Public posts from @darius@friend.camp
After experimenting with local LLMs for a couple years now, I'm excited to release my newest project: The Ethical Assistant! It provides all the benefits of an LLM assistant but with low energy usage, completely private, and no cost to use. https:// tinysubversions.com/ethical-as sistant/
Twenty years ago we had Johnny Cash, Steve Ass, and Bob Grass. Now we've got no cash, ass, or grass -- nobody rides for free!
You're telling me an n ed this Flanders?
The author of Math for Smarty Pants went on to have a long career as a math educator, and is still doing the thing! https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_ Burns_(mathematics_educator) Here's a short podcast episode and text transcript from her website describing her story as an educator: https:// marilynburnsmath.com/math-podc asts/conversation-2-marilyns-math-story/
Honorable mention to "Prof. E. McSquared's Fantastic Original & Highly Edifying Calculus Primer" (different author) https:// archive.org/details/profemcsqu aredsf0000swan/page/2/mode/2up Did I learn any calculus from it? Not so much. Mayyybe some basic pre-calculus, but at age 12 I hit my limit at, well, limits. Did it mean that I spent ages 12-15 excited to finally get to take a calculus class…
In a very real way, it's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" for kids! Like check out these pages. A pretty decent introduction to "proofs" for a very young child! Thinking about it now, the book came out 4 years after GEB -- I would not be surprised to learn that the author was influenced and maybe even thought "what if I bring some of these concepts into childhood math education?"
Discovered today that one of the most formative books of my childhood, Math For Smarty Pants (1983), is available as a full PDF online: https:// arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupt a/mathpants.pdf It's not a super well known book, though I bet there are plenty of Fediverse nerds who loved it as much as I did. The book was full of cool math stuff, but also wonderful cartoons and stories. Reading the…
I should also give a shout out to Alton Brown's website. https:// altonbrown.com/cook/ No adware bloat - again, the incentives are different for him as he makes money from books, merch, tour tickets, and presumably ad money from his new YouTube show (which is good). And Brown has the advantage of being someone whose cooking has influenced me for decades so I trust his recipes.
My new favorite place to go for written recipes online is food company websites. They don't have the adware stack pop-ups or weird SEO stuff. Their monetization story is simple: they sell me ingredients, and providing recipes may cause me to buy more of their ingredients. The better the recipe, the more likely I am to give them money. The incentives are all pretty okay. (I was struggling to find a…
passkey success Credit where it's due: today I tried to log in to a major retailer website with a passkey stored in 1password and... it worked! It was seamless! This might be the first time a passkey has "just worked" for me.
Nominative determinism, first theorized by the ancient Roman scholar Nominus Determinus
The ActivityPub Trust & Safety Task Force is looking for a new Co-Lead (I'm stepping down because I'm leading the Social Web Working Group now). Specifically we'd like someone with trust and safety experience! Doesn't have to be paid/professional experience (volunteer moderation workers welcome). If you're interested, please leave a comment on the Github issue here: https://…
There are a lot of reasons I've been in a creative funk recently but one of them is the chilling effect where I think about the inevitable LLM plagiarism that will occur and I think, huh, do I really want to release anything publicly? I feel myself more drawn to making stuff that never goes on the internet at all. Like, the idea of playing in a bar band around town feels more inviting than the…
Sweet bippy you've got there. Be a shame if someone bet it.
Every time I look on the back of a restaurant menu and there's not a multi paragraph narrative story about the history of the restaurant I get a little disappointed
Inventor of the art car https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Carn ey
First Saturday morning of farmers market season!
It's sad that I have to maintain an Instagram account in order to follow local jazz musicians to learn about amazing shows. A neat alternative is Freakscene, which I like to describe to Portland people as "a website version of the punk and noise show flyers that you see on every utility pole in the city". https:// freakscene.us/ I have my quibbles (wish they had public listings that didn't require…
Tired: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance Wired: the price of feeling ~20% better about my technology choices is eternal low-level inconvenience
today's passkey failure I imagine that if I fully bought into one of the Big Tech solutions for passkeys (store it all in the Google or Apple ecosystems) this would have worked seamlessly, since presumably I would have "signed in" to chrome itself and storing my passkey in Google's cloud or whatever, and Chrome would have done some magic there. But since I stubbornly refuse to do that stuff, I end…