A place for the personal blog, projects, and wanderings of Brennen Puth.
This thought was a part of a longer post which is mostly written, but unfortunately still mostly confusing and potentially unnecessary. One day that post may see the light, but until then I want this thought out in the open. It is not complete, nor necessarily right, but I believe it is worth considering. Although LLM-powered development is still in its infancy, pair programming has been studied…
This was a short three-part series on Herman's blog which proposes some good digital habits. At least, the term "digital hygiene" is now permanently part of my vocabulary. Emails On emails, my system is largely similar. I am careful about keeping the inbox mostly empty, on accounts I regularly use and want to recieve new items on. Archiving means I never leave anything unsearchable, and works…
I added a reading notes section to this website. The purpose of it is to help me track all my readings and hopefully offer some useful notes on them. Maybe they'll only be useful to myself, time will tell. The main purpose behind this is to let me write something even when I don't have a full blog post ready. These hopefully will give you, the reader, some insight into the sources behind…
Augustine takes sin seriously. Even from the beginning chapters, he grieves over the sin of his own infancy, before he could be held responsible! A wonderful example to consider, although it must be taken with a strong dose of mercy in the same draught. I highly recommend reading books 7-9 to any Christian reader. They contain the story of Augustine's conversion, and a terrific description of…
PDF Source This little paper quantifies humans and computers experiencing delay differently. It's one of those papers I wish I had considered searching for sooner, but now that I've found it it makes a lot of sense. It imposes an interesting restriction on form inputs. If the user has made an error, this places a minimum of two seconds delay on the response. The reason is that if the…
Christianity is full of seeming contradictions. Joy through suffering, receiving through giving, gaining through losing, and more. Among them is freedom through servitude. St. Augustine focuses on this issue while writing of his conversion 1 , when he discusses how the will must be unified in one purpose to find freedom. After the story of his conversion, he writes: "By your gift I had come…
I usually ignore the various AI popups included in all of my apps. If a human wrote it, I'd rather read it in full. Today, I've finally found one that felt insulting and intentionally isolating. GroupMe decided that a private message deserves a button at the bottom to request a summary from a LLM. Not a blog post, not an announcement in a group, not even an essay of a text. A 200-word…
This is intended as a future reference, for myself and anyone else who runs into issues. I have a Nvidia 3060Ti in my desktop, and this is how I got hashcat working with it. Symptom hashcat installed via brew cannot use the Nvidia GPU. On further inspection, even clinfo cannot see the Nvidia GPU. Solution TL;DR: Use a container! Step 1 Set up podman for Nvidia GPUs . Step 2 Create a container…
Occasionally I have to collaborate with myself via Google. Either I create the document on the wrong account or I share it with another account for easy access. Whatever the case, Google sends an absurd number of notifications when you share something with someone. I created and shared a test document to count. Two for my email (one for computer, one for phone, which is alright if it was the only…
I decided to set myself up with Zirconium yesterday on my Framework 13. When I booted into Aurora (my chosen image to rebase from) I got the wifi working immediately. When I booted into Zirconium after switching, the wifi no longer worked. When trying to connect manually via nmtui, it would give me a message along the lines of "AP security could not be confirmed" and stop connecting. Other,…
Written as an extension to things that aren't doing the thing because there are a lot of things that I tend to think are building the project which are in reality not building the project 1 . Naming the project is not building the project. Fixing your broken Arch install is not building the project. Considering how your project fits with other projects is not building the project. Writing a…
Over the summer, some friends and I read this essay about local communities by Wendell Berry. We also read his book named Jayber Crow which exemplifies the same values in the life of a character. His observations of a centrifugal force which pulls people into a city and kills any small country town nearby sounds eerily similar to the effect of large social media platforms on the Internet. These…
A few years ago, my friends and I decided to have a weekly movie night. Now, since we're all at college and living in dorms less than a 10 minute walk from each other, that was pretty easy. At the beginning, we simply told each other during the day the plans for that night. That way, we don't have to think that hard about it until the day of. Of course, eventually others heard about this…
I previously ran primarily Arch on all my systems. I don't think that it was particularly thoughtful on my part, I followed the "cool kids" of Linux. Experiences of breakage were rare for me, but I realized I was doing too much playing sysadmin on my own computer. In the rare occasion something broke I was never sure whether the failure was on the hardware's part or the software's,…
The last day or two, I've been refitting my Neovim windowing config. Nothing too wild, just fixing a few warts here and there. What follows is a few different snippets for different behaviors I wanted. Hopefully one of these is useful to someone, even if only as a reference (something definitely needs said about the Neovim documentation searchability situation). If you want to see these in…
Why? A friend recently asked me the question that's been around since the dawn of editors: "Is it best to teach someone programming with a pure text editor or with an IDE?" There is some bias to the formation of the question. No one who did not believe a text editor was objectively better for one reason or another would ask it with that wording. In response, I tried to take a reasonable…
This post was almost entirely inspired by Andreas Karlson's blog post where he details how he created the worst version of an isOdd function ever to visit this land. Andreas's 4 billion if statements cover the whole of 32-bit integers, and ultimately were written in Assembly to avoid compiler limits from C++. Of course, when I saw this post, I wondered, how crippled would a browser be to…