_Trying to prod myself a little into reading more carefully._
I read a _lot_ of articles online, and I hold onto a lot of the ideas from them sort of “ambiently”, but I often find myself sad when I want to point back to them — and I also don’t know exactly what I’ve read. Going to start asking myself after each read: “Should I take some basic notes on this?”
Obviously I still have to _act_ on…
running as a helpful tool for training our emotions.
Assumed audience: Talks about endurance sports and virtues, but in a way that I trust and hope will be friendly to people who have never run a mile in their lives and think “huh?” if I say “virtue ethics”.
…I have seen distance running do the work of turning barges. Running helps people to grow in discipline. It makes them…
It is indeed not optimal. Unfortunately, it is also hard to solve.
Assumed audience: People at least broadly familiar with the Rust ecosystem and The Rust Programming Language Book’s role therein.
Thinking a lot about the comments in The many journeys of learning Rust about the perceived maintenance state of The Book:
“We’d like to use [The Rust Programming Language/‘the book’],…
An idea for indie folks working together.
Assumed audience: Folks who work independently—or have in the past, or might like to in the future.
Epistemic status: Ideating!
Collectives are an organizational structure for bringing together people to share the legal and financial challenges of going it alone professionally, without embracing the mechanisms of the…
_Telling myself this a lot right now about my composing “career”, such as it is/not._
Some days, it’s nearly impossible not to despair of ever having my music find an audience. Say I finish the symphony: simple math still says it’ll likely never be played, even likelier never be recorded. (Getting a new symphony played, still less recorded, is _very_ hard.) This is one of those days.
On these…
Taking a page (no pun intended!) from Eleanor Konik’s book.
Assumed audience: People who care about note-taking and are already persuaded that thinking “with” a book via note-taking is helpful and good.
This evening I started rereading Sabrina B. Little’s excellent The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better Runners (which I quoted briefly here a few months ago) with a two-fold…
_Giving this project its own proper home at last!_
Took a bit of time this evening and got true-myth.dev up and working! It has lived at a js.org site for many years, and that was wonderful (seriously, much credit to those folks!) but as I’ve slowly pushed this project toward being a bit more “professional”, it felt right to give it its own home.
If you’re curious, the docs stack now:
*…
It’s only taken me over a decade to getting around to realizing this was not only an option but a good idea.
Assumed audience: People familiar with at least some of the “getting things done” world, particularly the use of focused work blocks and the pomodoro technique.
I have used a pomodoro timer to help me stay focused on work off and on for well over a decade now. It was a key…
It’s still terrible for us all.
Assumed audience: People who are open to hearing an experience report from someone “in the wild” of professional software development with “agentic” coding tools. I am not talking here about the ethics or legality of their training, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have carefully-considered opinions about those considerations; that just isn’t that post.
_Help me make this essay as robust as it can be!_
Posting this as a form of crowd-sourcing for an essay I’m working on —
What are the main “metaphors” you see deployed around LLMs and AI?
Here’s my list so far: intelligence, learning, training, thinking, reasoning, chat, agent, assistant, model, generative, skill, context, vision, memory, personality, constitution, engineering, prompt,…
…and resilience is a virtue I have been building all-too uncomfortably these past five months.
Assumed audience: Talks about endurance sports and virtues, but in a way that I trust and hope will be friendly to people who have never run a mile in their lives and think “huh?” if I say “virtue ethics”.
Two quotes from Sabrina B. Little’s The Examined Run: Why Good People Make Better…
_My opinion on YAML probably won’t surprise you. _
Assumed audience: People familiar at a basic level with YAML and its use in continuous integration and deployment systems like GitHub Actions.
YAML pipelines are a pit of failure for CI/CD pipelines. They attract people because they seem declarative and the syntax is “easy”, and they have become “standard”, but everyone ends up…
Work. So much work!
I just realized, on posting that bit about slices in Dorico, that I hadn’t written anything in February. I missed it, but then I barely got to any of my side projects in February. Vanta’s fiscal year starts on February 1, which means a lot of other things happen then as well:
_One of those handy features you don’t necessarily appreciate until you find yourself needing it._
I just used Dorico’s handy Exporting Graphic Slices feature for, I think, the first time, and: what a thoughtful inclusion this is. For one issue of my music newsletter this year (comment on going quarterly some other time — likely the upcoming January – March issue!), I wanted to illustrate, like…
_Having an App Store is fine.Only having an App Store is not. Or: the right to install. _
I was joking with my wife about a silly app idea that would be for her and her alone — an inside joke — and I was frustrated all over again about how difficult it is to get an app onto an iPhone. The App Store has many good things going for it. (I’m not just saying that: I really think that as a…
_I did it, and I did it fast! _
Assumed audience: People interested in endurance running (or endurance sports more generally), or who just like to hear what I am up to as a runner.
I ran the Boston Marathon yesterday! It went great! Apparently my body likes sea level and going downhill! The race went fast on multiple levels.
It was a blur of cheering and…
And a requisite aside about large language models.
Assumed audience: Software developers interested in the long-term health of their codebases.
There comes a point when you first notice that a given technical choice is not working particularly well. Maybe it is within minutes of making it; maybe it takes months or years to show up as a problem. When it happens, you should…
_We took a family ski trip and it provoked no little astonishment._
These past two days, my family and I went skiing at Loveland Ski Area in central Colorado, a few hours from our home. My daughters — one in particular! — have been begging to go for a few years, and we finally made it work schedule-wise and financially this year. It was a great trip, and I came away from it thinking about just…
