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 -
"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.
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!
