Recent content on Over the Hedge
I first read this story back in my junior year of high school. Ms. Jetton assigned it as reading and I didn’t take it seriously at all. For one thing, she was “the man” and I felt rebellious - policy is for the kingpins’ interests, not for me. For another, I was seventeen and on top of the world. The symbology and metaphor was totally lost on me back then. No chance…
I’ve been using Claude Code for a while for coding related tasks, but I get frustrated by running out of tokens. I have a GPU that should be sufficient for my needs, so I’ve also been tinkering with running a persistent local LLM for personal analysis and code generation. I used to use Ollama quite a bit to load in various models, but my experience loading arbitrary 3rd party models…
My brain is probably a little messed up from spending my whole career in trading. I don’t mean that it doesn’t work, I just mean that I often find little financial hacks that seem like a good idea at the time because the margins justify it. When I actually go ahead and do the trade, of course, it often becomes clear that I missed something crucial: You Can’t Eat Sharpe . Before…
This one is just going to be a short follow up on A Quick Business Discussion . You might be wondering if I ended up running the model in production. I did. Initially, I started running the filter every 15 minutes, for any message sent in the last 7 days. If you’re familiar with low-bandwidth, low-cost IMAP servers, you might already see where this is about to go wrong. We got an e-mail that…
Some of you might know that my fiancée is a small business owner on top of the many hats that she wears. Today’s post is about a small part of that experience that I’m familiar with. Read along to learn something about how basic spam e-mail classification models are built and how you too can make a startup that replaces Google, get acquired, then get shut down after securing your bag.…
Interesting fun fact, the internet only connects about 5.5 billion people as of 2024. Not surprisingly, most of these people live in developed countries as you can see in the animation below from the United Nations . There are infinite ways to classify the internet, but I think that the most mysterious one is the breakdown of clearnet , deepweb , and darkweb . Most people that are aware of the…
If you read my previous post about the latest homebrew batch of mead, you’ll remember that it was called Alchemist’s Gold so that it could be drank at a medieval themed bachelor party. We had a lot of mead in the bucket. Enough, in fact, to make 22 bottles. That’s a case and a half for the bacholor party and 6 for me to take to events or drink at home. We did a little product…
The Birth of Alchemist’s Gold Homebrew No. 5 , the latest large batch of mead, finally has a name! My buddy is going to a medieval themed bachelor party. What goes better for the medieval theme than your own brew?! Of course, since I’m not actually a huge fan of the last batch in it’s fully dry state, I’ve decided to backsweeten the batch, in the process creating……
Just cracked open batch number 5 of my homebrewed mead. I initially made two batches of mead using Crystal’s Wildflower Honey . The must of the first batch was made with 10 lbs of honey, 1 quart of maple syrup, and enough water to fill the remainder of volume of a 5 gallon HDPE food-safe bucket. I used 2 packets of Lalvin EC-1118 to get the fermentation process going. The must very obviously…
I’ve spent the better part of a month doing some basic design work on the cabin I mentioned in Cabin Fever and Part II If you get seasick or motion sick, I’m sorry… take your daily dose of dramamine right now. If you have tips on how to make better animations in SketchUp 2017, let me know! Summary The cabin will be a basic stick frame structure supported 4’ above the…
Last month I mentioned in Cabin Fever that it’s not worth the effort of letting envy take hold of you. Ironically, I’ve since done exactly that in the most literal of ways. I watched dozens of hours of men building remote cabins in remote corners of Wisconsin in one of my latest YouTube binges. This guy @Bushradical has got me particularly jealous. To be fair, I know nothing of the…
I read a piece by Shalom Auslander on the Dangers of Substack for the Chronically Low Self-Esteemed recently. The piece is from Aug ‘23 but it’s timeless nonetheless. Auslander explores his envy via George Saunders’ literal cabin (and retreats) as a symbol for Saunders’ relative success. Somewhere in his particularly vulgar and entertaining writing style, you can tease out…
Lately, I’ve felt a cognitive dullness… a brainrot. I don’t have an exact definition for brainrot and I’m not going to check a dictionary. No need, if you’ve been living in the modern world you know exactly what I mean. That feeling might just be a part of aging, but I suspect that it’s really driven by consuming short videos from whatever the service-du-jour…