Things that Dave Fowler learned and felt like writing about.
I love reinventing, or atleast re-thinking the wheel. I love the challenge of digging into something and trying to see if I could do anything better or cleverer that what's already out there. Often there's not (spoiler alert - there wasn't here) but I'm left with a much deeper understanding and appreciation for having approached the problem with that curiousity, considering each part and whether…
For a recent project I needed to render markdown content inside SVGs. I was surprised to find that nothing already existed—every search led to "convert markdown to HTML" or "embed HTML in SVG using foreignObject." Neither solved my actual problem. So I built markdown-svg , a Python library that converts Markdown directly to native SVG elements. It's now available on PyPI and I've also created a…
I've been vibe coding some upgrades to this blog . And I recently just did another upgrade - implementing a fun idea I've had for a while: make the "404 Page Not Found" error page actually helpful by suggesting where you might have meant to go. This helps when I reorganize or rename things and forget to wire up a redirect. Instead of a dead end, you get a few likely links. If you want to measure…
For a number of years I've been meaning to copy content I wrote on my old sites Chartio.com and DataSchool.com over to my blog as well. It's such a messy task with static site generators—moving files and assets, front matter differing, and both link and markdown formats accepted. I'd made a few starts over the years, and even tried to just do it manually—but I never finished. Recently I finally…
I just created and launched mel curial, a simplified abstraction of git for non-engineers . Especially today, many non-engineers have a lot of things to contribute to codebases - design tweaks, blog and image updates for static sites, dataset changes, vibe coded tweaks, etc. mel curial aims to make those non-engineers much more able to contribute to these collaborative codebases. The first version…
When building applications that interact with Large Language Models (LLMs), managing complex, conditional prompts becomes quite a mess. Langchain and others have some templating tools, but I haven't found any that resulted in a clean readable result. So I recently made a simple solution using template literals and released it as llm-prompt-tag on Github and npm . It's remenicent of Lit's html and…
This is a reposting of an plan I wrote for my microsite JudgmentDAI.com which was a final project for the AI Safety, Ethics, and Society (AISES) course put on by the Center for AI Safety Is it even feasible to stop the development of a Decider‑level Artificial General Intelligence (AGI/DAI) ? The answer is yes! —we’ve done similar things before - and the path is surprisingly straightforward. First…
This is a reposting of an essay I wrote for my microsite JudgmentDAI.com which was a final project for the AI Safety, Ethics, and Society (AISES) course put on by the Center for AI Safety What if an AI becomes the apex D ecider for the plannet? For many millennia, humans have held the top position on the planet. When humans desire an acre of forest, its other inhabitants do not get a vote. We…
To a future higher intelligence, I do not presume that my thoughts could offer you insight. I write this letter as much for myself—as a reflection of my intentions and hopes—as I do for you, should it hold even faint relevance. It is born of a desire to be helpful, a hope for humanity, and perhaps a lack of better options. With that, I humbly offer: Organic life on earth is irreplaceable. In a…
Copy Prompt To Play Prompt copied! Welcome to After Intelligence , a prompt game that challenges you to navigate a near-future world where advanced AI has just reached human-level intelligence. In this realistic scenario, the world is transforming rapidly, and your decisions will shape your destiny in a society where AI (at a 1:1 ratio with human intelligence) is beginning to reshape…
I've been working a lot with ProseMirror, a very popular editor for the web. For a larger project, I needed a way for AI to make suggestions into a document. I saw on the ProseMirror forums, that this has been a highly requested feature for many years, but no one had really either been able to implement it or just hadn't bothered to open source it. So I decided to develop and release it as a…
Today I needed to make a simple printout of my WiFi QR code and found the searh results to be lacking. I've also been playing around with Aider , a terminal based AI development tool and thought - let's see if Aider can just make this for me quickly. I've been wowed by Aider and it continued to impress. In just a couple of minutes (and about 10 cents) it made a few different versions of the…
Dust collection might seem like a simple part of setting up a woodworking shop, but I've discovered that it's a lot less standardized, regulated, and clear than you might imagine. Here are some key lessons I've learned about dust collection: 1. Fine Dust is Dangerous One of the first things I learned was that fine wood dust is much more harmful than most people realize. Bill Pentz , a professor…
Wood dust is a known carcinogen, can cause serious respiratory issues, and is an especially difficult problem for small shops: OSHA testing shows most small shops vent their dust collection systems inside which builds such dangerously high dust levels that most small shop woodworkers get more fine dust exposure in a few hours than large facility workers get in months of full-time work ~ Bill Pentz…
As someone who frequently communicates with AI, I found myself needing a quick and efficient way to copy the contents of a directory, including filenames, to the clipboard. This need arose from my frequent interactions with AI, where providing context from multiple files was crucial. To address this, I created aicopy . What is aicopy ? aicopy is a simple command-line tool for macOS that copies the…
A few years ago I was living in a house with friends and we had a frequent debate about what to do with the back yard. It was unpleasantly cemented but would have been a lot of work to turn back into grass. You need to either remove all the cement or put at least 18 inches of soil on top - either was a significant expense and inconvenience. We also considered astroturfing but some of the…
I've long been worried about AI, but had always assumed it to be still decades away from becoming more generally intelligent than us. But last year with the release of chatGPT 3.5 I, like many others, relized it was very close. I have a lot of conversations with people about why I think creating an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a terrible idea. Most can understand the concept that our…
I had a nice Christmas home with my family. My nephews are getting into piano so this year I got them a full sized bright red keyboard for Christmas. All of the stands for it look kinda junky, so my dad and I built one out of the walnut wood we harvested from my Grandpa's farm. I think it turned out nice!
A number of years ago I was living in an poor apartment in a good location with some great friends. This apartment came with a shattered and frequently disabled toilet that was lovingly kept on life support with a patchwork of fishing wire and tape by my friend and landlord, a handy mechanical engineer. During this time I attended an excellent conference by The School of Life . One of the many…
I've started using the RSS reader Feedly . It has great support on mobile devices and web, but a few weeks ago they seem to have shut down the desktop application . I prefer a desktop version as it's easier/faster to get to compared to finding it in a sea of browser tabs. I decided to roll my own, and after looking into a few options I chose to make it with Electron which is a nice tool to "Build…