Category: Uncategorized
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The systemic sublime makes our world more legible
My new favorite category on Kottke.org is the systemic sublime, wherein our networked, often inscrutable world is made more legible. The connections between ideas and and their instantiations are not always obvious. The history, and often the path dependence, of how we got here make it a little easier to understand our world. Other fine […]
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Advocacy = empathy + speaking to someone elseâs conceptual framework. When I’m trying to convey an idea from my head to someone else’s head, the biggest challenge is converting from my conceptual framework and values to theirs. Hence, The words that work: For example, one partner in a conversation might use concepts like power and […]
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It’s dangerous to go alone, take dotfiles
Yesterday I was handed a fresh, nifty new laptop. This is, for me, mildly terrifying. Last time I did a clean operating system install was seven years ago. I’ve carried an idiomatic mixtape of dotfiles, macOS preferences, files, and cruft with me on my personal laptop ever since. A brand-new, stock laptop is a shock […]
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I’m starting a new job tomorrow. I decided to take a week off in-between jobs, mostly to make a quick trip to Disney Land. I hid most social media apps away, stopped paying attention to news, and caught up on reading. I gave myself a 3-day weekend before our trip to decompress, we went to […]
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Scribbling through TensorFlow.js
I’ve been trying to wrap my head around machine learning lately. Today I worked through the TensorFlow.js tutorial on recognizing handwritten numbers with a neural network. Herein, my notes and scribbles. My previous forays into machine learning left me a little frustrated: I could tell there was language, pattern, and notations to this, but I couldn’t see them […]
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Code minutiae, October 23, 2017
For some reason, identifier schemes that are global unique, coordination-free, somewhat humanely-representable, and efficiently indexed by databases are a thing I really like. Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier (ulid, for humans) is one of those things. Implementations available for dozens of languages! They look like this: 01ARZ3NDEKTSV4RRFFQ69G5FAV. Paul Fordâs website is twenty years old. For […]
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A strange world of mathematical and computational complexity
Over the past few weekends, Iâve been reading on two topics which are way out of my technical confidence. Iâve spent the majority of my software development career building web applications and neither of these are very coincident with web apps right now: blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and autonomous contracts machine learning, neural networks, general purpose GPUs, […]
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Just keep writing, October 16, 2017
I watched pal Drew Yeaton work in Ableton briefly and it was pretty incredible. He laid down a keyboard and drums beat, fixed up all the off-beat stuff, and proceeded to tinker with his myriad of synthesizers and effects rack with speed. I had no idea what his hands were doing as he moved from […]
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One step closer to a good pipeline operator for Ruby
Iâve previously yearned for something like Elm and Elixirâs |> operator in Ruby. Turns out, this clever bit of concision is in Ruby 2.5: object.yield_self {|x| block } â an_object # Yields self to the block and returns the result of the block. class Object def yield_self yield(self) end end I would prefer then or […]
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Heck yeah, October 09, 2017
Simon Willison returns to blogging, in peak form nonetheless. Heck yeah! Janet Jackson, âRhythm Nationâ, posted by Billy Eichner. Heck yeah! A rocket engine made of nuclear fission. Note the âpoison rodâ in the schematic. Heck yeah engineering, heck no they actually tested this on Earth, heck yeah they never flew it!
Adam Keys is typing 