Recent content on Jason A. Heppler
If there’s one thing I’ve come to appreciate about generative AI, it’s the ability to automate routine things. One of my digital history sites— the first one I ever made —broke at some point. It’s an old site that really should’ve always been a static site, but static site generators were not quite a thing when I first made this project. Instead, I had a…
One thing I’ve been thinking about is a persistent critique—one I’ve expressed myself and think is completely valid—that code generated by Claude or Codex immediately becomes technical debt. That is, it’s tantamount to producing spaghetti or legacy code that you cannot understand because you did not write it (which, of course, is a similar concern I have about…
I wanted to jot down my current workflow for this website. I mentioned in my recent post on the redesign of this site that I have a new workflow in place where I can do everything right from the comfort of Obsidian. To get this to work I had a few things to set up first. While the following might seem slightly complicated (and certainly it is more techy than just running a WordPress website),…
Richard Beard, “ Computers Can’t Surprise ”: To escape the dead man’s handle of cliché, readers live in hope for organic associations, speculative leaps and surprise inferences. Whereas, to an AI, which is fed the answer before the question, ‘surprise’ remains an elusive concept. . . . An LLM’s calculation of the most likely sequence of words is the least likely way to create…
My website just went through a big re-design and I wanted to document some of the changes here. I entered this design work with some self-imposed constraints: Reduce the carbon footprint to less than 0.185g of CO2. Focus on functionality, get rid of everything else. Choose good, readable typefaces that evoke a book. As Robin Sloan says , this site will aspire to the speed and privacy of the…
I’m in the process of slowly trying to inventory my library using LibraryThing (where I’ve been for twenty years!). I’m mostly focused on physical books—I don’t own many ebooks or audio books, the physical books are most near and dear to me. I estimate so far that my personal library runs around 800 books currently (on top of 50 or so ebooks and maybe 10 audiobooks).…
Dave Friedman : Two frontier AIs debated a strategic question and quickly slid from sensible analysis into confident, theatrical nonsense. The collapse revealed a hard limit of today’s large language models: they can interpolate beautifully, but they cannot build new world models. . . . The ending of the exchange felt like Waiting for Godot rewritten in transformer weights: circular,…
A little over a year ago I wrote about how I use Obsidian for historical research. While it hasn’t changed substantially since I wrote that piece, there are some updates to the system I’d been wanting to write up. An email from a friend with questions about that piece, and this is basically the email I wrote back to him. The core question my friend asked about was the separation…
Amelia Wattenberger : We’ve been successfully removing all friction from our apps – think about how effortless it is to scroll through a social feed. But is that what we want? Compare the feeling of doomscrolling to kneading dough, playing an instrument, sketching… these take effort, but they’re also deeply satisfying. When you strip away too much friction, meaning and…
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. — Joan Didion Despite my self-imposed exile from social media, a conversation managed to still reach me from Bluesky over the last few days of my fellow historians making the point (and arguing with generative AI enthusiasts) that generative AI cannot do the work we do. This happens to exactly…
Every year we have a rotation of Christmas movies that we watch this time of year. We’re kicked off with Klaus tonight , and still have more to go. These are, of course, a mix of things that we watch with the kids or just the adults. Klaus Grinch (2018) The Muppet’s Christmas Carol National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Grevinnen og hovmesteren The Shop Around the Corner It’s a…
Aldo Leopold: What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one’s own land? Edward Abbey: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading go the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. It is not enough to…
With the weather starting to warm up in Nebraska, I’ve had a chance to start coming to terms with the Farmall H restoration project. I’m starting up a new series on this, and you can follow along in the restoration category . In my test drives I’ve done since getting it home and some closer inspections across the tractor, I’ve come to find a few things to look into.…
Oliver Burkeman : [V]arious acquaintances – and me too, in some ways – started doing what I called “living inside the news.” They seemed to view the world they accessed through news sites and social media as somehow more real than their immediate surroundings. The latter was a place they merely dropped into from time to time, before hurrying back to the main event. [ . . . ] Keeping your centre of…
A number of years ago I founded, along with Brandon Locke and Sarah Melton, Endangered Data Week , designed to highlight threats to publicly available data as well as train folks to work with data. And while EDW wound down in 2020, the work and skills remain essential. The End of Term Web Archiving team has been working hard to archive datasets and government websites that were at risk of being…
Jason Koebler : If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without…
When it comes to types of work I do, I like a certain amount of friction—what Alan Jacobs calls “ constructive friction .” The friction I mean here are the tools I use and how they can introduce the kind of friction that I find useful. Usually this means I tend to prefer tools that do less —it’s one of the reasons I often stick to default apps . Sure, I could (and once did, for a long time) use…
Charlie Stross : The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable. I do not write novels using Microsoft Word. I use a variety of other tools, from Scrivener (a program designed for managing the structure and editing of large compound documents, which works in a manner analogous to a programmer’s integrated development environment if Word were a basic text editor) to classic…
Jason Koebler : If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without…
For the past few weeks I’ve been using the Zen browser, a fork of Firefox that comes with some preference changes and nice interface updates: the vertical tabs are really nice, as is the workspace management. And, since it’s a fork of Firefox, all of my usual Firefox add-ons and my Mozilla account can sync with Zen. But, there were a few mild annoyances I kept running into, one being…