tl;dr built a wrapper in go with a collection of sandboxing tools (bubblewrap, seccomp, et al) in order to contain various coding LLM cli tools: cwage/agentpen forced (well, encouraged) its usage on my nix laptop so that invoking claude or codex actually executes it in this sandboxed tool why? When these LLM coding cli tools first emerged, I was cautious and skeptical. It didn’t take long for me…
tl;dr I used claude code to build an android app that lets two people prove they’re talking to each other using shared, rotating codes that only their devices can generate for identity confirmation repo: https://github.com/cwage/whoarewe OSS: MIT license It’s not on the play store, and probably never will be, unless I can convince a handful of friends and family to at least try it, much less use…
Throughout my dalliances with astrophotography , I was forced to get familiar with platesolving in a hurry. Platesolving, in a nutshell, is a process by which you can take a photo of the sky and figure out what part of “the sky” you’re looking at. astrometry.net is a set of tools to do this platesolving, which you can both do locally (if you download all the datasets) or with their web service .…
Obligatory Disclaimer I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Consult with your doctor before attempting anything mentioned below. This is a summary of my experience and advice for what you should do after you totally talk to your doctor first. It’s possible I got some details wrong. It’s possible many conclusions from my samplesize n=1 anecdotal experiences are wrong. Feel free to correct…
Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the subtleties of braising, but I frequently run across people who are confused about what, exactly, braising is – and for many years, so was I. What is the common description of braising? “meat cooked slow in liquid”. But what does that mean? Is cooking meat in liquid slow in a pot on the oven braising? (spoiler: no) Is slow-cooking meat in liquid in a pot…
Intro This is just a quick list off the top of my head of various tips, tricks, opinions, hot takes, and light trolling. This isn’t a comprehensive list or anything, just things I’ve encountered along the years that help me out with the stuff I tend to cook. There’s nothing in here that will be a shock to even a noob home chef, but you never know. I still run across things that blow my mind like…
Intro Disclaimer: I am not a project manager. I’m a devops/SRE/security type guy. I could barely explain to you the difference between “agile” and “waterfall” (in practice, anyway). These opinions come from someone that has spent 20 some odd years using every manner of PM tool under the sun in some capacity – whether as a manager, a developer, an engineer, or all of the above. This is not a…
A few years ago, I ran across an ad for a product: a “speed booster” lens adapter that promised to increase the ‘speed’ (effective light-gathering normally associated with the maximum aperture of the lens) by up to 1 full stop . A popular example is the Metabones adapter for various cameras/lenses. It sounded, at first, like a scam. “How can you change the fundamental limits of a lens to be ..…
I see that healthcare reform is in the news again! How exciting. A few months ago I joked that there were two articles that were required reading before I discussed healthcare in the united states with anyone. I thought I’d flesh that out a little bit: A good succinct no-frills timeline of how we got here. Do we have a government system? A private system? Why is the responsibility for healthcare…
The scene: The Metro Nashville Commission to investigate forming a committee to plan to address the mysterious problem of expensive housing plaguing the growing city. Expert: We’re gathered here today to address the problem of expensive housing that we just noticed again. Does anyone have any thoughts? Expert #2: It’s really bad. Growth is bad. Expert #3: Yeah, terrible, really bad – especially…
I’ve always been a big fan of Umberto Eco’s writing, and at a fairly young age I came across his essay “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” . Even then what I liked about it was the attempt to describe a broader pattern for a specific historical phenomenon. I’ve seen it used (by myself, included) as a checklist I could use to trump people lobbing accusations of Fascism.…
“Things are going to start happening to me now!” So, I got doxxed! FINALLY! I’ve been on this internet of ours 20 some years now. I’ve had racists threaten to dismember me at concerts, local stalkers repeatedly threaten castration/murder, etc. But no one has ever actually bothered to threaten me by pointing out they know where I live (not that it’s hard to find) – until now! Last night, I received…
To my liberal/progressive/democrat/etc friends: Trump won the presidency, and that is bad. There’s a vocal minority of racists and nationalists feeling empowered, and that’s bad. I get it. Everyone is very mad, and they’re not gonna take it anymore. The anger is overwhelming, such that I’ve more or less bowed out of social media, because the feedback loop of angry rhetoric was deafening. I made…
Everyone loves growth. People love it, cities love it, economies love it. Growth is the measuring stick by which we gauge success – for better or worse. Nashville is no different, and over the last decade our city has emphasized growth and tourism, largely at the prompting of interested parties, including primarily the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corporation and its CEO Butch Spyridon, among…
I thought I’d jot down some notes/observations after this conversation about payday lending. Payday lending is an interesting subject to me, both because of the demonization of the market and the interesting economics at work – it provides an interesting microcosm of how attempts to regulate markets can backfire and/or fail. 1st premise: people wish to lower the market rates for payday loans…
This started as a half-formed tweet but quickly took the shape of a tweetstorm, and I hate those, so: Every time there’s a horrific police shooting, I hear a lot of talk about the need for more police body/dash/helmet/whatever-cams. I feel like I’m stating the obvious, here, but perhaps this path needs a bit more scrutiny. Given an insidious hidden abuse of authority, increases in technology that…
I have a small but important piece of advice for journalists: stop using the phrase “affordable housing”. This occurs to me often in general, but occurred to me in particular while reading Amanda Haggard’s otherwise fine summary of the Ft. Negley tent city situation . The problem is the use of the phrase “affordable housing” – repeatedly, from the title to the body of the piece. Why is it a…
Posting this mostly for posterity and as a reference for when people ask me. For clarity, I am only listing restaurants that meet my (arbitrary) definition of “Hot Chicken Restaurant”, which is that they have to serve a leg quarter in varying levels of heat, and should at least nominally focused on hot chicken itself – that is, I’m not bothering to list the random restaurants that coat chicken…
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it” – Karl Marx “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke “Only several thousand Kampucheans might have died due to some mistakes in implementing our policy of providing an affluent life for the people.” – Pol Pot So, you want to effect…
These classes, according to the degree of enlightenment at which they have arrived, may propose to themselves two very different ends, when they thus attempt the attainment of their political rights; either they may wish to put an end to lawful plunder, or they may desire to take part in it. In 1850, Frédéric Bastiat wrote his famous work, The Law. This book centered on his observation that legal…
Humans are really bad at appreciating scale. Let’s take a look at human evolution and population growth. Homo sapiens sapiens emerged as a distinct species, say, sometime around 200,000 years ago. Let’s call it the year -197986.00 BCE. We’ll ignore the millions of years of evolution of our predecessors and competitors that preceded our step into the spotlight for now. For reference, all of…
Intro Years ago, during the beginnings of Nashville’s hot chicken renaissance, Jim Ridley posted a simple recipe for a basic portion of nashville-style hot chicken. Not much to quibble with, on the whole, except possibly the choice of chicken breast as the medium (people eat chicken breasts?). I was intrigued, and thus my quest to replicate my favorite hot chicken was launched. I wrote this a few…
I am reluctant to dip my toe into this – with all the gamergate nonsense going on, rational, level-headed discussion about gender issues and violence seems hard to find (for my part, I’ve managed to maintain a stubborn ignorance of gamergate, as it seems like a colossal waste of time). You may have heard recently that a man murdered a woman recently, and uploaded the photos to 4chan. Megan Seling…
Sony NEX-5N w/ Voigtlander 50/1.1. Is this a professional camera? Hi there! So, you want to have a photography policy. You’re holding an event or you manage a venue and you want to protect or restrict what sort of photography can be done and what can be done with the photographs. Excellent! There are a lot of reasons for this – some better than others: Safety – too many photographers in general or…
As is often the case, after reading JR Lind’s fine article on Nashville’s growth-oriented policies , I find myself agreeing with his premise, but not the conclusion. The premise: that increasing city population is not a good thing in and of itself, and our leaders do us a disservice by making economic and population growth the end-all/be-all of civic progress. 100% agreed, and it’s a problem on…
"woo wooooooo murder aw yeah this is cool" There’s a post about the rioting (which didn’t really happen) in Ferguson that’s going around in jacobinmag , a magazine named after Jacobins. Jacobins, if you’re not familiar with history, were a group of French revolutionaries whose main claim to fame is coopting a revolution in order to stage a couple of years of widespread creative decapitation. The…
After reading a Tennessean article that reports the magnanimous graciousness of metro police in “allowing” a Nashville resident to continue residing in a makeshift tent encampment on the banks of the Cumberland, I’m left with a few lingering questions. The article posits matter-of-factly that the land belongs to metro. I’ve heard from other sources working with metro to delay the eviction that…
This is st_rev’s , but I find myself referencing it a lot, so I’m putting it here: You want to sell product/project/policy X for dealing with Z. Z is guaranteed to 1) get worse, 2) get better, or 3) stay the same. If 1: “Z is getting worse, we need more X!” If 2: “X is working, we need more X!” If 3: “X kept Z from getting worse, we need even more X!” Originally got this analysis from Penn &…
In modern democracies, election seasons are often accompanied by public-service campaigns designed to encourage citizens to turn up at the polls and vote; regardless of one’s political leanings, it seems, it is important that one votes for something. In some countries, governments go so far as to legally require voting. These campaigns are a terrible idea. Most voters have no idea what is going…
Libertarians of all stripes would be well-served to abandon the term “free market”. I know it’s near and dear to a lot of them, and I get it, I do: the words should hardly be controversial – who among us can deny the value of “freedom” and “markets”? (well, many can and do, but that’s neither nor there). There are a few reasons the phrase has lost all useful communicative value: 1) Many people…
Because I’m a contrarian (or should I say buzzkill. get it? buzz? kill? google buzz? get it? SEE WHAT I DID THERE), I’ll play devil’s advocate to the frenzied excitement over Google Fiber in Nashville. Some supposed factors driving the excitement: Fiber is fast Well, fiber is a physical medium that is quite capable of fast transfer. But a network has to be built to take advantage of that. This…
From this Wired piece on bitcoin derivatives : What we need is a bitcoin market that operates on a much larger scale, one that’s approved by financial regulators. … “The derivatives, futures, options market is largely undeveloped,” Ehrsam says. “You might say the counter-party is risk is unacceptable.” Part of the concern is that existing services may run afoul of regulators, either in Europe or…
Probably the most succinct description of socialist thought (as concieved by Warren, Proudhon and Marx) I’ve encountered: From Smith’s principle that labor is the true measure of price—or, as Warren phrased it, that cost is the proper limit of price—these three men made the following deductions: that the natural wage of labor is its product; that this wage, or product, is the only just source of…
This is probably the best and smartest article I’ve read about bitcoin to date. Go read it. I don’t agree with all of it, necessarily (see below), but her criticisms are well-founded and part of what makes this experiment so fascinating to me. As Haruhiko Kuroda, governor of the central bank of Japan, explains, deflationary economies tend to stagnate, because people defer spending decisions in the…
An interesting, if obvious, observation as to why large government’s success hinges on the existence and success of large corporations: The key mechanism that makes third-party tax enforcement successful is the combination of verifiable book evidence that is common knowledge within the firm and a large number of employees, as any single employee can denounce collusive tax cheating between…
The headline of a Newschannel5 article by Adam Ghassemi on the recent Cessna crash at BNA caught my eye this evening: Nashville Crash Highlights Aviation Security Loophole . I had read a bit about the incident, and while it certainly seemed to be an unusual case, I wasn’t aware of any loophole, so I read the article. What I expected to be a mundane/fluff update on the crash with a hastily chosen…
For some brief context here, recall that Belloc’s take on “Capitalism” is not the same as the “capitalism” as it exists in our own vernacular or current pop culture lexicon. For Belloc, (as he says below), Capitalism is an unstable equilibrium wherein the means of production are owned by a few and there exists political freedom – meaning, basically, people are free to work or not work as they…
An unlikely confluence of ideas between two books I was reading this week: James Q. Wilson published The Moral Sense, which makes many of the same arguments from a criminologist’s perspective. ‘What most needed explanation, it seemed to me, was not why some people are criminals but why most people are not.’ Wilson chides philosophers for not taking seriously the notion that morality resides in the…
Some required reading before you go any further: Why Nashville Needs Newspapers – the Nashville City Paper’s farewell editorial, and JR Lind on the dim future of newspapers . In the latter, JR says: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for The Washington Post. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway is adding newsprint alongside Dairy Queen and Orange Julius in its prodigious portfolio. Boston…
I was reading a bit of Nashville history in George Zepp’s wonderful Hidden History of Nashville and ran across the story of Cortelia Clark . I was surprised I had never encountered this man or his music before. He was a street musician, and a Nashvillian by way of Chicago. He lived at 934 Jefferson Street in a small wooden frame house, located just up from where the Garden Brunch Cafe is now.…
I really like Killer Mike’s “R.A.P. Music”, but “Southern Fried” has possibly one of the most facepalmingly (a quick google search verifies unfortunately that I did not just invent this word) awful stanzas ever: Moet? Rolex. Big Benz, no flex Wedding ring on finger, I married a Trina Pretty as a singer, Fine as a stripper When we in the strip club strippers try to tip her I am not certain it’s the…
There’s this article floating around called “Why Successful People Leave Their Loser Friends Behind” that I find incredibly repulsive. Let’s ignore for the moment the most obviously distasteful things about it: the fact that it’s hosted on a domain called “addicted2success.com”, and that it has a photo of Richard Branson and two other dudes looking like the world’s biggest toolbags. Or that it…
I found an old letter to the editor that I wrote in 1998 to Boston U’s Daily Free Press in response to some awful opinion piece about how the Internet was terrible. I can’t find any trace of the piece I was responding to, but I know they ran it on January 23, 1998. They also published my response, but I can’t find any trace of that either. The gist of his opinion was that the Internet was “out of…
Guys, the internet is broken. Can we start over? Let’s review a few incredibly infuriating examples of why the internet is driving me nuts, lately: Google invents the ultimate tool for information gathering and sharing (Google Reader), recruits an entire generation of devotees and information addicts, and then brutally murders it, because they want to drive more eyeballs to G+ because they need to…
DISCLAIMER: a lot of people are going to skim or not read this at all and just assume I’m another neckbeard technocrat bitcoin fanboy. That’s fine. I am fascinated by the bitcoin experiment, and the prospect of an alternative currency pegged to a steady rate of growth mathematically, whether it’s deflationary or inflationary. I have not invested any money in bitcoin, in any case, so this is not a…
“I’ve always been in favor of abolishing the federal reserve, and substituting a machine program that would keep the supply of money going up at a steady rate.” – Milton Friedman So .. basically we acknowledge that Satoshi Nakamoto is Milton Friedman, right?
Disclaimer: this is not a rah rah meat post. I love meat. I also love vegetables. So, I normally don’t bite on stupid facebook memes, but this one is so egregiously stupid I had to comment – especially because nutrition is a pet topic/peeve of mine. So this image is floating around facebook: So, you don’t have to be a nutritional expert to get the impression these numbers are … amiss. Cucumbers?…
Some of the photos from the Scene’s photo contest that I thought were noteworthy: Scott Simontacchi, “Eloise,” Bowling Avenue Holden Head, “Pasiphae,” East Nashville – I actually found this photograph to be grotesque, but that doesn’t make it a bad one. It did get me reading about Pasiphae. Pasiphae, in Greek mythology, was the daughter of Helios that fucked a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur,…
I thought the onion’s joke was hilarious. The joke: “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhan Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?” For those (like me) that maybe didn’t actually watch the Oscars: Quvenzhan Wallis is a 9-year old actress up for an award at the ceremony. A few of the hypothetical reasons proposed that this joke was horrible and should have immediately been deleted, and…
I love sriracha as much as the next guy, but I have to admit, the sortof viral meme-like spread of its popularity is suspect to me. Frankly, I think it’s a bit of a newb food. Who would have thought that chiles, garlic and sugar taste good?! I’m shocked, SHOCKED! I’m surprised there’s not an entire subcontinent whose culinary tastes are founded on this combination! “What’s that? Sugar?”, you say?…