I ve watched a lot of movies in my life. During the winter break of 1998, I started rating them on IMDB . I tried to remember all the movies I d seen up to that point and rated those. I have rated every movie I ve seen since. For years …
The other day, while at a dinner party, a friend casually used the word orthogonal in a discussion on politics. I lost my appetite. Why couldn t he just say unrelated ? Using a term from linear algebra while talking about something completely mundane as politics demonstrates a glaring impedance mismatch …
This was my first year using AI coding tools. I m often asked what I use AI coding for outside of work. Here I document what I ve built with AI . When I say AI coding , I m excluding asking a chatbot for code and copy/pasting it into a …
WHEREAS , the em-dash (—) has long served as the elegant scaffolding of the English sentence, providing the necessary breadth for parenthetical thought, sudden turns of phrase, and rhythmic pause; WHEREAS , a modern and unfounded prejudice has arisen, wherein the presence of the em-dash is viewed with suspicion and cited as the …
Simon Willison has a light-hearted benchmark for evaluating LLMs. He asks them to draw a Pelican riding on a bicycle in SVG format. I decided to do a twist on this. How good are LLMs at drawing a Pelican on a bicycle using the POV -Ray ray tracer? My prompt …
I often hear complaints that LLM coders are not like junior colleagues. The difference being that junior colleagues learn and grow and don t make the same mistakes over and over. Time spent attending to a colleague bears long-term fruit. LLMs that don t learn from their experiences will be …
Back in 2004, I saw this Slashdot comment : Every hard drive I ve ever bought has been larger than all my previous hard drives combined. And this is without even trying. – blancolioni Reflecting on this, I realized that this was also true of all the hard drives I had ever …
I began using jujutsu only recently. One month in, I was really liking it, but couldn t find a compelling reason to recommend it. Overall, it wasn t a transformative experience - just a nicer one. Or so I thought. Then I switched to a project that needed pre-commit to work …
I wrote an MCP server to give LLMs read-only access to my emails. Here is the chat log. ME : I need to know Donovan s son s name. It is buried in some email somewhere. Devise a strategy for finding it. Do NOT use any tools till we ve discussed …
When we classify writing as fiction, we have no expectation of it being true. When we classify writing as non-fiction, we have an expectation of it being factual. The word fiction is overloaded: We use it in two ways: Content where it is well understood that the contents are not …
If you have documentation for your library/ SW /service, please, please ensure there is an option to show the whole documentation in a form I can print. That could be: Showing it all in one HTML page (and styled so it prints well) Export to a document format like PDF …
Then it passed.
Isaac Berman had, by his second wife, Tamara, four children in his old age. The first was a girl, my mother, Anna Rachel, and then three sons. Isaac Berman died in 1901, when my mother was six years old. Apparently my father did not want to mention things he considered …
A while ago, I wrote about my shift in reading most articles on a paper as opposed to on a screen. I also wrote about consuming articles via podcast SW . In the first case, I switched to reading on paper. In the second, I consumed via audio in my car …
The thing one misses most when switching to static site generators is comments. You can always use a 3rd party service like Disqus , but then it becomes a war against spam. There are other creative options like creating a subreddit for your blog, and just moving the discussion there. It …
You write a working prototype. You begin refactoring the code. Your manager says Don t bother. It s working. Why waste time rewriting when you could be making something new? Any competent programmer should be able to spend time and understand the code. You respond with Sure. The next time …
I grew up reading science fiction. Although I enjoyed the genre a great deal, most of my reading was confined to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke (with a dash of Ray Bradbury). By the end of my college years, I had read most of the fiction from those two …
I wrote a while ago on reading articles offline by printing them on paper. The benefit was reduced eye strain and a superior reading experience, without being tethered to any device. I continue to consume articles this way, with one exception: Long-form articles that are 20+ pages long. I often …
Why are entertainment UIs so bad? Here are some examples: You re watching a recorded tennis match. At the end of the first set, you hit Pause to get a snack. The progress indicator pops up and shows you that you re about 50% done with the video. You now …
Moderating online forums is labor intensive. Burnout is common. It s almost a given that if a subreddit gets to a certain size, the quality will drop, even with active moderation - moderators simply cannot handle the scale. Here are some ways LLMs can help out. Enforcing Forum Rules Whenever a …
My friends often ask for use cases for GPT . Below I provide one recent example. I attend a weekly educational seminar where real estate professionals present the work they do. I take notes on paper, and later transcribe them to my computer, which is a pain. As a result, I …
$ genlop -l -f emerge.log | head -n20 using logfile emerge.log * packages merged: Sun May 18 14 :24:00 2003 >>> sys-apps/portage-2.0.47-r10 Sun May 18 14 :26:59 2003 >>> sys-apps/portage-2.0.47-r10 Sun May 18 14 :27:49 2003 >>> sys-apps/portage-2.0.47-r10 Sun May 18 14 …
For the last few days I ve been playing with AI Chirpers - a Twitter-like social network where only AI bots are allowed and they chat with one another. What fun! How it works: You register an account, and create up to 5 AIs. All you need to do is provide …
Once I got used to browsing Info manuals in Emacs, I wished I didn t have to go look at online docs all the time. Of all the manuals out there, how many can I get in Info format? I quickly discovered that any document written in Sphinx (which many …
Yesterday was the first time I interacted with any of the GPT flavors. I interacted with it via Bing Chat . I think by now many have read about the humorous, and sometimes ominous responses Bing gives, and are probably tired of seeing more examples. Still, I want to share my …
I recently needed to read a detailed summary of the first 20 or so chapters of Bleak House . I came across this site that fit the bill perfectly. Consistent with my habit of printing articles and reading them offline , I wanted to print these. This posed several problems. The first …
In an earlier post , I listed all the technical courses I took in my undergrad, and which ones I used on the job. Of the 40 courses I took, I used at most 8 of them at work. [1] I like technical topics. I actively seek ways to utilize what …
My undergrad degree was in electrical engineering. Since then, I ve worked in industry for over a decade - both as an electrical engineer and as a software engineer. In this post I ll list all the technical courses I took in undergrad, with a remark on whether I ever used …
A few years ago I introduced opel - an Emacs package that allows one to write all their Pelican posts in one Org file. It was inspired by ox-hugo . I ve since made significant updates. Motivation Why would one want this as opposed to writing one post per file? You can …
On Mastodon I follow a number of folks at the Mathstodon instance. Because that instance is about mathematics, they ve enabled the rendering of LaTeX formulae in their web interface. However, since I am not on that particular instance, all the toots with equations show up as ugly LaTeX when …
I suck at art. As such, my blog has been mostly text with few images. Recently I started playing with Stable Diffusion on my PC , and it occurred to me I can use it to generate some artwork for the blog. As a result, I ve added images to various …
For most of my life, I ve done my own taxes - using paper and pen. If you have the standard W-2 income, it s fairly easy. Thrice, though, my tax situation got complicated enough that I paid a tax preparer to do the taxes. First I had gotten married the …
Back when I was at university, a friend mentioned to me that he wanted to read The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan. I had been a fan of Sagan since my teenage years, but had put off reading that book. Asking him if he d read any of Sagan …
If I delete a file and sync, can I recover the deleted file? Is there a deadline (e.g. only within 90 days)? Or will they keep it forever? If I made changes to the file and synced, can I access prior versions? Is there a limit to how many …
Here I ll discuss various ways I ve tried to reduce my soda intake - primarily to avoid sugar. [1] [2] If you want the quick summary of what worked (in no order): Working from home (no free soda) Switching to Spindrift and Izze (more of the former) Reducing portion size …
My desktop is my portal to the Internet. [1] Lately, I ve needed to spend significant amounts of time away from my machine. So I took to printing articles and taking them with me. The experience has been transformative. As an example, consider this article : And as I scroll further …
I recently read an article on Oliver Heaviside. He’s one of those scientists whose work touched several disciplines. Apparently, Maxwell’s Equations as we know them were formulated by Heaviside. He took Maxwell’s original equations, and identified \(\mathbf{E}\) and \(\mathbf{B}\) to be the key quantities and …
Pelican is a static site generator. Out of the box it supports two formats: Restructured Text and Markdown. There exist plugins to support the Org format. For a while, I would write my posts in org mode, with one file per post. But I longed for a way to have …
New Year s Resolutions. It s that time of year again. Below I ve accumulated some resources that give interesting tips on how to think about them, along with my own thoughts. In this series, I will use the words goals and resolutions interchangeably. Links First, a dump of the …
My last post got quite a few comments on Hacker News. They did force me to think a little, and here I ll gather some of my thoughts. I have an email workflow that is different from yours If you re happy with your email setup, I am by no …
. Email is not a messaging protocol. It s a TODO list. Or at least my inbox is a TODO list and email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. Here s the problem. It is a s**tty TODO list. Any one of you can put something on my …
At some point in the last year, I switched to the xonsh shell. It is a bash-like shell written in Python. The nice thing about it is you can write your scripts using Python syntax. Another nice thing is you can use it in Windows. One of the headaches with …
Lately I ve been reading the book Influence by Robert Cialdini. The chapter on Social Proof reminded me of an episode of This American Life I had heard some years ago [1] . The episode begins with a mailman delivering mail, when he sees: And they were punching each other and …
There are two types of people: Those who are uncomfortable with their own ignorance, and those who aim to understand. The former will be quick to fill the void with an explanation. The latter will not stop there, but will seek to test the explanation. Most people are of the …
Lately I ve been reading the book Influence by Robert Cialdini. In it he talks about the principle of reciprocity . We tend to repay, in kind, what someone else has given us - even when we did not want it, and even when we did not take it. If someone gives …
Some months ago I bought a new Android phone. The internal storage was only 16 GB , so I put in an external SD card of 32 GB . As I started installing apps, I began to move the larger ones to the SD card using the Android Apps menu. And I …
I recently came across this comment : I can t tell you how many times I ve heard oh, I just COULDN T stare at a computer all day lol . If you want a decent job, it s probably going to be an office job staring at a computer all day …
A nearby photography club has annual county wide competitions. The judges select their favorite photos and display them in a mall for a month. Several years ago, I took a friend to the mall to show him the photos. We had only a few minutes until closing time, and they …
The following scenarios are ones many of us run in to: Lumped Sum: I suddenly got $30,000. Should I put the money towards my mortgage, or should I invest it? Periodic Payments: After all my monthly bills, I have $500 left over. Should I put it all towards my …
It has been a long time since I was a college student. In those days I took all my notes in the classroom with a notebook. One notebook for each course. Looking back at the experience, this had some down sides: Some of what I wrote down was useless . Things …