Switching back to Apple Music
Officiallly switching back to Apple Music after a 1.5 year dalliance with Spotify. The recommendations were definitely good, the podcasts were definitely lacking versus something like an Overcast.
Notes on Zach Nielsen's Blog
Recent notes on Zach Nielsen's Blog
Latest posts
Quick AI update for 2026
I wanted to step back for a second to get into what AI is doing as we enter the majority of 2026. Christmas break with Opus 4.5 was really where Claude Code exploded in popularity. I think it had been pretty solid for awhile; I’ve been doing some machine learning stuff with sports data, and it’s been helpful for a bit. I do think they lowered the usage on the $20 a month plan, it…
Ninja Creami Macro Dishes
From this X thread 𝗕𝗜𝗥𝗧𝗛𝗗𝗔𝗬 𝗖𝗔𝗞𝗘 𝗪𝗛𝗜𝗥𝗟: 360ml Fat Free Fairlife 2 servings Sugar Free Cheesecake Jello Pudding Mix -3 squeezes of SweetLeaf Sweet Drops Vanilla Sweetener 1 serving True Nutrition French Vanilla Egg White Protein Powder 12g sprinkles 2g Xanthan Gum 350 Calories / 45g Protein 𝗖𝗜𝗡𝗡𝗔𝗠𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗢𝗔𝗦𝗧 𝗖𝗥𝗨𝗡𝗖𝗛 𝗦𝗪𝗜𝗥𝗟: 300ml Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk…
Sora 2 Review
I wanted to note some initial thoughts down on two new products that have just hit my inbox today. The first is Sora (the app) running Sora 2 (the model), used for video generation, and the second is the Droid CLI by Factory. This will be the review for Sora and Sora 2 respectively. Sora is pretty fun! I’m seeing a ton of historical figure selfie videos (i.e. Jesus at the last supper), style…
Great Tables in Python
I’ve been going through the archives of the great newsletter The F5 . Flagging this for myself - I was wondering how the tables looked so good, and he mentions using the Great Tables package in Python. Definitely worth investigating!
AI Software that Doesn't Exist
After reading more AI apps that should exist , I decided I had to note it(similar to my first post ). There are some solid ideas here! I particularly like a camera app that takes your iPhone photos and uses nano-banana to make them better. I also like this recommendation engine A recommendation engine that looks at my browsing history, sees what blog posts or articles I spent the most time on,…
Simple Sabotage Rules for White Collar Workers
I recently came across the OSS Simple Sabotage Rules again. After finding out that it’s in Project Gutenberg, I thought it’d be a ton of fun to list some of the rules that apply to white collar workers. “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.” “Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great…
AI and Deep Thinking
I was listening to Derek Thompson’s most recent podcast with Cal Newport. As a long time Cal Newport stan, it hit on a lot of themes that you’d expect; society is getting worse dealing with deep thinking. In particular I really enjoyed Derek talking about his idea of time under tension for the mind as a metric to strive for, particularly in regards with children. I think with AI…
Essay Meta Primer
I’ve been meaning to link to this tweet by Patrick Mckenzie for a bit, where he explains the essay meta. In short, JD Vance told the New York Times that he read the pretty famous AI 2027 paper . I think this is a great example of agency; a $14 domain name and some fancy css can be a great way to get a point across to a Serious Person. It’s the new example of a resume on nice paper,…
Notes on Nobody Knows How To Build With AI Yet
A really good post on the current AI landscape. Some thoughts: Maybe that’s all any documentation is. Messages to future confused versions of ourselves. I totally agree with this. I find that the more documentation you can feed AI, the better. I’m constantly noting “check off @TODOS.md, note this in @README.md” If readme gets too big, use subagents to clean up the…
Throw more tokens at problems
Channeling this idea - when in doubt, throw more tokens at the problem, docuemnt lessons learned, and redo it.
LLM Analyst Benchmark Idea
One idea I had for an LLM benchmark - rather than Javascript web dev, I’d want something that’s a bit more multi functional. I’d use an analyst level analysis all the time; something like transcribe Caesar’s Entertainment, Boyd Gaming, and MGM’s most recent earnings calls, pull out any takeaways regarding marketing efficiency and spend, and put them together in a nice…
Gemini Nano in Chrome
Found these excellent instructions via the always excellent Swyx on using the new Nano model in every chrome. I’m a big Safari guy, but I’m super jealous of Chrome’s extension library. This would be a great tool to enhance your workflow.
Transcribing Tips via OpenAI's Whisper API.”
Really good post on hacker news for Transcribing tips ( comments ). Some notes: A commentor had the idea to also strip silences with the following FFMPEG code block. Less silence means less room for hallucinations, and it’s also cheaper! ffmpeg -i video-audio.m4a \ -af "silenceremove=start_periods=1:start_duration=0:start_threshold=-50dB:\…
All We See are Shadows Notes Recast Video Notes
Really good video by the Recast folks . Some choice quotes on marketing: Experiments are “good” to the extent that they can provide support for or against a certain hypothesis Various model metrics (R-Squared, MAPE, convergence) don’t tell you if your model is good, you need internal or external validity checks. MMM’s should be assumed to be wrong until they’re proven…
Subagents in Amp
Fun post by Amp on how subagents may be changing the current meta consisting of a project plan and carefully managing scope. What does that mean for how we interact with agents? Is the meta of having plan files outdated? Is careful conversation management a thing of the past if now a single conversation with one main agent can potentially contain tens and tens of other conversations with…
Poddigest Update
Quick update on my Poddigests.com app. I took it down as the Postgres DB on replit was costing a ton of money a month. I think I want to rewrite it in Python anyway, so might as well transfer to SQLlite.
Airbnb Update
It’s been a bit since Airbnb released their most recent update. I’m not exactly sure what constitutes an experience , but the no brainer for me is having Airbnb integrate with Bachelor(ette) Party setup people, or Instacart, to get groceries in your apartment night 1, or something. As a family man, I’m not interested in skydiving or a foodie scene, and more interested in getting…
Only in Poland
Really cool tweet talking about project creation. I love the idea of having a bug board for a country. I think the U.S. is in a bit better of a place (hopefully??) to do this than Poland, but it’s still a cool idea.
Hocking Modeling - Postseason 2025
I have a broader review of my new NHL Forecasts coming soon, but one thing I wanted to call out specifically. Colorado/Dallas was a 50/50 ish series before any games were played. When Colorado won the first away game, it added about 4.5% of win prob to their Stanley Cup chances, going from 6.1% to 10.6%. They’re playing again tonight, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens with…
Terminal Coding Tools
Lots of great coding terminal tools floating around. One that I want to note is GPTME . Using Github as a memory bank is a really cool idea. More definitely to come here.
Crossover 25
Foudn a good article on Mac Gaming by Macsparky It seems pretty good! I always think gaming on Macs should be a bigger deal than it is. Whenver I get free time back, I’m absolutely going to look this up.
Gemini Code
A few days late, but found Gemini Code which is super cool. Definitely have to poke around with this library a bit more. Creator was the PM for NotebookLLM, a super fun X follow.
MCP Initial Thoughts
I also got MCP hooked up on my local Claude app today. Many more thoughts to come here once I poke around with it a bit more. My initial vibe is plug ins, but with everything which is neat. Some inital security concerns - what happens if a webpage, file, etc. contains an exfill message?
Arco Game
Found a rec for a new game .
Recurse Coding Retreat
I found this coding retreat via Dan Snow’s excellent blog and post and it seems reallly cool! As someone who codes very creatively let’s say, I’d love to do something like this to hone my skills, but a few things stop me: This seems to be more for app design, less for the meat and potatoes data analysis / modeling I tend to enjoy. I do know how to code enough for my purposes -…
Cursor for Writing
So it turns out that the cursor for writing… may just be Cursor? I’ve been having a blast loading up my Hugo site and vibe coding some changes: New CSS Digital Garden Removed Mailchimp newsletter Super fun to have it just all work with Sonnet 3.7. Next step in my mind is to have an LLM look at all of my posts for better categorization and tagging, but that’s a project for later.
Modern Vinyl
I found this really fun article on MacStories on integrating vinyl into modern homeplay speakers. The real unlock is using the app Quanta to use an existing iPhone or iPad to AirPlay music from your turntable to any compatible playback device. Vinyl is one of those things I want to get into more, but as someone who barely listens to msuic, it just never makes sense. Regardless, a very cool…
Translating with LLMs Case Study
Really good comment on Hacker News on how to work with LLMs to professionally translate some prose (via the great Simon Willison ). One thing that immediately came to mind is the repetition with LLMs. Usually I’ll just fire off a zero-shot coding question, but this is making me rethink my strategy (or at least put together a tool for asking multiple LLMs at once!) Great article.
Children's Education Tools
Being a new parent comes with a host of challenges, amoung them being how unaware I was about the tasks I’d have to make the baby do (tummy tinme, crawling practice, etc.) In an attempt to get ahead of it for the education aspect, I found this resource on using phonics for reading, specifically with the book Learn to Read in 100 Easy Lessons . Separately, via this twitter thread , I found…
Loading text from shortcuts
I’m putting together away to post more short term content from my phone. I think it’ll scratch that edge that Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, etc. will do, but I’ll be able to own all of my content. Let’s see.
Getting inspired by wild coding projects
I want to start tracking all of the absolutely wild coding projects that I find. Awhile ago I found this project on HackerNews, and it is worth the read.
Quick Mastodon Update
So I’ve finally gotten into Mastodon - better late than never I suppose! A few things really made it worthwhile for me. I briefly signed up for the main instance of Mastodon.social, but found it was too big for me. I then stumbled across omg.lol, which felt like a perfect fit. They were running a Valentine’s Day sale and I never looked back. So far I’ve been lurking…
Quick Mastodon Update
I’ve been experimenting with Mastodon recently - it’s long past time to move on from Twitter/X. Benedict Evan’s post on Twitter was an excellent catalyst for making the move. To sign up for mastodon, I really strugged with the best way to do that. I ran into the following issues: Do I pay for hosting so that I can use my own domain name? If no, what instance should I sign up for?…
OpenAi Update
I’ve been thinking about OpenAi’s recent developer conference and release for the past few days. Lot’s to unpack (hello, larger context window), but I’ve been really fascinated by how big the “Create Your Own GPT” has gotten. Seeing how GPT can vary so wildly with simple prompting really is something to behold.
Installing nfl_data_py on Mac
I’ve been trying to redownload nfl_data_py on my Mac after hosing my python installation. The error I kept running into was that python-snappy wouldn’t download, which kicked nfl_data_py out of the installation process. I googled around a bit and found this stackoverflow What worked for me on the Mac was using homebrew to install python-snappy and then using the following command to…
GPT-4 Working Notes
Some working notes on using GPT-4 to code (and LLM’s generally) GPT-4 is definitely the move over GPT-3.5 It’s pretty clear when GPT loses the context window - sometimes it just makes more sense to paste the code into a new chat window to refresh. Small contained steps are the way to approach the problem. Doing a ton of modeling / data stuff, the way seems to be “Looking for a…
Analytics Motto
Metrics for my real friends, real tricks for my meh friends — Jeremy B. Merrill 1 Via Jeremy’s excellent blog . ↩︎
Dusting off the website
With all of the dust flying over Twitter and the API shutting down, I think it’s time to get back to writing. I’m fascinated to see what’s next for social media - lots of great developers have loads of time to spend improving the Fediverse/Mastodon/etc. I’ve already been gathering inspiration for my inevitable redesign!
Library Visits
Rediscovered the humble library and it’s been a game changer. Love the randomness of walking through the book rack and picking out whatever catches my eye. Anything from a big data book from 2017 to a remote work environment. And now they auto-renew unless someone actively is reserving it. What a winner!
Modal Tailwind Email Popup
I’m currently working on building out a new website in Django and one key component is an email capture system. I spent some time googling around and found this great post on building out an email capture popup form. Having the ability to capture emails is a great growth business hack.
Further Tableau Tricks
I have recently published several Tableau dashboards, which has me relearning many of Tableau’s foibles since I frequently used it in 2015. Some tips for the future: One problem with a relative date picker (where you can pick both sides) is that both the start date and end date are fixed, even when new data comes in. This means that the end-user has to change the date whenever they launch a…
Twitter as Inspiration
As Austin Kleon notes, problems of output are so often problems of input. Twitter, for me, is a great way to find ideas from many walks to spark inspiration. Now Twitter gets a bad rap, and I think that’s dependent on who you follow. Feel free to unfollow people! Feel free to mute tags and people! Keeping your feed trim and clean makes it easy to find the wheat and separate it from the…
Analytics Approach to Scouting
In my first post on the Big Data Cup, I talked about how I think I’m going to focus more on the Scouting dataset. This post will talk about how I will approach scouting a player. When thinking about a GM’s role, I’d imagine that there are two competing desires when drafting a player: what’s the best player available at the moment, and what need do I need to fill at the…
Big Data Cup 2021
I was scrolling and found the Big Data Cup for 2021. In short, they’ll provide two data sets about Women’s Hockey, and I’ll perform some analysis on that data. The winner gets tickets to the conference in Canada. The first dataset deals with scouting hockey players, while the second deals with Olympics level performance. I’m going to spend most of my time on the Scouting…
Codenames for Projects
As someone who always has project ideas turning around in his head, I’ve decided that they’ve been lacking one thing: codenames. Therefore, I’m going to start giving each of my projects code names. I feel like my codenames should all be linked in some way which is yet to be determined, 1 but overall this should make writing them much more entertaining. I’m leaning towards…
Sports Betting cont.
Thinking about it more, the NFL being so random means that any predictions have to be couched in probabilities. For example, the Saints were favored against the Bucs, but four turnovers later mean that the Bucs are advancing. If they were to play that game 10 or 100 times, how many times would the Bucs get those four turnovers? That’s the part I’m unclear on. Similarly, it’s…
Sports Betting for Wild Card Weekend
Finally had some time to think through sports betting that happened over Wild Card Weekend. The one question for me was how “chalk” it was going to be, in that would common sense check out. It turned out that it mostly was the case - I thought that Buffalo would win but not cover, Saints would win, etc. There were some surprises for me - the Ravens winning was a biggie (until I heard…
Color Palette
This is a super useful utility to help pick a good color setup. Design is tough, so this could be useful in finding what colors my next redesign should be.
Creating Yourself
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” George Bernard Shaw