Code, Coffee, & Cortex
I have a pen-plotter! It’s great. It’s like having a printer but slow and it breaks more often. I got it on eBay and it came sorta broken and I immediately spent the difference between what I paid and the price of new one fixing it. Now it’s fixed! My favorite thing to do with the pen plotter is to create things that I wouldn’t be able to create on, say, a printer, or by hand. 1 Sometimes that’s…
Do you know that story about when Sally Ride was preparing to go to space for seven days, and NASA engineers asked her, would 100 tampons be enough? That’s how I am with planning a vacation and toothpaste. Sure it’s just me, and only for a weekend, but I might meet others. And one never knows, with air travel as it is these days, if a four-day trip might — through the vagaries of air traffic —…
Update! Riji now supports Mandarin, Spanish, and Italian. Want another language? Ping me on bsky :) Want access to a public beta of Riji? Ping me on bsky :) Everyone says that the best way to learn a language is to use it. HOWEVER! Using a language as a novice sucks. 1 Let me explain my theory of the Mystery Question . The Mystery Question will be familiar to anyone who is studying a language.…
By popular request, I’m going to share how I wrote some recent projects and their corresponding LaTeX manuscripts in Overleaf using the Scientific Repositories approach I outlined in my previous post in this series. Previously: Scientific repositories Scientific conventional commits Paper-writing with LLMs (expect some major updates soon!) If you’re just here for a Skill.md for your favorite LLM,…
I’ve been writing recently about best practices — or at least, the best practices that I keep — for reproducible, rigorous scientific software development during research. Here I’ll share how I organize my scientific repositories, with three key goals in mind: Reproducibility: anyone (including future-me) should be able to inherit the repository and follow a clear “steel thread” from raw data to…
I saw this article yesterday from Daniel Lemire about how newline characters are valid in text representations of URLs, per the WHATWG URL Standard . Immediately upon seeing his “2D-block” of data URL data I thought, “I bet you could put an ASCII image in that block.” Something like having a picture of a puppy but somehow when you go to inspect source, you just see, <img…
If you’re writing code, you should be using conventional commits! Conventional commits probably look familiar to you already. Stuff like: feat: add button that makes fart sound fix: make fart sound appropriate volume docs: add documentation for how to use fart button The idea is to use a standardized format for commit messages that includes a type, a scope, and a description. I’m a scientist! Most…
I mean… kind of? Not totally? But it definitely seems to me like Kepler figured out some pretty fundamental attributes of gravity that we usually attribute to Newton, and they wound up in the footnotes of a not very popular book, and so now nobody talks about it at all. I don’t remember how it arrived on my To-Read radar but I got my hands on a copy of Kepler’s Somnium (latin for The Dream ). 1…
AI will soon dominate key professional fields—not because it’s ready, but because we’re not prepared to stop it. Hey by the way this is part of a much longer series of AI pessimism at least eight years old . I’ve often suggested offhand that I expect AI doctors and lawyers to be common within five years. This prediction is based on the rapid growth of AI capabilities, especially in knowledge…
More recently: Human-assisted scientific manuscripts with LLMs Much has been said about AI language models’ role in scientific publishing (see also Mapping the Increasing Use of LLMs in Scientific Papers ) and the implications of AI authorship more generally , but it is undeniable that LLM assistance — used properly — can be a force-multiplier for technical writing. Collaborative editors like…