Posts

What’s kicking, internauts? This is a blog post explaining how to build fully statically-linked OCaml executables in a Docker environment, then copy them out of your Docker environment into your filesystem.1 Prerequisites This post assumes an “I run Linux on my computer” and “I write sofware in a programming language that compiles to machine code” level of tech-savviness. Although I develop in OCaml on Arch Linux, this post is nonetheless likely to be of interest if you are a developer who isn’t on Arch Linux, and it may very well even be of interest if you don’t use OCaml. If you have no idea what any of these computer words mean, please feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll be happy to write a follow-up post explaining whatever you’d like to know about. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: episode 157 was recorded in September of 2022. In this episode, Matt and Joseph sit down with Robin Hanson, Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, to discuss prediction markets. Click here to download Episode 157 of Elucidations. A prediction market is a kind of betting market, wherein people place bets on whether or not some future event is going to happen by investing in market shares associated with that event. If the event happens, the people who predicted it correctly get paid. If not, they lose the money they invested. So far, so good: all that is pretty normal for a betting market. But in the case of a prediction market, there is a further twist. Before the future comes to pass and the people who guessed it correctly get paid, there’s a mathematical formula you can use, based on the price of the most recent bets that have been placed, to determine what the probability of that event happening is. In other words, before the payout, the current prices of all shares in the market give us the ability to subtly aggregate the wisdom of every individual speculator into a combined judgment about what is probably going to happen. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Magallanes. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman. Joseph Diller: And I’m Joseph Diller. Matt Teichman: With us today is Oliver Traldi, postdoc at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and visiting assistant professor at the University of Tulsa Honors College. He is here to discuss political expertise. Oliver Traldi, welcome. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Magallanes as Trans-Expert. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Rebecca Lowe, Philosophy Senior Research Fellow and Director of Emerging Scholars at the Mercatus Center, and she’s here to discuss speaking freely. Rebecca Lowe, welcome to Elucidations. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Miranda Abainza Magallanes. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today is Christos Lazaridis, a neurointensivist at the University of Chicago, and he’s here to discuss brain death. Christos Lazaridis, welcome. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Magallanes. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with me today are Lainie Ross, Carolyn and Matthew Bucksbaum Professor of Clinical Ethics at University of Chicago Medicine, and Christos Lazaridis, Associate Professor of Neurology at University of Chicago Medicine. They are here to talk about defining death. Lainie and Christos, welcome. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: episode 156 was recorded in June of 2024. Full transcript here. For this episode, Matt Teichman and Joseph Diller sit down with Oliver Traldi (University of Toledo, Mercatus Center) to talk about political expertise. Click here to download Episode 156 of Elucidations. ...

Greetings, earthlings. This is a blog post explaining how to run Emacs, GPG Agent, and SSH Agent as user-level daemons, mostly using systemd. I do so on Arch Linux, but in principle, this setup should work fine on any Linux distribution that uses systemd. Prerequisites This post assumes an “I run Linux on my computer” level of tech-savviness. The portions of this post that pertain to Emacs also assume that you are an Emacs user. If you don’t know what any of those words mean, or if this post employs concepts that you don’t understand but would like to, please feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll be happy to write a follow-up post explaining whatever you’d like to know about. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Note: episode 155 was recorded in October of 2025. Full transcript here. Last episode, we talked about free speech, and this time, we sit down with Rebecca Lowe (Mercatus Center) to discuss the related but slightly different topic of speaking freely. Click here to download Episode 155 of Elucidations. ...

Subscribe to Elucidations:       Episode post here. Transcription by Prexie Magallanes. Matt Teichman: Hello and welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman, and with us today is Luca Gattoni-Celli, founder of YIMBYs of Northern Virginia and author of the Cornerstone Substack about housing, urbanism, and the world we build for each other. He is here to discuss the housing crisis and how to fix it. Luca Gattoni-Celli, welcome. ...