# big boy (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 3 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover big boy. Page: Feed: --- ## [Not London. Not Kingston. The Caribbean: Why the CCJ Should Become Jamaica’s Final Court of Appeal](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/not-london-not-kingston-the-caribbean) _2026-08-21 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ I have followed Jamaica’s long and often contentious debate over republican status for many years: whether we should become a republic, how the transition should occur, and what a genuinely Jamaican Constitution should include. ## [An Open Letter to Dr. Leo Gilling](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-dr-leo-gilling) _2026-08-19 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ What About the Half That’s Never Been Told? ## [Before America Pardoned Garvey, Jamaica Had Already Judged His Life](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/before-america-pardoned-garvey-jamaica) _2026-08-17 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ Marcus Garvey, political prosecution and what Jamaica’s National Heroes teach us about law, justice and leadership ## [You Will Never Know Until You Try: Finding Your Place in Service](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/you-will-never-know-until-you-try) _2026-08-16 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ No one can know beforehand whether they are truly ready for philanthropy or charitable work. ## [After the Bulldozers Leave: Are We Solving Informal Settlements—or Deepening Poverty?](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/after-the-bulldozers-leave-are-we) _2026-08-14 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ I woke up yesterday morning to images from Cooper’s Pen in Trelawny that disturbed me deeply. ## [We Know Who Sang The Jamaican Songs. But Who Made It Soun Suh Good?](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/we-know-who-sang-the-jamaican-songs) _2026-08-12 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ Why Jamaica’s Musicians, Writers and Engineers Must Stand Among Its Reggae Icons ## [Who Owns Jamaica’s Beaches? Who Has the Right to Use Them? And How Did We Get Here? An In-Depth Review of Jamaica’s Beach Laws, Private Property, Public Access and the Struggle for the Shoreline](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/who-owns-jamaicas-beaches-who-has) _2026-08-10 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ I Grew Up With the Beach as Part of Community Life ## [Jamaica’s Reggae Icon Award: If You Create a Benchmark, Begin With the Benchmark](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/jamaicas-reggae-icon-award-if-you) _2026-08-08 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ Part I — What Exactly Are We Measuring? ## [Five Minutes Before Independence: The Night Jamaica Grew Up](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/five-minutes-before-independence) _2026-08-06 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ I have always tried to be in Jamaica during the Independence season, between July 27 and August 12. ## [The Jamaica Teaching Council Legislation: Where Should Professional Regulation End and Criminal Law Begin?](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/the-jamaica-teaching-council-legislation) _2026-08-04 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ I first became aware of the Jamaica Teaching Council Bill in 2015. ## [Snapshot Showdown on Google Play (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/ec21BGqmYAWO) _2026-08-04 · **Sponsored**_ Available on Google Play for Android devices. ## [Queens hydro power](https://regexking.info/2026/08/02/queens-hydro.html) _2026-08-02 · The Regex King_ Running a small weather station presents many opportunities to indulge in a particular fantasy of how software and data should work: for the small cost of a few sensors and a rented server, I can record weather data that has a very specific terroir…it comes from a specific and real place in Queens! I can store that data and do anything with it forever, without worrying about some provider… ## [Riding Toronto’s Freedom Train on August Morning - Emancipation Day](https://leogilling.substack.com/p/riding-torontos-freedom-train-on) _2026-08-01 · Dr Leo Gilling · The Gilling Papers_ I’ve heard about Toronto’s Freedom Train on the morning of August 1 for years. [Listen](https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/209383601.mp3) ## [The If-Statement Retirement Plan](https://sentimark.ai/blog/the-if-statement-retirement-plan/) _2026-07-07 · Field Log on Sentimark_ Somewhere in every production system there is a function nobody loves. It is four hundred lines of if-statements. It checks a deny list, then a beta flag, then a tenant tier, then a regex somebody wrote in 2019, then a country table, and then, if the stars align, it lets the request through. It is called something dignified like evaluate\_policy . It is the slowest thing in the hot path and… ## [Legal First. Optimal Next.](https://sentimark.ai/blog/legal-then-optimal/) _2026-07-06 · Field Log on Sentimark_ One sentence kept turning up in the literature, in three different papers, in almost the same words: the standard FPGA routing algorithm is intrinsically sequential . Three research groups, three decades of tooling, one verdict, routing on a GPU cannot be done. I disagreed, and I built the engine that settles it. Routing is the dominant stage of FPGA compilation, and the reason it resists… ## [Pushing the Featherweight Edge: Real-Time WebSockets Without a Server](https://sentimark.ai/blog/pushing-the-featherweight-edge/) _2026-06-09 · Field Log on Sentimark_ A week after I wrote about the featherweight pattern , my brother sent me a text. He was sitting at his kitchen table, laptop open, playing a test game of Keth-Veyr . His phone was propped up on his water glass next to his physical character sheet. “I hit myself with a fireball,” he wrote. “I clicked save on the laptop. It took two seconds to upload, and then I had to swipe-down… ## [I Bet Everything on Eight Weeks](https://sentimark.ai/blog/i-bet-everything-on-eight-weeks/) _2026-06-08 · Field Log on Sentimark_ Eight weeks ago I was on the wrong side of a question. The question was: Do I actually believe what I’ve been saying out loud for years, that I can build a better embedding engine than the teams shipping the ones the world uses, or am I a person who says that and works somewhere safe? I’d been working in enterprise software for decades, as an architect. The kind of role that pays well… ## [The Berm, the Burn, and the Banana: Heat-Beating Comfort in Northern Sac](https://sentimark.ai/blog/the-berm-the-burn-and-the-banana/) _2026-06-01 · Field Log on Sentimark_ We call it Riverside living. The river is, technically, right there, forty yards off the back fence. It is also entirely invisible, because between us and the water sits a berm the size of a beached whale, a long earthen wall the flood district built to keep the Sacramento from coming over for dinner uninvited. ## [The Featherweight Pattern: Cross-Device State Without a Backend](https://sentimark.ai/blog/the-featherweight-pattern/) _2026-06-01 · Field Log on Sentimark_ It started with a character sheet. My brother and I have been rolling dice together since we were kids: first edition AD&D, the version with the attack matrices and the saving-throw tables you had to memorize. I built him a digital sheet: dice that actually tumble, hit points you drag to spend, spell slots you tap to burn. A toy. A gift. Then he said the thing that turned a toy into a question:… ## [kill -9 Is a Feature: Auto-Healing a One-Box ML API Without Root](https://sentimark.ai/blog/kill-9-is-a-feature/) _2026-05-31 · Field Log on Sentimark_ The numbers were real, and that was the problem. We had an embedding model we believed was about to top MTEB English, and a reviewer had agreed to prove it: reproduce the benchmark against a live endpoint, on their own schedule, over the next three days. That is a wonderful sentence and a terrifying one. Wonderful because someone credible was finally going to confirm the work. Terrifying because… ## [A Late-Spring Tuscan Evening](https://sentimark.ai/blog/a-late-spring-tuscan-evening/) _2026-05-28 · Field Log on Sentimark_ There’s a particular kind of dinner that isn’t about the food, exactly: it’s about deciding the evening is going to be nice and then making it true, one pan at a time. This was one of those. Dinner for two, prepared with love, eaten at the counter by candlelight while the garden’s first real tomatoes finally earned their keep. The reviews were rave. The wine, I’ll… ## [Hire AI-Powered Freelancers Fast (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/7KYcyoljXN4B) _2026-05-27 · **Sponsored**_ Browse and hire skilled professionals using AI tools — free to post, free to apply. ## [Mindful by the River](https://sentimark.ai/blog/mindful-by-the-river/) _2026-05-12 · Field Log on Sentimark_ A Note Before You Begin Just past the berm at the end of our street, the Feather River runs south toward the valley. Most days it is quiet: green, slow, half-hidden by cottonwoods. In dry years it pulls back to a thread. In wet ones, after the Sierra snows let go, it pushes against the levee and reminds the town it is there. The berm does not stop the river. It lets us live close to it. ## [Route of the Postman](https://sentimark.ai/blog/route-of-the-postman/) _2026-05-09 · Field Log on Sentimark_ This is the kind of trip that looks ordinary if you flatten it into logistics. Redwood City to Eugene. One long day in the Tesla, two charging stops, and we arrive at family. A few days on Damon’s porch. The Oregon coast if the weather cooperates. Then the long road home. That is the map version. The feeling version is stranger and better. I am getting ready to play postman across California… ## [Monetizing a Defect](https://sentimark.ai/blog/monetizing-claude-drift/) _2026-05-06 · Field Log on Sentimark_ Forgive me for a moment while I rant. I’m a solo founder running a pre-revenue AI infrastructure company. This week I burned $100 in three hours on Claude Code “extra usage” doing routine work. I want to walk through what happened, because the pricing structure that produced that bill is not an accident, and the pattern is showing up across the industry. For context, I was… ## [When Big Boy Came Through Marysville](https://sentimark.ai/blog/big-boy-marysville/) _2026-04-09 · Field Log on Sentimark_ There are machines you understand by reading about them, and there are machines that make reading feel beside the point. Big Boy is the second kind. Union Pacific brought Big Boy No. 4014 through Marysville on April 9, 2026, during its America 250 coast-to-coast steam tour. The public schedule had the stop at the 7th Street crossing from 3:30 to 3:45 p.m. 1 That is the sort of sentence a calendar… ## [Hard Negation](https://sentimark.ai/blog/hard-negation/) _2026-02-13 · Field Log on Sentimark_ I did not set out to build a negation dataset because models could not understand the word not . The obvious version of the problem has improved. Give a frontier LLM a clean sentence and ask what happens when you insert not , and it will often answer correctly. That does not mean the retrieval layer has learned the same lesson. The failure I cared about lives in the gap between surface similarity… ## [“Mack the Knife” — Louis Armstrong (1956)](https://regexking.info/2026/02/08/mack-the-knife.html) _2026-02-08 · The Regex King_ I was listening to an archival radio broadcast from the late Phil Schaap about the swing jazz band man Tiny Bradshaw. In full Phil Schaap discursive mode, he briefly detoured to describe a recording that Louis Armstrong has made of “Mack the Knife” with Lotte Lenya, the singer who’d made this song famous originally in the 1930’s as part of Threepenny Opera. Mack the Knife… ## [A Speed Nerd Met spaCy](https://sentimark.ai/blog/rust-pos-spacy/) _2026-02-06 · Field Log on Sentimark_ A speed nerd met spaCy and said… what if we did it this way? That sentence is a joke, but only barely. The problem was not spaCy. spaCy was doing exactly the part I wanted it to do: tokenize text, assign part-of-speech tags, expose dependency labels, and give me stable linguistic features without turning the pipeline into a research project. The problem was the loop after spaCy. I was… ## [talk2html](https://regexking.info/2025/11/23/talk2html.html) _2025-11-23 · The Regex King_ I like a live event where the format is people riffing, and try to attend these when I can. It’s also remarkable that we live in an era with unprecedented access to recordings of these types of live events: I’m always seeing or being sent links to a video recording of a presentation, a panel discussion, or a video version of a podcast. Unfortunately, the practice of watching or… ## [Why Forge](https://sentimark.ai/blog/why-forge/) _2025-11-10 · Field Log on Sentimark_ In November 2025, the question was simple enough to sound rude: Why does the world need another vector embedding tool? The honest answer is that the world does not need another wrapper around somebody else’s model. It does not need another dashboard with a prettier cosine similarity demo. It does not need a new place to paste text and receive a list of floats. But it does need better… ## [Interview: Julien Minet - OpenArdenneMap](https://regexking.info/2025/11/02/minet-openardennes.html) _2025-11-02 · The Regex King_ Great interview with the maintainer of a region-specific OpenStreetMap style called “OpenArdenneMap”, that’s been optimized for hiking in a specific region in the world (the Ardennes) while still being usable and forkable for use elsewhere. I found this interview while researching tools I could use to make a print map of the neighborhood for my son (I ended up using QGIS).… ## [Realtime AI Arbitrage Terminal (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/MhrH7elcD15I) _2025-11-02 · **Sponsored**_ Realtime auto-trading across exchanges with scored setups, backtesting, and risk controls. ## [The Magic of AMQ](https://sentimark.ai/blog/the-magic-of-amq/) _2025-10-18 · Field Log on Sentimark_ Some infrastructure questions become too expensive just by being asked often enough. Is this IP hot? Has this tenant crossed a boundary? Does this key belong to the set of things we should treat differently right now? At small scale, you ask the question directly. You look in a database, call a cache, increment a counter, wait on a network hop, and move on with your day. At meaningful scale, that… ## [Utopian XHTML at the SEC](https://regexking.info/2025/07/05/xhtml-utopia.html) _2025-07-05 · The Regex King_ I’ve been working on a project that was riffed into existence by friends John, Olov, and Nora at Grand Morelos: it’s called Labor Leverage. It’s loosely based on workshops John and our coworker Stacy Cowley have run previously, where they share with other unions how to research employer finances in order to build power at the bargaining table. Big public companies are required to… ## [Re-uploading Unix Time](https://regexking.info/2025/05/30/unixtime-archive.html) _2025-05-30 · The Regex King_ In 2016 I was inspired to run a series of DIY workshops on the command line and the Unix philosophy generally. I’d been chatting with a handful of friends about interest in learning more about the history of Unix and non-graphical interfaces. I chose the name “Unix Time” as a tribute to the time convention of the same name, and we met for several months in Red Hook, Brooklyn at… ## [Updating volume pops pro](https://regexking.info/2025/03/08/volume-pops.html) _2025-03-08 · The Regex King_ In 2011, which in retrospect was a gentler computer era, I made a piece of software called Volume Pops Pro which installed custom sounds over the system default “pop” sound you get when you increase or decrease the volume on a Mac computer. There was a Funkmaster Flex inspired explosion sound, and an airhorn sound. It was packaged as a package installer that put the files in the… ## [blob-15, blob-16 and blob-17.local](https://regexking.info/2024/10/15/blob-17.html) _2024-10-15 · The Regex King_ ZeroConf is a protocol that lets computers find each other automatically on a local network. In the typical configuration, if your computer is named “Jeff’s Mac”, it’s Zeroconf that makes your computer available for networking using the hostname jeffs-mac.local. I have what I like to think is a normal number of Raspberry Pi computers around the house, doing Raspberry Pi… ## ["it's really coming down out there" bot update](https://regexking.info/2024/10/14/really-coming-down-bot.html) _2024-10-14 · The Regex King_ The Big Boy Weather station records data forever: observations for temperature, humidity, rainfall, and wind speed, are all recorded with the original time of observation. These observations are then rolled up into an almanac view, where it’s possible to note exceptional weather events within a day, or a month, or a year. A timeless way to mark exceptional amounts of rainfall is to say…