Recent content from Lev Lazinskiy
Looking back through the last year of photos and thinking of all the great memories has become my favorite way to spend January 1st, I highly recommend it. Here is how my life went in 2025. Friends and Family No one died this year and lots of my friends had babies. I got to spend some real quality time with my brother and his family. I made it back to Ohio as much as possible and they even all…
Feeling really touched today after reading a letter that Corry Frydlewicz wrote coming out to her grandma: https://corryfrydlewicz.com/dear-grandma/ By the time I came around to coming out to my grandpa a few year ago my grandma already had dementia and was no longer able to have a meaningful conversation with me. I have no idea why I waited so long. My grandparents were proud of me and supported…
I love Cynthia Erivo. When I saw her singing “The Wizard and I” at the AMC IMAX in San Francisco last November I felt like I saw Elpheba herself for the very first time. I sat there bawling in my seat remembering the countless times I would listen to Idina Menzel on the original soundtrack sing that song. Back when I also felt like an outsider with big dreams. I told Aosheng after we…
I must have looked so desperate on the evening of December 11, 2006 when I asked the woman standing outside in the freezing cold at O’Hare airport for a cigarette. “Excuse me, can I please bum a smoke? I am going to boot camp today and this will be my last one for a while.” “Here, have two” she said, handing me some Pall Malls and going back to shivering. A few months…
The other day my friend Nathan told me about what a Sarlacc is. I’ve never really been into Star Wars but this specific thing stuck with me. The idea is that a Sarlacc is this creature that lives in the desert that looks like a big hole with teeth. If you find yourself inside, you are slowly digested over a thousand years. C-3PO: “In its belly, you will find a new definition of pain…
I’ve been knee deep in studying robotics ever since joining Foxglove earlier this month. There is so much to learn! One major pain point that I have come across is trying to work with ROS outside of Linux. I have my Framework Laptop running Ubuntu and that is all working without any issues. But my main work computer is an Apple Silicon Macbook Pro and things are complicated. Apple Silicon…
*raspy old man voice* Back in my day ARR used to mean something. Three key components: Annual - 1 year contracts Recurring - someone, anyone, has renewed their plan ever Revenue - cash in your bank I have no idea what ARR means now. First we saw usage-based-pricing models touting eARR where the e = expected (I always joke that the e stands for Enron). Now we have all these AI companies changing…
Happy to celebrate 4 years of no smoking today. I have not really thought about cigarettes all year. Even being around them does not bother me anymore and I don’t ever have cravings. 4 years ago today I would never imagine that feeling this way would even be possible. There is still a long way to go to heal the damage that was caused from so many years of smoking, but today I am feeling…
Learned about nxtscape from HN today and interesting to see this cursor playbook emerging. Take an existing open source product with a huge marketplace/ecosystem cursor: vs code nxtscape: chrome Fork it Change some branding Stick some LLM hooks into it and fire up a sidepanel to chat. Profit. The existing ecosystem is the key here, but Google does not want to lose browser market share. There are a…
The other day I wrote this chunker for my Bluesky dagger module using Claude that automatically splits up long posts into chunks and posts the correct amount of things onto Bluesky. It took a few seconds to generate and worked on the first try. Then I had this brilliant idea to add a few tests to make sure it keeps working for the long haul and all hell broke loose. The dagger module and chunker…
I’m taking an in-person Chinese class in San Mateo and our final assignment for this block is to a write a biography in Chinese and then stand up in front of the classa and read it. Here it goes. 大家好！我姓Lazinskiy叫Lev. 我是俄国人。我是三十六岁。我有一个哥哥。我哥哥和他的妻子有四个孩子。三个儿子和一个女儿。第一个儿子六岁。第二和第三个儿子都四岁。他的女儿六月。他们都说英语和俄语。他们住在Ohio。我爸爸妈妈也住在Ohio。我住在加州。 我在Florida上大学。Florida…
Hot takes that I’ve learned along the way. Do’s WIP Dont’s Don’t join a stealth startup. Don’t join a role where you title is “founding X”, the longer the X the more urgent this warning. Don’t join a startup run by siblings, the more siblings the more urgent this warning. Don’t join a startup with a solo founder. Don’t join a startup that…
I’m working on making a Dagger module for Wrangler , a CLI from Cloudflare that allows you to manage worker projects. In their docs it feels like they summarize everything wrong with modern dev tools in a single paragraph: To install Wrangler ↗, ensure you have Node.js ↗ and npm ↗ installed, preferably using a Node version manager like Volta ↗ or nvm ↗. Using a version manager helps avoid…
HouseRat Zero wrote about resisting the urge to edit old posts. https://houserat.net/resisting-the-urge-to-edit-old-posts/ This one really spoke to me because last year I started the (still unfinished) work of moving and consolidating 20 years of blogs into this one. https://levlaz.org/archive/ It was a huge effort that was mostly positive. I didn’t rewrite history, but I did add some…
I took the HSK Level 1 Chinese Proficiency Test in the middle of November and passed it with flying colors. I was well prepared for it, but it almost felt too easy. I thought it would be fun to knock out the HSK Level 2 test before the end of 2024 as well. Unfortunately there were no more test dates left for this year. On a whim, I checked into the website one time in early December and saw that…
Here we are at another checkpoint. A chance to look back on the last year. I’m going to follow the same format I did last year, join me on this journey through the year of the dragon. Friends and Family Rollercoaster this year, weddings, births and funerals. In January I lost my grandmother in Ukraine . Then in April my Grandfather passed away . At least with my Grandfather I was able to go…
This is a now page , and if you have your own site, you should make one, too. Aosheng and I got an offer accepted for a condo in Emeryville, right next door to Ikea. Fingers crossed that this goes through. Bittersweet to imagine leaving SF proper, but feels close enough! Continuing to try to find product market fit at Dagger. Feeling grateful to work with this team and feel all the support from…
I was listening to “The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart” and he had a guest on, Annie Lowrey, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic. They were talking about Trump and politics and somewhere along the line she used the term “enshittification” to describe what is happening to our government.…
Earlier this year, large swaths of the tech industry declared death to DEI and ushered in the era of Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. I wrote about it then noting that hypocrisy rhymes with meritocracy . They made themselves a website to celebrate each other. https://www.meritocracy.com/ That website has a list of familiar faces if you’ve been paying attention to the random tech people…
I have a dream last night where I saw my grandpa giving a speech. But in the dream I was watching myself watching him give a speech. I was crying, I miss him. But maybe this was a sign? He was a huge Trump supporter, he found a way to bring him up every time we had a conversation over the last few years. We never agreed much on politics, but we always had thoughtful discussions and I miss those…
There are two ways to play in the world cup. You can either qualify or you can host the games. I see this as an analogy for a career in the tech industry. The world cup is “a seat at the table”. If you want to be an executive in a tech company you can climb your way to the top or you can take a shortcut and start your own company. Just remember, if you happen to be playing in the world…
My Chinese teacher gave me some homework to describe a place I want to travel to and what I am going to do when I get there. This is what I came up with. 明年我想去长沙旅游。 我的朋友告诉我，长沙有好吃的臭豆腐。 我想吃那个豆腐！😋 It says: I want to travel to Changsha next year. My friend told me that Changesha has delicious stinky tofu. I want to eat that tofu. – Changsha Skyline Image By Ckproject - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0…
I read a post today from Rene Coignard where he tells the story of unexpectedly being spoken to in Russian at a McDonalds in Germany. It reminded me of this time that I went to the Grounds for Sculpture in Trenton, NJ. I was wandering around the grounds and enjoying all the wonderful sculptures when I came across a lake. There were two women standing near the shore and they were both chatting in…
I’ve been working on a Dagger module for interacting with the Bluesky API. I wrote the first version in Python, using the atproto library. It worked well and was easy to use, but I noticed that none of my links, mentions, or hashtags were showing up. I ignored this for a while, but today decided to investigate this some more since the whole world seems to be showing up on Bluesky this week.…
some of the content in this article was generated using Generative AI, it’s sloppy I was reading the paper by Alan Turing that introduces the imitation game: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf I came across this question, which I decided to put into all of the current models in DuckDuckGo AI chat to see what happens:…
I came across this post today from Kev Quirk on Mastodon about reading old blog posts . It’s something I do regularly because of this nostalgia Dagger module that I wrote a few months ago. I hooked it up to my Novu module, and now I get an email every day letting me know what posts I wrote on this day throughout the years. That post encouraged me to subscribe to his blog, and it comes with a…
20 years ago this month I discovered Ubuntu which led to a life-long love of Linux. My first Linux distro was SUSE 9.0 which I purchased on CD-ROM at Microcenter in 2003. I tinkered with it a bit, but finding the Ubuntu community made a huge difference and made me fall in love. My love for technology, Linux, and programming grew from the seeds that were planted in the Ubuntu forums in 2004. The…
This one has been playing on repeat all week. The bouncing bass transitioning to those classic piano house licks just moves me in ways that no other sounds can. Takes me straight back to Apex in Washington DC circa 2007. In between repeat remixes of Beyonce that the DJ was obsessed with, this one would have made the entire club bounce. Gerald would have loved this one. — Thanks for reading…
For the last few weeks the open source tech world has been observing some drama between the founder of Wordpress and WP Engine. I cant say that I am on the side of a PE firm, but Matt seems to be doing everything he can to turn the community against him. Recently, DHH stepped into the ring to provide his opinions on the matter and it seems like we have ourselves the equivalent of the Drake v.…
I loved this post from jwz about Feedly where he beautifully describes the feeling you get when you realize a service that you’re using is being enshittified. every time I see what their logged-out front page looks like – which is always, since they are pathologically incapable of keeping me logged in – I think, “I’m gonna have to stop using this pretty soon,…
This is a now page , and if you have your own site, you should make one, too. Aosheng and I are searching for a home to buy in San Francisco again. Its as frustrating as always but the rent is too damn high. Feeling optimistic this time. Recently finished a mega project of visiting all 50 state capitals in the US. I celeberated one year at Dagger, still having fun, learning a lot and feeling lucky…
I started working at Dagger one year ago today. It flew by! I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past and think about the future. It’s been a bumpy ride for the last few years. After a successful run at LaunchDarkly I jumped into a couple of companies that didn’t work out. In fact, the last time I celebrated a 1 year work anniversary was in 2018 . Despite these setbacks, I…
I found a draft of this campy book review, likely circa 2018 in an old journal. It’s probably not complete but I don’t remember reading this book. It made me laugh to read it so I am happy to share it with the world after all of these years. I’ve never been to Greenlawn Cemetery, but I learned about a small cross-section of its corpses after reading “Wicked Columbus…
I have this old iPhone XR that I turn on every once in while to check the stats on this app I used to use called “My Last Cigarette”. I turned the phone on today and realized that thanks to leap year, it’s technically been 3 years as of yesterday, since I had my last cigarette. The app still exists but has been enshitified, so instead of installing it on my new phone, I keep this…
In October 2016 I arrived in Sacramento, CA and set off on a project to visit every state capital and see what all the fuss was about. I’m flying back to San Francisco from Madison Wisconsin tonight which means I’ve officially completed the journey! When I started the project I was working at CircleCI. I remember leaving for Emeryville on an Amtrak bus from the temporary transit center…
A few weeks ago there was this big uproar about meritocracy because the CEO of ScaleAI led the way by putting his foot down and said no more DEI and politics at work, after a bunch of others did it as well. They even found this nice vanity domain and featured all the other people that gave themselves a pat on the back about doing this. It’s funny how the people that say no politics at work…
Around this time last year, Aosheng and I went to Reno for the fourth of July and I brought a whole box full of veggies with me because we just started getting our CSA box and I didn’t realize how much food was going to show up at our door every week. It felt awful to waste it. We stayed at an Element suites, which came with a little kitchen. I brought my induction wok with me along with…
I’m so excited to share that I had my first contribution to the Debian Salsa CI team merged! It’s been almost six years since I wrote this post about wanting to become a Debian Developer . I did a bit of work with a few of the debian-qa projects, but life got in the way, and here we are today. I read the most recent bits from the DPL where I learned about the Salsa CI team for the…
I know folks that have so many Chrome tabs open that they live in fear of their computer turning off because they have no idea how they will get back to work. I suffer from the same problem, but with with terminal tabs. I run a few services on a server that I connect to remotely over ssh. This includes mutt for email, and weechat for hanging out on irc. I also ssh into my server whenever I want to…
I came home to make lunch today since Aosheng was sick and he beat me to it by steaming up a bunch of bao. I made a quick pasta dish and pesto out carrot tops like John Kung showed us . It was delicious. On my way out the door back to WeWork Aosheng said “I want to eat Korean food tonight!” We have a fridge full of fresh veggies, the CSA box has been fruitful. I could not bring myself…
I’m so excited about the Ladybird browser . The dream of a fully free web browser that is not tied to any commercial interests or funded by ads inspires me. I hope to contribute to this project as much as I can. I was able to get Ladybird compiled on Debian Stable in a VM, it works! It’s really special to see something that I think is going to make the web a better place this early in…
This is a now page , and if you have your own site, you should make one, too. Mourning the loss of my grandfather who passed away on April 26, 2024. Living In San Francisco with Aosheng, a bunch of plants, and a pickle jar that make little burping sounds as it ferments. Working Trying to find Product Market Fit at Dagger. Learning Practicing Chinese every day, learning Go. Reading “A…
一百天中文 100 days from now I am going to ace the HSK 1 Chinese test. I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately when it comes to learning Chinese. I found myself using way too many streak freezes on Duolingo and doing other silly things to keep my “streak” alive instead of focusing on learning. So my plan to do something about it is spend a minimum of 1 hour each day for the next 100 days…
Here’s a simple script that I wrote in python for helping to migrate from a wordpress blog to a static hugo site. It uses the jinja , slugify , and mysql.connector libraries. It connects directly to the Wordpress database and extracts the compiled HTML from Wordpress For simplicity, it does not handle tags from dataclasses import dataclass from datetime import datetime import mysql.connector…
A collection of my favorite recipes. Peasant Bread – got this one from Adrianna and have been making it every week ever since. — Thanks for reading this post via RSS! 🫶 Reply to this post by email
My miniflux theme, its so simple but I love reading feeds with miniflux with this theme now. I liked it so much that I updated the theme of this site to look the same. Set Theme in /settings to Dark - Serif Copy this Custom CSS * { font-family : monospace ; } a { color : skyblue ; } . entry-content a : visited { color : violet ; } . item-meta a { color : white ; } . item-meta a : hover { color :…
I woke up in Waikiki, saw the sun creeping over the mountain into our room. Aosheng is still asleep. My phone was filled with warm wishes from friends, family, and even an automated text message from the dentist office. Yesterday we spent a lot of time in nature, we saw giant sea turtles laying in the sun, ate some pineapple ice cream, and enjoyed a fish tasting menu served by Michael Mina…
A couple years ago Drew DeVault seeded a new blogosphere by giving $20 to anyone willing to start a new blog who does not already have one, and an additional $20 to anyone who kept writing for another 6 months. He also started a mailing list called the free-writers-club where people could encourage each other to write more and give feedback on their work. This was such a cool experiment. I love…
A couple years ago Cory Doctorow wrote a post about “The Memex Method” where he described how to use your blog as your second brain. He’s been writing (well) for decades, and one of my favorite parts of his blog is when he refers back to previously written posts looking back 1, 5, 10, and 20 years. I have also been writing (not so well) for almost 20 years and wanted to find a…
I wrote a new Dagger module over the weekend that implements the miniflux python sdk and allows you to interact with a miniflux rss server as a part of your Dagger pipeline. My immediate use case is to help generate the inputs for my openring module that I use to insert snippets into my blog from my blogroll (scroll down to see an example). Previously I maintained a text file by hand that included…