Recent content on Brady Hurlburt
Summary 
 
 This is a fun little set of commands to run live-captioning on my Macbook ! Nothing serious. 
 I saw a post on HN that introduced me to Whisper.cpp. I’ve been excited to see so many AI tools start to support my M3 Macbook/Metal/whatever so I can put my 96GB of RAM to use! 
 This was my first time trying out gpt-oss-20b locally, and it did pretty well helping me…
Brady Hurlburt - July 8, 2025 
 “But Don’t All Politicians Lie?” 
 In 2015, Angi Drobnic Holan published a wonderful article titled “All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others.” 
In it, she makes the case that while all politicians lie, there are meaningful differences in how often and how severely they do so. 
 Here is the graphic from her piece:…
Brady Hurlburt - July 8, 2025 
 “But Don’t All Politicians Lie?” 
 In 2015, Angi Drobnic Holan published a wonderful article titled “All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others.” 
In it, she makes the case that while all politicians lie, there are meaningful differences in how often and how severely they do so. 
 Here is the graphic from her piece:…
Hi, I’m Brady Hurlburt. 👋 
 I live in Chicago with my wife and kiddos. I’m interested in philosophies of learning 📚 and in playing and teaching music 🎹. I work as a software engineer. 
 
 Self Portrait 2024 
 
 

 I’d love to chat 💬. Feel free to email me . 



 


 More About Me 
 Schooling 
 I like school 🎓.…
Another song on the baritone ukulele that my dad built for me.
 Raw link 


 
 
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 Tabs (GuitarPro) 
 Tabs (PDF)
“Due Midnight AOE” 
 A song about having a newborn. 
 Video shot by Bearded Science Guy . 


 

 I wish I had a friend on Baker Island
So when it’s late at night here I could call them
Anywhere on Earth is just a timezone
We’re up here humming Eno, the rest is ocean

We’ve got walls caked with white noise
It disappears in its…

 How We Think by John Dewey. 🎧 
 Dewey equates intelligence with the ability to suspend judgement instead of accepting dogma immediately. Thinking , then entails waiting to make a final conclusion while alternating between inducing to deducing – moving from particulars to ideas to particulars again. Here’s his example: 
 
 A commonplace illustration may enforce the…

 Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. 🎧 
 You’d think that car safety ratings include testing woman-sized crash dummies in the driver’s seat, right? Nope. 
 Ian Bogost talks about children having to live in world not designed for them. It turns out this world was also not designed for women either.
Want to help your kids experience classical music, but don’t know what to play? These are some of my favorites: 
 
 What’s good for bedtime/wind-down/cleanup?
 
 Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major , 2nd Movement . (Pro-tip: The second movements are always the soft, pretty ones.) 
 
 
 What’s good for morning wakeup?
 
…

 The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns 
 Enns argues that most of the Old Testament is not actually trying to get the historical events right: it is a narrative designed to help exiled Israel and doesn’t necessarily recount what happened or what God said or did.
I find his arguments convincing. But, he says the Bible is still valuable for meeting God through the stories of how…

 White Noise by Don Delillo 
 Since this is the first post-modern fiction I’ve read, I can’t tell if the theme of this book is that you can’t know anything for sure, or if that’s just all post-modern books. The public-health-communication context hit pretty hard, though. 
 Also, I think this Adam Driver movie is going to be great. It’s basically a…
There should be a “Jack Antonoff Ruined My Favorite Band” club. How do I start a Facebook group?
I’m about to start a family Trello board. God help us.
I left an IntelliJ debugger running yesterday, so this morning I pulled my laptop out of my bag hot, fan running, and out of battery and all I could think was “same.”
In Mom Instsgram, slicing bananas with a plastic knife is the new reading.
Pork belly is the cream cheese of meats.
In How We Think , Dewey says that a shift from an attitude-of-play to an attitude-of-work is not a shift in interest in activities for their own sake to an interest in results and products. Instead, it is only a change in the type of activity the child is interested in: she declines those that are moved forward by whim in favor of those that move toward a product. She can be interested in an…
I’m still working my way through The Authority of the Bible by C. H. Dodd, but here’s a highlight so far: 
 Dodd claims that no one has ever honestly believed that all the parts of the Bible are equally as important.
From John Dewey’s How We Think : 
 
 Direct immediate discharge or expression of an impulsive tendency is fatal to thinking. Only when the impulse is to some extent checked and thrown back upon itself does reflection ensue. It is, indeed, a stupid error to suppose that arbitrary tasks must be imposed from without in order to furnish the factor of perplexity and difficulty which is…
This is my first post via my little HTML posting web client and a Rails API on Heroku!
It has been pleasant developing.
Here we go again.
Brown sugar is like, whole-wheat sugar, right?
This is my first post from the Ruby client I just wrote. I can now post quickly from the CLI. Look for quality to take a sharp downturn.
Favorite Things 
 Public transit. 
 I aspire to live somewhere with a subway one day.
For now, I take the IndyGo 10 bus downtown to the office. 
 Music 
 All-time favorite 
 mewithoutYou - Brother, Sister (2006) 
 
 Recent favorites 
 The Beths - Future Me Hates Me (2018) 
 
 Better Oblivion Community Center - Self-titled (2019) 
 
 
 To fall…

 Love Wins by Rob Bell. 
 Why did nobody tell me ten years ago that Love Wins is just a Great Divorce study guide?
American Evangelicals making any claim on C.S. Lewis is ridiculous, because The Gospel Coalition blog would immediately declare him a wolf. 
 The final chapter is a telling of the Gospel that is indistinguishable from (and accredited to) Tim Keller’s. It…

 Democracy and Education by John Dewey. 🎧 
 There’s so much in this book, but I lived in “Chapter 23: Vocational Aspects of Education” for a while. (Emphasis below is mine.) 
 
 There is a standing danger that education will perpetuate the older traditions for a select few, and effect its adjustment to the newer economic conditions more or less on the basis of…

 After Evangelicalism by David P. Gushee 
 Gushee says that he’s found his “church” in a combination of a Jewish synagogue, Catholic Mass, and a really good home group. That’s disappointing: I was hoping he’d make it easy and recommend some denomination. 
 My cynical theory is that TGC crushed Rob Bell so hard that progessive Christians don’t start…

 For Common Things by Jedediah Purdy. 
 On living unironically (emphasis mine): 
 
 In all of these ways, West Virginia meant perfect confidence in the reality of things. I developed one of our hillside springs, digging out a natural seep, filling it with filtering gravel, and ditching out a pipe-run between it and our house, more than a hundred yards below. I drilled the…

 The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. 
 I think about this a lot when my company gives us “Wellness Days” off: 
 
 Due to the very success of this separate production of separation, the fundamental experience that in earlier societies was associated with people’s primary work is in the process of being replaced (in sectors near the cutting edge of the…
A song on the baritone ukulele that my dad built for me.
 Raw link 


 
 
	Your browser does not support the video tag.
 

 Tabs (GuitarPro) 
 Tabs (PDF)

 Introduction to the Philosophy of History by Hegel. 🎧 
 About the only thing I remember from this is something like “history is the physical working out of reason.”
Even so, that’s helping me out with the Marx stuff.
The “I forgot to submit my assignment” dreams have been replaced with “I forgot to submit my benefits enrollment” dreams.
I think text autocomplete is low-grade mind control, so I made a little app to try to demonstrate it.
I copied a Google RNN tutorial, and I got to use Svelte for the first time!

 Taking God at His Word by Kevin DeYoung 
 This book convinced me that it would be great* if the Bible were innerrant, infallible, complete, and clear from a basic reading.
It did not convince me that it actually is. 
 * for some people
My 5HE is turning off Eye Saver on my monitor at around 2pm.

 To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov. 
 The first half of the book covers three points: 
 
 
 Not all problems are simply issues of efficiency. Some “problems” are in fact necessary tensions between contrasting philosophies and are not something technologists should try to erase. 
 
 
 There’s…

 
 The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. 🎧 
 Socialism: Scientific and Utopian by Engels. 🎧 
 I didn’t know that Marxism was all about the effects of the Industrial Revolution.
“Everyone deserves to feel connected to the products and outcomes of their work” is what stuck with me.
I’m setting a goal for this year to become brave enough to open leetcode.com in my web browser.
What stage of quarantine is looping Jack’s Mannequin and Flyleaf?

 Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design by Paul Resnick, Robert E. Kraut, and Sara Kiesler 
 A comprehensive book applying basic economic and psychological principals to community design.
I learned there are two types of affective commitment people can have to a group – identity-based and bond-based – and that
turning knobs on your site…

 Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America by Christian Smith and Michael O. Emerson 
 White Evangelicals’ tendency to individualize issues and dismiss systemic explanations is not happenstance; rather, it follows naturally and
inevitably from their (our? my?) defining religious beliefs.
When the only thing that matters is a personal saving…
Carl Hendrick in Aeon on our apparent failure to form growth mindset theory into an effective intervention: 
 
 In their book Effective Teaching (2011), the UK education scholars Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds note: ‘At the end of the day, the research reviewed has shown that the effect of achievement on self-concept is stronger that the effect of self-concept on achievement.’ 
 
…
You know, the not-a-cluster cluster. 



 Brady Hurlburt 
 Indianapolis, Indiana | bradyhurlburt@gmail.com | https://brady.fyi | github.com/aninternetof
I can’t tell if I’m not grokking “composition over inheritance” or if Go just really needs better mocking tools.
The Mayo Clinic parenting book doesn’t say at what age the baby can understand Phoebe Bridgers lyrics.
I’m pretty sure a bot could derive our company’s org chart based only on listening to who resumes talking after two people accidentally try to start talking at the same time on a Zoom call.
My dad gave me his old architectural lettering textbook. It’s tough, but I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made in a pretty short time so far. 
 

It’s important to remember that most of your electronic devices just barely work.


 
 

 Play Anything by Ian Bogost 
 
 First, pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things. Then allow their structure, form, and nature to set the limits for the experiences you derive from them.
By refusing to ask what could be different, and instead allowing what is present to guide us, we create a new space. 
 
 
 
 
 
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