I've been dealing with a bad case of RSV. At one point, I said to someone, "at least this will help my immunity", but then I looked it up and it turns out getting RSV doesn't seem to give you much immunity to RSV. So much for that!

https://academic.oup.com/jid/article-abstract/163/4/693/944323

And there's a theory that covid somehow reduces people's immunity to RSV below the already low levels found in pre-covid studies. Also, I wonder why the RSV vaccine is only approved for older adults and infants?

Learning a bit about building game AIs:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/152027219

It's sort of amazing how quickly you can do things now. I wanted to try writing an alphazero-style AI for Azul. With no AI background, it took me maybe 2-3 hours to (2-3 days wall clock) to beat the best AI I could find to play against:

https://danluu.com/game/tile/

I don't think the AI is superhuman, but I've just been training it on a CPU on my laptop and it's not bad and measurably better every few hours, so maybe it will get there if I just let it run for longer (or if I get a real workstation)

Exercises in benchmarking and experimental design, part 5:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/149123122

Useless information about poker chips:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/146484203

How earthquake safe are Vancouver condos?

https://www.patreon.com/posts/143211904

Interesting story about Google publishing someone's phone number on searches for them when they gave the number to Google for account verification/security:

https://danq.me/2025/05/21/google-shared-my-phone-number/

Reminds me of the time a company I worked for (AFAIK) accidentally used phone numbers obtained the same way for ad targeting and got fined $150M

Exercises in benchmarking and experimental design, part 4:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/127627543