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I have no views I care to vocalize about the current political situation in the United States, or anywhere else you may associate me with. I am personally totally politically inert, the equivalent of neon gas in a tube, and a steadfast adherent to philosopher Michael Huemer’s prescription in In Praise of Passivity to boot. I have never voted and refused to say the pledge of allegiance in…
Companion to digital resiliency 2025 . Follow to become moderately more digitally resilient. This list does not implement every single suggestion from that post. But it puts you in a really good position to implement more later if desired. Cheap wins So called because altogether these will probably cost you less than $10 total in the first year, and under $100 in the first decade. (At least if…
(⭐ See the digital resiliency 2025 checklist if you just want to quickly go through and implement the nuts and bolts of this for yourself!) I like security! 🔒 Even though my personal data is about as interesting as turnip soup, I really enjoy thinking about things like “threat models” and “risk optimization”. I happened to have some time on my hands this summer, so I…
The world has gotten much, much richer over the 31 years I’ve been alive, and so have I. My parents, Irish immigrants and perpetual laggards to technology, now not only both have cell phones, they both have smartphones , and they can see the videos I send them a few times a week of our beautiful baby boy 4000 miles away in rauhallinen Finland. I have been able to work at home for over 90% of…
7 or 8 years ago, while I was by no means suicidal, I did have a kind of blase take on death. Like if it happens, it happens; it might hurt momentarily, but then I’ll just be gone, and the world will roll onward. That is almost unthinkable to me now as a husband and father. — Andrew Quinn (@hiAndrewQuinn) May 10, 2025 I think about my wife sleeping in the other room, and I look down at this…
Contra my previous Thoughts on 29 , I did not just turn 30. I started being 30 almost a year ago, and I will soon stop being 30 and start being 31. This is a new writing technique I recently learned of called the non-prophetic perfect tense , in which you describe past events that are so certain to have happened that you refer to them in the past tense as if they had already happened. Because they…
According to Beeminder , today marks 1000 days since I decided to go sober. I don’t know if it is 1000 days since my last drink, exactly, but it’s certainly possible. I feel accomplished. Indeed, the only thing I regret about reaching 1000 days now is that I ever started at all. What few promises civilizational culture likes to toss around about alcohol being a “social…
Four years into learning a second language to fluency, I am forced to admit this is probably the hardest thing I have ever done, intellectually. This claim probably doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone else who found themselves with good reason to learn another language as a fully-formed, employed adult. It is probably made a little easier in my case by the fact that I studied multiple…
Finnish has six “locative” (location-based) cases, which are generally first explained to students with the following table: Movement Internal (Inside) External (Outside/On) Static Inessive (-ssa/-ssä) Adessive (-lla/-llä) Moving Towards Illative (-Vn, -hVn, -seen) Allative (-lle) Moving Away From Elative (-sta/-stä) Ablative (-lta/-ltä) Or, to use an example from the Finnish word…
I have long espoused the works of Gwern Branson , and his essay Choosing Software is no exception. If I were to sum up the vibe of it, it would be: It is not enough for software to be good - it must also be lindy . There isn’t much point in eating the learning curve for, say, Emacs if Emacs isn’t going to be around long enough to see a good ROI on it.
⚠️: Unlike most other entries, this one requires some JavaScript to make the checkboxes work. Nothing you put here is saved to my server! It’s all in your localStorage . Simon Willison ’s post, “The Perfect Commit” , is one of my favorite posts to reference when anything I’m starting to work on gets large enough that I can’t keep the full context in my head. I…
Greetings, fellow traveller. By this point in your journey you may have ran across the enigmatic Eric S. Raymond a couple of times; I assume you have hit upon this page because of a legendary and exact blade he has forged called reposurgeon . However, you, like me, are young, and are not yet wise enough in the ways of SVN to even make a toy conversion to Git – fear not. I will give you just…
Since wiping my Github over a year ago I’ve taken a much more, let’s say, impatient approach to my work. I have a lot of things I want to do, and a lot of things I want to see exist. Most of the things I want to see exist are niche enough that they won’t exist if I don’t make them. So, over time, I’ve refined a few anti-patterns and anti-techniques that let me build…
Hugo 101 :: (optional) Steal His Look I like making sure other people can get exactly the same access to all the tools I use. If anything you see me do today looks interesting, feel free to ask me how I did it! Or you can grab all the tools I will use at once by following these simple steps. Install VirtualBox Download Ubuntu Create an Ubuntu virtual machine - great official instructions!…
I turned 29 today, in this, the year of Our Lord 2023. I don’t have any particularly profound thoughts on 29. It’s a liminal year - next year I’ll be 30, hopefully with a kid in tow, I mostly see this year as continued preparatory work for when I finally have a family to call my own. But even though they’re prosaic, I do have a lot of things I’m quite proud of either…
These slides live at https://andrew-quinn.me/modern-shell-slidy.html A more normal HTML version @ https://andrew-quinn.me/modern-shell/ What I hope you leave with Use fzf Use zsh (minimum) Learn (some) vi tldr »= gpt »= man who am i hey i’m andrew https://andrew-quinn.me/modern-shell/ https://twitter.com/zephyr_on_call https://staging.bsky.app/profile/sonder.bsky.social…
Recently my fzf post went really, really viral on Hacker News ! This touched off a virtuous cycle where I was also featured in the TL;DR Newsletter , which I’m pretty sure is AI-generated? I digress. This was an exciting thing to see, except for the fact that Netlify is now banging on my door asking me for $110 in surprise bandwidth costs. Yeah, yeah, I know. Nobody expects the SaaS…
A tiny convenience I recently discovered: Hitting Ctrl+X, Ctrl+E in a terminal window will put your command into your text editor so you can massage your commands. I often have long ansible or kubectl commands I want to either run, or insert slashes into to put into my company’s internal documentation. I do it here with vi (badly!), but there’s nothing stopping you from customizing…
Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can come at a steep cost over time for people who constantly flit back and forth between different tools without investing the time to learn their own kit in depth. As someone with a healthy respect for the tacit knowledge of people better than…
The TL;DR’s TL;DR Read books. Not too fast. Use Anki. TL;DR Pick something to learn from the learning queue. Is it useful, given my current ambitions? If no, delay. Is it easy, given what I already know? If no, delay. Is it cool, given what I currently find cool? If no, delay. Read a book on it. Take Anki card notes, chapter by chapter. While actively reading: Review 10 new Anki cards, per…
Hugo 101 Hugo 101 Websites for little guys
Working Effectively With the Modern Shell Working Effectively With the Modern Shell Talk @ the Tampere Coding Sauna, May 2023. 2023-05-05T11:37:03+03:00 These slides live at https://andrew-quinn.me/modern-shell-slidy.html A more normal HTML version @ https://andrew-quinn.me/modern-shell/ What I hope you leave with Use fzf Use zsh (minimum) Learn (some) vi tldr >>= gpt >>= man who am i hey i’m…