Dispatches

I’m personally skeptical that LLMs provide enough benefit to outweigh their potential harm, and so I deeply appreciate those who are attempting to make them work without relying on pixie dust.

I’m in the Netherlands currently so I’ve had lots of meetings while fighting jet lag. This week in Daniel: Finished reading How To Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix. It was an excellent novel about generational trauma, grief, and evil puppets.

This week in Daniel was quite busy: Lots of work stuff to do, so that kept me running. Setup a Github Action workflow to automatically deploy this site whenever I push a change, and then to also do automated deployments every 15 minutes for any content that I had scheduled in advance by using a future date.

I’m still alive! I’ve recovered from COVID, and back in the saddle. This week in Daniel: Did a bunch of catching up on work stuff since I was out sick most of last week.

This week in Daniel: I got COVID. It sucks. Really hard. That’s it.

This week in Daniel: After a rough first week of jetlag, finally caught up on sleep. Visited Escher in the Palace, a museum dedicated to the work of M.C. Escher, which resides in the former winter palace of Queen Emma of the Netherlands.

I’m a big fan of using direnv to set project-specific env variables. And at one point I was using it to automatically activate my poetry virtualenv whenever I entered the directory per this function.

While looking at my Github news feed today, I spotted an app via one of Jeff Triplett’s stars. The app is Sloth by Sveinbjorn Thordarson, and it provides a GUI frontend for lsof that can quickly show you which processes are interacting with various files, directories, IP sockets, or Unix sockets.

Hi there. It’s been a while. I had a whirlwind of activity over the last few weeks, both on the work and podcasting front, and quite frankly getting around to writing up these update posts was beyond my available bandwidth.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve recently come down with a case of the mind-virus that is Obsidian. I was infected by the dastardly Daniel Rodriguez, whose dark exploits are well known.

Another week of work in the Netherlands is wrapping up. I’m publishing today’s weeknotes a bit early as I’m about to board a flight on my way back the US, and I strongly doubt I’ll have the energy to write this up after two flights and a long layover at LHR.

This week I’ve been in the Netherlands for work, so between jet lag and meetings I’ve been pretty wiped out. Still, I’ve managed to get a few non-work related things done as well.

This is one of those silly little things that I always feel like I’m the last to learn. Admittedly, when I’m working with hidden files, I’m usually on the command line or in a text editor that already shows them.

I try to post cool new arrivals from Kickstarters and pre-orders when they arrive, usually to my Mastodon account,1 but with the business at work and with the podcast it slipped past me.

Back in the saddle, baby.

The new version of the license is “over 9,000 words long”, and, well, it sounds pretty bad.

This is a great profile from the Washington Post on Devon Henry, the contractor who took on the city of Richmond’s contract to remove their confederate statues, and the challenges he faced along the way.

I feel like “migrating to a different static site generator” is the new “installing a new Linux distro.” It’s something nerds do for almost no reason besides curiosity, boredom, and perhaps no small amount of masochism.

Some great advice from Chuck Wendig to start your new year. As a writer, everyone wants a piece of you. They treat the act of writing as an unserious endeavor, failing to see it as the result of the three corners of art, craft and work.

Writing for Wired, Vijith Assar raises some excellent points on how bad actors with capital are the most dangerous threat to any system. Capital can kill code. Capital can kill anything.