The Curious Engineer

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Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward

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Some things that aren't worth doing are worth overdoing. Click to read Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward, by Dylan Black, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalMathHistoryScience

’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
61 from 28 Nov 2021 to 18 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (8 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/feed

2026 8

  1. The Philosophical Claude
  2. A Turing Test for Physical Intelligence
  3. Jev is Poorly Calibrated
  4. Forgotten, Like the Beasts of the Field: The Catiline Conspiracy, Part II
  5. A Most Excellent Design, Too Violently Pursued: The Catiline Conspiracy, Part I
  6. The Gremlin Theory of Everything
  7. Anything Will Lase If You Hit It Hard Enough
  8. The Parable of Fat Worm

2025 5

  1. Is James Islington Messing With Us?
  2. This Post is Average
  3. Highlights from the Comments on "A Measured Response"
  4. A Measured Response to Bentham’s Bulldog
  5. Tripping over Chesterton's Fence

2024 6

  1. The Fall of Democracy is a Markov Process
  2. AI-Generated Podcasts with NotebookLM
  3. The Bookmarks Bin, August 2024
  4. The Chronicles of Gerald Caligula
  5. In Defense of Useless Hobbies
  6. Daenerys Targaryen, Humanitarian

2023 12

  1. The Devil and the Cerulean Sweater
  2. The Bookmarks Bin, September 2023
  3. Spoken Egyptian in Age of Mythology
  4. Top 16 History-Adjacent Podcasts of 2023
  5. Guinea Pigs are Fermions -- Part 2
  6. Guinea Pigs are Fermions -- Part 1
  7. The Sibylline Oracles and the Last King of Rome
  8. A Lukewarm Defense of Imperial Units
  9. The Evolution of the Alphabet
  10. The Great Kings of Assyria Reply to Yet More Spam Texts
  11. Scaling Problems in Social Control
  12. Ancient Alien Linguistics, The Pyramids, and Radio Antennas

2022 20

  1. How to Season A Wok & Thin-Film Interference
  2. Voltorb Flip: Overanalyzing a Minigame -- Part 5
  3. Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward: One Year Anniversary!
  4. I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language
  5. Elizabeth Bennet and Sennacherib, Destroyer of Babylon
  6. The Pig-Pork Transformation: Class Divisions in Medieval and Modern English
  7. The Great Kings of Assyria Reply to More Spam Texts
  8. Dungeons & Dragons, Peasant Accelerators, and Inertial Confinement Fusion
  9. An Offering for the Dead
  10. The Great Kings of Assyria Reply to Spam Texts
  11. The Tyranny of the Wagon Equation: Pre-Gunpowder Military Logistics and the Minimum Donkey Rate
  12. Data Through the Looking Glass: Part 1
  13. Six-Star Textbooks on a One to Five Scale: A List
  14. Famous Opening Lines in Literature
  15. A Brief History of Dik
  16. An Addendum to "How to Fail at Amazon Interviews with Calculus of Variations"
  17. How to Fail at Amazon Interviews with Calculus of Variations
  18. Is A Hot Dog A Sandwich? Defining the Sandwich with Unsupervised Learning
  19. A Statistical Analysis of Sniffing in The Wheel of Time
  20. Minutiae from the Ancient World

2021 10

  1. The Young Pedant's Guide to the Greek Alphabet and Acceptable Variable Nomenclature
  2. Voltorb Flip: Overanalyzing a Minigame in Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver -- Part 4
  3. Voltorb Flip: Overanalyzing a Minigame in Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver -- Part 3
  4. Voltorb Flip: Overanalyzing a Minigame in Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver -- Part 2.5
  5. Voltorb Flip: Overanalyzing a Minigame in Pokemon HeartGold and Soul Silver -- Part 2
  6. Voltorb Flip: Overanalyzing a Minigame in Pokemon HeartGold and Soul Silver -- Part 1
  7. Inspirational Quotes from My Personal Heroes
  8. A Terrible Statistical Analysis of Pass the Pigs
  9. Ancient Egyptian and Emoji Chain Letters
  10. Index: Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward