Recent content in Ian Whitlock on silly business
Background Alibaba released the 3.6 35B version of the Qwen family of models about a week and a half ago, and I pulled it down with Ollama 1 to try out. I have been doing this for awhile, though I have not had much use for local models in the last few years aside from chat-bot toys. But I remain interested in them, because even as language models get better, hosted LLMs will always come with…
I accepted a new job offer, and my last day at Cloudflare was two weeks ago. I decided to take a short break before starting my new role, so I haven't started quite yet. I'm finding the timing to be a bit of a shock. Layoffs hurt. I hope for the best for all of my old colleagues – those still at Cloudflare, and those no longer. Anyway, the spring weather has just been incredible during my little…
I want to quickly address, with laser focus, a most pertinent part of the LLM discussion: I have no interest, and I shall never have any interest, in using text generation for the writing on this blog. I declare this with utmost certainty. Thus: I swear to never use an LLM to generate or assist with any writing on this website, intended for consumption by people, except as immediately disclaimed.
Literate programming is the idea that code should be intermingled with prose such that an uninformed reader could read a code base as a narrative, and come away with an understanding of how it works and what it does. Although I have long been intrigued by this idea, and have found uses for it in a couple 1 of different cases 2 , I have found that in practice literate programming turns into a chore…
My day jobs have entailed occasional interaction with Kubernetes for a long time, and I've been an accidental participant in the "hobby" of self-hosting 1 since high school so I have been meaning to incorporate k3s somewhere in my stack for a long time to encourage me to stay fresh with some of the aspects of the tools I use professionally that I don't always encounter day-to-day. k3s is a…
Flyspell provides a modern spell-checking interface for Emacs that includes a mode flyspell-mode for text modes, checking everything in the buffer, and flyspell-prog-mode which only checks comments and other places where prose is expected, including in Org mode. hunspell is the system package that provides the dictionary and spell-checking capabilities, so search for your language and hunspell in…
A hot new VCS called jujutsu ( jj ) is all the rage right now , and I want to be excited about it because it has some interesting new features like undo . But when I first tried it out I realized I would have to give up my beloved Magit and I knew jj on the command line could never hold a card to Magit, so I figured I'd wait until a similar interface was built for jj .
I like to watch broadcast TV from time to time, as it is free and local, but I'm used to the usual affordances of the streaming era like the ability to pause or watch on any of my devices, and to be able to record TV, so when my wife and I started to watch Jeopardy! more religiously I decided to investigate getting a TV tuner so I could record episodes.
Recently on The Orange Site and elsewhere I have seen various discussions regarding self-hosting a git "forge" such as Gitea, Gogs, or Gitlab, or some other alternative that integrates with ActivityPub or atproto etc. These "forges" provide, in addition to git repo hosting, various social features and features for issue tracking and managing pull requests, as well as web interfaces, and are…
I deal with a number of long-running projects in my day-to-day, so I like to keep an Org Mode file for each project, and whenever I work on a project I add a headline to the Org file with the day's date and a little explanation of what was going on, eg * <2025-10-11 Sat> developed the query to do the thing I have always been terrible at keeping a journal, so one thing I like to do is actually…
Here's some evidence:
A small observation about Large Language Models (LLMs), human psychology, and some common pricing models for the APIs of hosted models: LLMs induce Gell-Mann Amnesia 1 when asked about any topic about which the inquirer is unfamiliar. If one should ask an LLM a question to which one knows the answer, one scoffs at the small or large errors it makes. When one asks it about something with which one…
You Can Add Custom Buttons To Your Browser That Do Whatever "Bookmarklets" are an underutilized and frankly little-known feature in Chrome and Firefox (and probably most other browsers too) that allows you to create a bookmark that contains a little bit of JavaScript instead of a link to a web page. That doesn't seem too exciting, but combined with the ability to put bookmarks on a bookmark…
There's an old idea, one which never took hold in any serious way, called "literate programming," that nonetheless has been discussed at some length over the years. The idea is that code should be more prose than code, and that reading a codebase should feel like reading a piece of literature. Now that the industry is more mature, the general consenus is that this is not a realistic way to write…
Many operating systems, including most Linux distributions, configure devices to have a hostname like device.local accessible on the local network. The way this works is via a protocol called mDNS or Multicast DNS. Arch doesn't set it up by default. To enable it, you only need to enable it in systemd-resolved: Uncomment a section in /etc/systemd/resolved.conf MulticastDNS=yes And then restart…
It turns out that git worktree makes working on your Emacs config much more convenient. Don't you hate it when you're editing your config, and you don't notice that you messed it up until you restart Emacs, and it doesn't start? As it turns out, it's easy to move those changes off to a temporary directory if you're tracking your config directory in git . git stash git worktree add…
I had heard of GPG/PGP (same thing, as it turns out) for years and I heard it was hard and unpopular so I never investigated it independently. However, I needed to learn how to sign and encrypt things with it for work at some point and I learned the basics, and more recently I noticed that GitHub will allow you to verify commits with GPG. So, I decided, why not start signing my commits? That would…
A few weeks ago I was fiddling around with my neglected Zsh setup, wherein some years ago I had installed a theme through the Zim framework – one of many open source frameworks that allows you to quickly "supercharge" a shell like Zsh which has a lot of latent power if you know how to use it, for mere mortals like me who just want better ergonomics and don't want to learn all the intricate details…
I knew this day would come. I have uninstalled lsp-mode and made the transition to eglot . I've been using lsp-mode since long enough ago that eglot was fairly barebones and it was not obvious which one was the "better" client. Maybe it still isn't obvious. I tend to prefer a more batteries-included solution; time is short. I picked lsp-mode . But lsp-mode was always kind of janky, to be honest,…
Reared in the age of GitHub, I am ashamed to admit that it took me too long to realize that you do not need a "forge" like GitHub or GitLab in order to be able to git push to a repository and in fact you don't need to do any extra configuration at all, if you already have an SSH server running. Ever since realizing this I've just started putting repos in my home directory on my home server. Now,…
Today I built out the beginnings of this blog. I am not going to go into great detail about it because I find "I started a blog" posts to be boring. Suffice to say, I used Hugo. It shouldn't be a surprise. It integrates well with Emacs, and it's based on Go so I tend to find its patterns familiar. I'm not sure I'll stick with it long term but it's good enough for now. I've always found Hugo to be…
Prologue This is my Emacs configuration. It is written in Org Mode format, which means that I can display a static representation here, but the source repository and document ( plain text view ), are interactive when opened in Emacs. It follows the concept of " literate programming " and both defines my Emacs configuration (as well as a few other, related things) and includes my notes about why I…
Later I will add some more detail but for now, here are a few of the things I've built for fun: a tool for reading Weatherflow Tempest UDP data a silly Mattermost plugin an RNN chat bot before LLMs were cool a Mattermost weather plugin