Blog
Thoughts, mostly about technology and philosophy. Sometimes about cats.
Summaries might be LLM generated. Actually, they probably are. Yes, they are definitely all generated by LLM. They're normally okay but I'm not going to take responsiblity for them or anything.
-
"Web Development: The Last Bastion of Online Human Expertise"
Web development is likely one of the last jobs AI can't take because its dependencies constantly shift and break, leaving humans debugging things like why Tailwind CSS suddenly ignored their config.
-
The National Highway System: America's Original Housing Sin
Reading about the housing theory of everything got me thinking about the unexpected role highways play in urban development. Highways allow residents to access services from workers commuting from afar, removing a self-interested push to support local density and transit.
-
I Wish Elon Musk had More Imagination
It seems like a strange use of time for powerful people to focus on firing employees instead of tackling more interesting problems. Even wildly speculative ideas for using vast wealth and influence feel more productive than simple layoffs.
-
Stargate SG-1 was the Last Great Sunday Television Show
Stargate SG-1 was the perfect example of the "Sunday Television Show", a now-rare type of light, episodic TV ideal for lazy afternoons. This format, built for casual viewing, seems to be fading in the era of streaming.
-
On Unproductive Work and the US Economy
Beyond manufacturing, I see a huge part of the US economy engaged in zero-sum games, particularly in areas like healthcare and law, which consume vast resources but create little net societal value.
-
On Variance as an Explanation for Dominance in Certain Fields
Sparked by electrocution stats involving fractal wood burning, I started wondering if variance in distributions could explain large outlier differences between groups. This led to thinking about how we perceive populations by focusing on means rather than the full distribution shape.
-
Anki/Jisho Chrome Extension
Building a Chrome extension to look up text on Jisho and create Anki cards was remarkably easy using an LLM; it even handled adding Netflix subtitle support with minimal cleanup.
-
LLM Generated Flashcards
Memorizing vocabulary is a challenge in language learning. I built a small tool using LLMs to generate flashcards or Anki decks with context sentences and translations to help.
-
Noteomatic - Beautiful Understandable Handwritten Notes
I built a tool called Notematic to convert my handwritten journal pages into digital HTML or Markdown using LLMs, finally merging my physical and digital notes. Now I can easily integrate scanned notes into my other digital workflows.