Orlan

I wish! Yes, the better you get at riffle shuffling, the more it will approximate a faro shuffle (meaning less "clumps" and more singles alternating) in some parts of the deck, but it's the repetition that makes it random. If you have accidentally mastered a perfect tabled faro without deliberate practice, I'd like to shake your hand and read your book (or video) on the technique!

Perhaps we can caveat that the person is not cutting perfectly at 26 every time and performing perfect out faros, then we can assume they'll be mixed enough. :-)

It's been a while since I've read Persi Diaconis' paper (who coined the 7 shuffles thing), but I believe all your main concerns were addressed. Not sure about the sleeved deck thing, that wasn't probably a consideration.

August 22–24 at the Revolution Hall in Portland

So… see you at Magic Live?

How’s your progress going? I read The Memory Book (Harry Lorayne) 20 years ago, and have always been interested, but assumed it would take years to be proficient. Wasn’t until I read Moonwalking With Einstein that I realized that with consistent practice it doesn’t need to take that long.

Life has gotten in the way, so I haven’t been consistent with practice. Have also been procrastinated by jumping between books (Dominic O’Brien, Harry Lorayne, Nelson Dellis, others) trying to compare methods.

Penn has mentioned a few times on his podcast that him and Rob Pike are good friends from way back, and has shared several anecdotes.

One I remember and found funny was that one time Penn saw Rob talking to someone, and Rob asked for their phone number. From Penn’s vantage point he sees Rob pick a pen and paper and mimics writing the phone number, but doesn’t write anything at all. When he questions Rob about it he says something to the effect of “Oh, I can just memorize a phone number without a problem, but if I say that out loud they’ll think I’m blowing them off or I’m not really interested in the number, so it’s easier to just fake write it”.

For me, it was Skittles! I traveled to the UK, bought some Skittles, and almost spit them out (blackcurrant instead of grape). Had to look up what it was. Still haven’t tried the real thing, only in candy form.

And here’s an explanation from a theater show by Derren Brown @ 5:43 - https://youtu.be/GPoPSNxV1D4?t=342

Nice! I remember learning about Cronhub when the original developer was building in public on social media, back in 2019. I remember thinking it was a cool idea, and even recommended it to a friend that was running a startup and was having some issues with failing cron jobs.

Cool to see that it’s still around and profitable! Yeah, maintenance of an inherited codebase is hard, but happy to see that someone took over it.

Perhaps there were special deals in place for high profile podcasts?

I’ve never used the Apple Podcast app, and only learned about the Apple only features while listening to John Carreyrou‘s podcast during the Theranos trial. They had member only episodes (paid) which were only accesible using Apple’s app, but they also had a public RSS feed which excluded those members only episodes.

The Spanish “scene” has been around for a while! I have a friend who moved to Spain in the 90s to study under Ascanio. After Ascanio, Tamariz and the late Gabi Pareras seem to have the biggest influences, but Gabi was not well known outside of Spain (until his later years). Only got to see him once in London.

Tamariz is still a big influence in the magic scene of course, but DaOrtiz and his Villa Kaps seem to be expanding the circle at a faster pace for the next generation.

(Not Spanish, from Puerto Rico now living in the US, and very much into the topic. =) )

And Luis Olmedo - 2022 FISM winner! Great act.

Plus many more.

If you enjoyed reading this article, you’ll probably also enjoy Joshua Jay’s book How Magicians Think. Among other things, he describes the experience of spending a few days visiting Tamariz.

There’s a significant number of magicians worldwide that have learned Spanish just to spend time around Spain and around other Spanish magicians.

This OS "upgrade" has been annoying. At least I'm not the only one with issues, and I have some of the same issues listed listed here. I hadn't seen them documented elsewhere.

I waited until the first point release to upgrade in hope of a seamless transition, but instead I've been keeping a list of issues. I've been meaning to do a writeup (or at lease a tweet), but haven't done so for the same reason I still haven't spent time trying to fix them. It's many small annoying things. There might be a way to fix some of them (like the generic icons for some filetypes, or my NAS not mounting at startup, or Finder constantly crashing), but so far I've decided to keep my sanity.

I love rclone, have been using it to reliably move large files between different could providers (thanks Nick!). GUI applications were constantly crashing, rclone has always been reliable.

Make sure to support your favorite open source projects! https://rclone.org/donate/

Surely you weren’t the only one who read it that way.

All of them good points. I'll add another wrinkle; for some reasons I can barely remember, I have 2 different Apple IDs. I was a paid .Mac user when it was a thing, but I also had a different account to make iTunes purchases back in the day. Currently I need to log in with both in my devices; one of them is used for purchasing in iTunes/App Store, the other one is used for iCloud Photos/iCloud Drive. However you can also make purchases in the Books app (which I use it to sync PDFs), so this always trips me up. There's no way to merge two Apple IDs, and setting up a new device is always an adventure. Knowing when to use which Apple ID can be confusing (don't get me started on 2FA, I'm afraid that having 2 Apple IDs will eventually lead to me getting locked out!).

I liked the concept of Sign in with Apple when I first heard about it, but at this point it might be too confusing (I also never check my "main" Apple ID email).

I'm more or less on the same boat, but this would be my first time trying it.

Not familiar with all the available API platforms, but while doing some research, Alpaca kept showing up ( https://alpaca.markets ) so I just opened an account with them recently.

Would love to get any recommendations on getting started with the data analysis/algorithms/ML side of things for this.

I still use https://fluidapp.com/ when I have to log into Facebook from the computer, hopefully, this will replace it!

Looks cool, can't wait for support for the other websites.

I also got the "Registration is denied" error multiple times with no other error messages.

Does your company name have any non-alphanumeric characters? I removed the "&" from mine and was able to register.

Are you familiar with Ramit Sethi, from https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/ ? He has shifted a bit from a blog about financial advice but has years of entries in the blog (and a book from a few years ago).

If anyone caught Derek Delgaudio's Off-Broadway show "In and Of Itself", he dealt with this concept. Great show, limited run just ended recently.

I've used Plivo in the past and was happy with the results. Since you mention Twillio, I'm assuming you're okay with a development platform and are not necessarily looking for a consumer product. Plivo did recently roll out PHLO, which allows building a solution with little or no programming.

Interesting. The article itself does not add much insight from the professor (Dr. Melissa González) since she didn't respond to requests for comments, so it is based on a research paper she cited and an email she sent to potential students.

If you're interested in these type of experiments, you should read some of the books by behavioral economics professor Dr. Dan Ariely. He has several talks online as well. I'm partial to his first book on this topic, Predictably Irrational, but he has several other books exploring human behavior.

Is this for businesses only, or can individuals with a Twilio account also make use of this API?

I've also been guilty of this. For programming side projects, I recently decided I was going to think of them as microservices. I've been guilty of overengineering what should have been something simple and losing interest halfway through.

Instead of a polished, user-friendly product, I'm building simple utilities (CLI or minimal UI) that can be leveraged (or refactored) into something else in the future. Good documentation also helps!