Regardless of how you feel about generative AI—love it or hate it—the worst thing you can do with it is use it to write for you. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that there was an LLM entirely free from any ethical, ecological, or economi…
I got asked a good question today: what is the difference between Tree-sitter and a language server? I don’t understand how either of these tools work in depth, so I’m just going to explain from an observable, pragmatic point of view. Tree-…
I never liked running. I did swim team in high school and that was pretty much the only sport I enjoyed. During the pandemic I started running a little bit, but I didn’t know very much and when I moved to Salt Lake City to start my PhD I pr…
I started using Typst about a month ago to write my dissertation proposal. I had seen Typst before and decided to keep an eye on it as it matured. While it still is very much in development, it is mature enough that I was able to rewrite my…
The past few weeks have seen major AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare outages. I predict Google Cloud will have a major outage sometime soon as well. Each time one of these massive systems goes down, it takes a sizable chunk of the internet with it…
I got asked how I manage papers, notes, and citations for doing research. I started writing out a very long Slack message, but it quickly passed the threshold where I ought to just turn it into a blog post. The short of it: I’m an incorrigi…
There are few sounds as satisfying to me as a lock popping open, especially when it’s a well-machined lock that makes a nice, crisp “chink!” sound as the shackle releases. This post is some suggestions I gave to a friend of mine who wanted
I just released version 1.5.0 of Emacs Bedrock—a super minimal starter kit for Emacs. This is a minor change: I’ve fixed a few bugs and added a package or two to some of the optional config files under extras/. Unlike some starter kits, Bed…
The key principle I follow is this: how I take my notes will evolve over time. I do not stick to any system too dogmatically. That said, I’ve settled on a system that’s been fairly robust and stable for the past few years. I have tweaked it…
Many developers seem to have a fanatic obsession with monospace fonts and using them to make their blogs look “cool”. I won’t call out anyone’s blog specifically, but you don’t have to look to hard to find some. As an example theme using a
When I was in my early 20s, I vowed that I would keep my kids from watching any amount of television. Turns out, sometimes you really need a break as a parent. A good show can keep your kid entertained while you perform necessary tasks like…
This is the story of how I solved a problem (ugly, cumbersome boilerplate code) that I ran into while writing a program in a functional language (Elixir). Functional programming languages often pride themselves on expressiveness and eleganc…