement of distances between interstellar bodies.

2. GoGc The Go programming garbage collector Interesting read on the GoGC

3. PESQ vs MOS - Perpetual evaluation of sound quality relies on sending a reference waveform and measuring the degradation for an objective evaluation, while the mean opinion score is a subjective evaluation of how the sound quality is impacted at the receiver because of any reason from network quality to codec degradation.

4. Chances of two large numbers being coprime is about 60%

5. Visualizing imaginary numbers - This is an interesting take on why and how imaginary numbers (and by extension complex numbers) are useful.

6. Git command cheatsheet

7. Most traffic on the internet is already encrypted end to end. See here.

8. Trap street: An interesting concept where map makers deliberately introduce flaws to detect plagiarism. 

Notable open source repositories

1. Ansibile - open source repository. Ansible tutorial - The tutorial shows how you can use this framework to manage multiple hosts to deploy software, manage configuration and overall manage infrastructure. The results of each of the actions are in JSON making it easy to parse and manage via a browser.

2. Cheatsheets - Another nice github repository with cheatsheets for different use cases ranging from GBD to managing VLANs.

3. RUST driver for WiFi - A rust based driver for WiFi chipsets.

Research papers

1. DNA from thin air - The invisible witness: air and dust as DNA evidence of human occupancy in indoor premises - 

2. Rhombus - A New Spin on Macros without All the Parentheses. Rhombus is a new language that is built on Racket. It offers the same kind of language extensibility as Racket itself, but using conventional (infix) notation. Although Rhombus is far from the first language to support Lisp-style macros without Lisp-style parentheses, Rhombus offers a novel synthesis of macro technology that is practical and expressive. A

3. Impact of generative AI on critical thinking - key snippets: "Specifically, higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more critical thinking. Qualitatively, GenAI shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship" 

Closing comments

This is the last article of 2025 and might spill over into 2026!

Bayesian broadcast newsletter E01

Bayesian broadcast newsletter, E01

Gautam Bhanage

Published at www.bhanage.com

Feb 2025

About

These are a mishmash of interesting articles I have read over a period of time, approximately over a month. Articles are referenced in no particular order. Topics are all over the place ranging from science, engineering, philosophy, programming to anything that sounds remotely interesting. None of these serve as personal recommendations or endorsements. Purely for fun.

Quotes and quips

Quotes that stuck with me recently - 

1. "I do not think that the radio waves I have discovered will have any practical application". Quote from Heinrich Hertz's discovery of radio waves in the 1880s. This is a reminder for us to never underestimate the power of new information. Discovery of radio waves eventually formed the basis of all forms of wireless communication, changing the world forever.

2. "Remember that an airplane takes off against the wind and not with it" - Henry Ford. Interesting quote that reminds us some amount of friction is needed before something meaningful is achieved.

Interesting articles

1. Watt The Fox? -  An interesting read about how Firefox (a popular browsers) creates Audiocontext for webaudio and does not end up suspending AudioContext when done -> which results in the laptops sending out white noise (can be heard feebly when everything is silent) -> which results in powermetrics/powerstat showing that the system has an additional 1.5W ambient power usage -> which causes the battery to drain faster.

tags: Linux, power usage, embedded systems, browser interaction

2. Comments on NASA's 10 rules for programming - Contains an interesting bunch of rules and the author primarily discusses them in the context of C programming and how they would apply. While there is some good advice in the directives, it is not easy to follow all of the rules without resulting in some convoluted code. A good read nonetheless. 

tags: Programming, C, Linux

3. Management lessons from the challenger space shuttle disaster - This is the second reference to NASA, but we are not following a theme here. Rather, this is an insightful article on managing risky programs. Key take-aways - 1) Establish priorities and follow through e.g. safety before launch, 2) Avoid groupthink - i.e in a bid to reach consensus do not miss identifying critical issues noted by strong team members, and 3) Trust your team's recommendation - this is is for senior leadership to take recommendations seriously. One more thing not called out in the article, but I felt was important is avoiding normalization of deviance. E.g the safety of the o-rings in cold weather (which eventually caused the crash) was called out by the team, but ignored by senior management since they had done this in the past for previous programs. This should not have been ok when such a critical program was being launched.

tags: management, leadership, lessons, better leader, risk management, TPMs

4. Intolerable genius - An interesting read on how a scientist taking LSD came up with a way to make copies of DNA leading to him winning the nobel prize in chemistry. Coined as Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), this was a breakthrough in helping us detect genetic mutations like sickle cell disease in under 12 hours. Another interesting read is the impact on ancient DNA.

tags: science, biology, genetic, chemistry, nobel prize

5. Shallow vs deepcopy of objects in python - Like in some other languages, assignment statements (=) in Python do not copy objects, they create bindings between a target and an object. The difference between shallow and deep copying is only relevant for compound objects (objects that contain other objects, like lists or class instances): A shallow copy constructs a new compound object and then (to the extent possible) inserts references into it to the objects found in the original. A deep copy constructs a new compound object and then, recursively, inserts copies into it of the objects found in the original.

tags: programming, python, refresher, quick read.

Notable open source repositories

1. Awesome LLM apps - A repo that contains a collection of AI agents ranging from investment assistants to tutorials, to RAGs and everything in between. 

2. Miniaudio - miniaudio is written in C with no dependencies except the standard library and should compile clean on all major compilers without the need to install any additional development packages. All major desktop and mobile platforms are supported.

Research papers

1. "Network Control by Bayesian Broadcast", Ronald Rivest. This is the original paper from 1987 that got me interested in MAC layer optimizations that make networks cooperate and deliver information across. In a slotted aloha system, each of the transmitters estimate the probability of a collision, a hole or a successful transmission to adapt and optimize. My newsletter is a namesake from this paper. 

tags: networking, probability, math, research

Closing comments

For the future, I might try to make newsletters more focussed on a theme. It really depends on how I feel about it at that time. Until then, thanks for reading.