Recent content on Caleb's Blog
Yes, AI will take your job, except for a small subset of people: plumbers, surgeons and the like. Oh, and politicians, executives, and board members. You Stand in the Way of Profit You might argue, “but AI can’t do my job as good as me!” Yeah, probably. Maybe it will one day, but AI will take your job tomorrow, not “one day,” not some mythical future when it’s…
Seven years ago I paid something like 50$ for a permanent Pastebin pro account, mostly so I wouldn’t have to deal with Captchas anymore, but also so I could have unlimited unlisted pastes. It’s been useful for tech support forums so I can paste in massive debug logs. I think I’ve even plopped pastebin links into Stackoverflow questions and answers. This means I have 20 something…
In 2025, Framework did some things that made people mad . Pause right here - already some people reading this are getting ready to say, “just SOME things? They promoted a nazi! They donated to a fascist!” I’m writing this as an anarchist that cares deeply about leftism, anti-fascism, trans liberation, the safety of minorities, and the dissolution of all hierarchies. So to make it…
There’s a lot of small things I think are valuable to do in life, but aren’t big enough to warrant a blog post (yet). So, I’ve collected them here. Here’s some things you just gotta do. Normally I like to acknowledge where I could be wrong, or the myriad of things that could make what I’m saying not apply to other people: ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic…
A long time ago, I was curled up on a hotel bed, scrolling through reddit, seeing it through waves of tunnel vision and mild hallucinations as I worked my way through a maliciously-delivered salvia trip. They had told me it was weed. I knew I was in for a bad time when the first tunnel vision hit, but I latched on to a safe comfort: I can just browse reddit until it goes away. Whenever I felt…
Table of Contents “Anathem”, Neal Stephenson “Wind and Truth”, Brandon Sanderson “The First Law” series, Joe Abercrombie “Anarchist Communism”, Peter Kropotkin “The Traffic Power Structure”, by Planka.nu “A Brief History of Anarchism in Romania”, Vlad Brătuleanu “The Mongoliad Book Three”, Neal Stephenson and…
I was recently interviewed by ChaoCode (Jane Chao), a Taiwanese programming content creator. We mostly discussed the co-op , but also got a little bit into AI and advice for junior engineers this year. You can watch the video on Youtube . Chucking up a blog post for this made me realize I never dropped a link to the podcast that interviewed me like two years ago, regarding the restaurant I had…
I’ve kept a diary since I was 5, so I’ve been running a 30 year experiment on journaling and note-taking. As of 2026, this is what I’ve determined: There is no tool more well-suited for the task of taking notes than pen and paper. This post will be about more than just taking notes; rather I’ll be writing more generally about the advantage of pen and paper in certain…
Companies want you to download apps. Here in Taiwan it’s particularly bad: I’ve had shop staff tell me about some discount if you download their app, and when I decline, say something like “It’s really easy! Here, just give me your phone and I’ll do it for you.” Once when I was setting up my phone plan, the staff wanted my phone to, idk, note my IMEI or…
Computing Hardware Operating System IDE AI Tooling Other Software Organization Journal Task Management Notes Calendar Email Reading Life Location Transportation and Travel Social Media Fitness Nutrition Philosophy This post was inspired by a discord message from a friend . I thought it could be fun to mark the end of this year with my current “life stack,” since I so frequently change…
If you use Google Authenticator for your 2FA codes, and Google shuts down your account, you are fucked. There’s no way to back up these codes that doesn’t involve using another phone, or, your own Google account. This is part of my “don’t trust Google as your only backup” series, since Google has “unpersoned” people before for things as trivial as…
Yes. Is that a universal truth? Maybe not. If, in 1939, you found yourself in rifle range of Hitler, and there was no opportunity to steal him away, imprison him, or humiliate him in such a way as to defang his power - the only option to is to assassinate him and thus likely end or quicken the end of the suffering of millions (tens of millions if we count the generational suffering he wrought), or…
Google Maps “Location History” is now called “Timeline” and is no longer available on desktop. Gone as well is the method we all used to back up the Location History, which involved downloading the history in Takeout or just from the Google Timeline webapp. Now, Timelines will only be available on a single mobile device. Ostensibly for security reasons. This kills a ton of…
In Taiwan, sometimes the government mandates certain Saturdays or Sundays as “make up workdays.” If you get off Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday for Lunar New Year, for example, you may have to come in next Sunday, because five days of straight vacation for the working class causes physical illness to the Taiwanese billionaires forced to witness it. Though the government advises which of…
Can’t remember where I read it, but some founder or famous techie once said they never bring their laptop on trips. Home is for focusing on work, travel is for focusing on the location, being present, fully experiencing the probably only time in your life you’ll be in some new exotic location. Ostensibly I agree, how nice it is to experience a European city for the first time as an…
This year I wanted to get this list out by January :P “The Dispossessed”, Ursula K. Le Guin “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”, Steven Levy “The Anarchist Cookbook”, Keith McHenry “Children of Ruin”, Adrian Tchaikovsky “Kitchen Confidential”, Anthony Bourdain “Children of Memory”, Adrian Tchaikovsky “Shards of…
ZSA, the company that built my daily driver split keyboard, the Moonlander , interviewed me and featured me on their people page ! It was really fun to get a state-of-my gear post together as well as a snapshot of everything I was doing at the time, late least year 2023. I think it’ll be fun to go back and read that in a few years! I wonder if I’ll still be using the same…
I was lucky enough to be interviewed by friend and fellow Crossroads member, Teddy Lai . Teddy does street interviews of people in Taiwan and often comes across really interesting people. In the interview, I got to talk about some of the things I love about Taiwan, and some things that after 3 years I think I can fairly evaluate as worth improving. I also got to talk about my engineering co-op,…
Some friends and I opened a Southern Fried Chicken Biscuit restaurant in Taipei. It’s called The 雞 Spot and is near Taipei City Hall Station. Google Maps Website Instagram Expect more posts to follow. I’m working on a couple big ones, including how we opened a restaurant here, how we started a business in Taiwan, and all the other insane shit we went through opening a restaurant. Those…
“Too Like the Lightning”, Ada Palmer “Reamde” and “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell”, Neal Stephenson “Children of Time”, Adrian Tchaikovsky “Bullshit Jobs”, David Graeber “A Fire Upon the Deep” Vernor Vinge “A Half-Built Garden”, Ruthanna Emrys “3 Body Series”, Cixin Liu “Neuropath”, R. Scott Bakker…
In early August, 2023, the Cross-Generational Bilingual Training Program in Taitung invited me to their Taitung In-Depth Tourism English Service Guided Tour, or, CGBTPiT’s TIDTESGT. They have no website. As far as I could determine, this program is from some kind of tourism-focused office of the Taidong government, with the objective of developing tourist activities for English speakers…
I’ve deployed a lot of web software on a lot of platforms: Heroku, AWS, Google Cloud, Netlify, Cloudflare, lol even bluehost (my website and this blog). They’re great for quickly spinning something up, or if you might need to rapidly scale a project, or if you’re hyper optimizing an application with a lot of traffic. The downside is each of them comes with their own quirks, their…
I’ve been having conversations around two different ways to live life: Find peace and happiness despite suffering Reject suffering and strive, even futilely and at the cost of your peace and happiness, for change I don’t think one or the other is more valid, I just want to explore what I’ve been thinking about and how the conversations have been going. Find Peace Choose Violence…
Ages ago we hosted a party with the objective of creating a tier list of 7-11 snacks. It’s time to finally share the results. First, if you’re just here for the data, it’s all available in the google sheets spreadsheet . Everyone enjoyed the snack party Method We gathered 85 snacks from 7-11 and initially were going to categorize them into sweet, salty, ice cream, drink, etc, but…
Taiwan has a requirement for one of its citizenship paths wherein you must renunciate your original citizenship. This is not something many of us interested in Taiwanese citizenship are willing to do. Therefore, I made a psuedo-petition with a simple question: would you seek Taiwanese citizenship if you didn’t have to renunciate your original citizenship? It’s not a real petition…
In late January and early February 2023, my family visited Tammy and I in Taiwan. It’s something I never really thought possible but always wanted. When I think about my family, I automatically put myself back into the “normal” mode, the kind of thinking where moving to a foreign country or going to a coding bootcamp isn’t like, a thing that people do. Yet I always argue…
Recently I’m really into archiving. Be it old movies, shows, books, or music, I have a server set up in my house and I’m fiendishly addicted to deploying open source services on it to serve the weird (out of license) content I find. Since I like to lean into hobbies if they come up, I’ve started picking up any weird VHS tapes I find while out and about, or traveling, with the…
This article has been making the rounds: https://medium.com/@SamTaiwan/from-taiwan-gold-card-to-a-taiwanese-citizen-7ed65bb07f28#c9d0 In it, Sam documents what he went through trying to get married to his Filipino wife in Taiwan, then acquire citizenship for himself and his daughter. It’s an excellent, carefully considered, and rigidly fair critique of what in my opinion is Taiwan’s…
I read this article today by Vicki Boykis where they discuss the annoyance of modern-day programming being mostly trying to stick together a bunch of APIs. They write: Recently, I’ve come to the realization that much of what we do in modern software development is not true software engineering. We spend the majority of our days trying to configure OpenSprocket 2.3.1 to work with NeoGidgetPro5,…
Sometimes companies in Taiwan, and elsewhere probably, will have as policy that employees can’t tell eachother their salaries. This is unethical, and depending on where you are could be illegal. Arguing about law is boring though, the ethics are more interesting. First, the real reason a company doesn’t want you to tell your coworkers your salary is because the company benefits when…
I’m losing track of the cafe’s I’ve tried in Taipei, and the whole point is to build out a list of the best ones, so I’m going to start updating this post as I hit them.
Taiwan had an Ideathon, like a Hackathon but for ideas, in November. One submission category was to write a news article set in the year 2040. I believe the evaluation criteria are “the futuristic nature of the entry, creativity, and presentation.” Considering the next submission category is a “prototype” aka designs and whatnot, I’m guessing most of the submissions…
I was tasked with adding Segment , an analytics pipeline API thing that plugs into tools like Google Analytics, to a client’s app. The docs are decent, but they specifically recommend keeping prod and dev environments in the same workspace, and make these things “different sources.” “Sources” in Segment are determined, for their Javascript API }, by a “write…
My friend Tiffany miraculously got us a reservation at Raw , a two Michelin star restaurant from Chef André Chiang. We’ve spent a year and a half trying to get a reservation there, turns out the trick is to book an 8 person table. Luckily for us, that table was the kitchen table, right next to where food was coming out with clear view in on what the kitchen was up to. Literally a dream.
I was cleaning out my PC and found Adobe Creative Cloud was installed. Probably from when I used to use Lightroom. It’s the source of a lot of annoyance: slightly slows down startup, dumb little tray icon, using resources when I don’t use it anymore, not to mention it’s just shit to have a separate program to manage installing applications when your OS already has one (or……
I’ve got a massive backlog of blog posts I want to write, and I’m not writing them. There’s friction. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that a good way to help get stuff done is remove all obstacles you can. If you’re struggling to get to the gym in the morning, leave your gym shorts and shirt right next to your bed every night so you can toss’m right on as soon as…
Maybe I’m dumb, but I find React / Redux world to be full of just about the most difficult to understand documentation and tutorials I’ve seen. I was looking up state management for React, which is now Too Good for straightforward component lifestyle update methods like onComponentMount or whatever, and found this Stackoverflow answer that spelled out React Hooks’ useEffect…
This article has been a long time coming. For the most part, my immigrant friends and I have been having a grand old time in Taiwan. Not perfect, nowhere is, but I like to say it’s about as perfect as life can be, depending on one’s circumstances. There’s a loud minority though, and unfortunately like many loud minorities, the media loves to trot out their bad takes, because bad…
I’ve written plenty of times about how I think one of the coolest ways to see a country is on the back of a motorcycle. This is doubly true for Taiwan, where my many videos can speak for themselves on the subject. There really is some of the best riding in the world here. Clean, well-paved roads with almost no potholes, wide double lanes, endless mountain road choices within 30 minutes of…
My buddy was having a bachelor party in Puerto Rico, and I’d been in Taiwan for nine months, so I figured that since I’m crossing the Pacific anyway, I might as well visit all my friends and family in the USA while I’m at it. Considering that I have to quarantine for two weeks when I get back to Taiwan, it doesn’t really make sense to stay for just a short time, so I…
The Taiwan Gold Card office sent out a survey to all Gold Card holders, asking about their experience so far in Taiwan, what brought them here, that kind of thing. After the results came out, Amcham Taiwan, the American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan, wrote an article looking at the results of the survey. In preparation for that article, I was interviewed! That was very fun, but the best part is…
Lucas, Yoyo and I wanted to go on a nice long ride over the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, so I rented a CB250RR..R? Not sure how many Rs, but a very, very sporty Honda CB. Plus, Lucas had just bought his KTM, so we had lots of reasons to get out. We started early, at 8am, and were planning on heading down through Wulai and exploring the entirety of a road that I only partially explored in a…
Like I pointed out in my previous riding video post , now that we’re in level 3 COVID-19 lockdown here, I have a lot of time, and am finally making my way through my HUGE backlog of motorcycle videos that needed editing. The latest one is this ride that Tammy and I went on with our friend Irish . Irish rides a Ducati Scrambler which is a pretty big bike for Taiwan, but she’s pretty…
I finally have time to make a packlist blogpost. If you aren’t familiar with the onebag community , this post will seem super weird. Just know that we love looking at people’s packlists . Why? Hard to say. I guess perhaps it’s the same reason some people like fantasy football, and talking about what trades various football teams should make, and speculating how certain games…
I’ve been meaning to write one big fat post on my Emacs journey, and how I use Emacs, for ages. It’s time. I was thinking today about whether and how my life would be different if certain open-source / libre software had never been developed. Git, for example. Though I feel like inevitably some other SVN would in that case take the place of git, what if not? Same for Emacs. If I…
Now that we’ve been in level 3 lockdown for a couple months, I finally have time to get through my huge backlog of gopro footage from the motorcycle rides I’ve done here. On top of that, I’ve just bought a Yamaha MT-07, which means I’ll probably have tons of more footage to get through, so it’s time to crank out these kinds of videos. Here’s the Wulai video . I…
I’m about to talk a lot, so if you happened upon this blog post because you’re looking for a way to merge all your duplicates in Calibre, head down to the download and installation instructions . I get big bouts of what I suppose are a form of imposter syndrome. Bootcamp kid, no computer science degree, always struggled with math, lucky charisma roll means I get to “sneak”…
A discussion among my Taiwan group chat: how can we combine all our Google Maps “favorite” places? The “favorites” places is a list in Google Maps you can add businesses too, so that they appear on your map as a heart icon at all times. I’m going to investigate further how to do something useful with the data I’ve gotten, but in the meantime, here’s how to…
This March I attended a g0v hackathon. g0v holds these hackathons every 2 months to give the entire g0v community a chance to regularly meet, as well as to allow newbies, such as me, an opportunity to get introduced to g0v and find ways to contribute. g0v is a civic community here in Taiwan, founded by hackers and backed by Digital Minister Audrey Tang. The community is a mechanism to act on the…
I published a short video showing off my setup during my two week quarantine in Taiwan. Expect another post going more into detail about what that was like and how I kept sane. The video can be found here . The transcript is copied in the raw below, for those that don’t want to use Youtube or watch a video. 1 01:00:02,533 –> 01:00:03,617 Good morning! 2 01:00:04,884 –>…