Technology

I moved my blog from WordPress.com to Bluehost and the open-source version of the WordPress engine back in 2018. I wanted more control, and wasn’t willing to pay the Automattic folks for the right to add more plugins to my blog. Instead, I probably paid even more money to a different corporation because, well, it felt better. Technology has evolved, and I’ve decided to move backwards and save some money. With three or four hours of work, I migrated my entire blog off WordPress and into Hugo, a lightweight static blogging engine, relies directly on Markdown, and is simple and cheap to manage on a hosting provider like Netlify. ...

I recently finished helping a small online high school create a new data science course, the foundation for which was Stanford’s youcubed Explorations in Data Science. It’s a snappy curriculum that is thoughtful and modern in its topic selection and a bit ragged at the edges of its resources. Its lesson layout is clear, its tools of choice are accessible and modifiable, and in the spirit of decades of statistics-oriented education, it helps students be wary of practitioners who lie and misrepresent either through thoughtlessness or malice. While I wrote this course to run in a format that relies heavily on self-directed work, wholly different from what youcubed anticipated, the curriculum was an excellent base that created ample opportunity for differentiation. By all accounts, students are loving the results. ...

What a great video. Destin is always captivating, and I enjoyed the crossover into one of my favorite sports. My only comment is near the end, where he takes issue with the terms “overstable” and “understable” to describe different disc flights. While it’s the opposite of what one might consider as stability for aerodynamics, it makes perfect sense in the context of the sport: an “overstable” disc is extremely stable in different wind conditions and forgiving of angles.

Core to my effort to improve this blog and my writing more generally is a better revision process. I now use tools to catch mechanical errors or to point out when I’ve slipped into passive voice accidentally, but that doesn’t address the flow of prose, the feel of the words washing over the reader. Reading out loud is a superb way to improve, but I’m not always in a position to do that. ...

While navigating the house of technology you build for yourself, please hold onto banisters and sturdy bits of furniture because the rug may be pulled out from beneath you at any time. Software companies have a silly habit of doing one or both of the following: Taking a one-time payment to access their premium version forever. Giving away a free version of their product forever. The former exists to both gather capital (I presume) and ensnare people who are anti-subscription and have an outdated or incorrect understanding of software. The latter is solely designed to convert free users to paying customers. Here’s the thing: these same companies have another silly habit where they conveniently forget their marketing promise and request more money, or hoover some up with advertisements. They’re making a bet that enough users will convert to a subscription (or swallow the ads) compared to the number they alienate by this move, that they come out ahead. When it’s a service with few alternatives and all with similar business models, it’s difficult to hold any of them accountable. Not every company that has made these promises has proceeded to pull out the proverbial rug. There are at least a couple in each category that have remained steadfast, and those are just as intriguing to consider. Here’s a survey of the software and services I’ve used that have explicitly offered me forever at the cost of free or some fee, and where they are now. ...

It’s always more fun to work on something other than what I should explicitly be doing in the moment, so ideas and small projects naturally arise from procrastination. I was having trouble returning to my NaNoWriMo work after my sisters visited last weekend, and I took fifteen minutes to learn how to locally run an LLM. My ninety percent use-case for LLMs is word refinement. While writing I will get a word stuck in my head, the wrong word for the exact feeling I’d like to describe. So, I tell some LLM (often Claude) to provide several more synonyms with varying connotations. This doesn’t rely on having up-to-date knowledge or internet access, so a nimble, offline, and local LLM would fit the task perfectly. ...

My several-year-long nerd snipe has comprised inspecting the inspection certificate in every elevator I enter. Who watches the watchers? I do. I focused on Connecticut legislation throughout this, though I expect the broad strokes are similar in many states. ...

I have a work trip to San Diego and all my other blog post ideas need more time, so here’s a quick list of my favorite tech media. I stick with these outlets for their staunch commitment to quality and independence; they’re all owned and run by excellent people with that ineffable and intangible quality of taste. These lists aren’t in any particular order. Websites Daring Fireball 512 Pixels The Verge Six Colors Podcasts ...

Each time I commit to sharing my writing process, I jinx myself to undergo a radical change within a month. Yet, my hubris tells me that this update is different. ...

Tapestry by Iconfactory has significantly improved my internet experience. Similar in some ways to feeeed, which I wrote about last fall, Tapestry combines my social media accounts and RSS feeds into a single timeline. While feeeed separates itself by a larger number of built-in source connections and its “magazine” approach of curating recent items, Tapestry is focused on a linear display that holds place. You don’t scroll back to find older items you may have missed; instead, your position is held, and you scroll forward in time to see what has happened since you last opened the app. It’s the only sensible way to interact with news and media, and matches what I and many others love about the Mastodon client Ivory. ...