I hate the idea of networking. It feels disingenuous to me. I spend more time on \r\LinkedInLunatics than actual LinkedIn. However, I know that a solid professional network is a great asset, and after over eight years as a professional developer, I only know a small handful of people who work in my area of expertise. So, I made it a goal to attend at least one developer/tech conference this year. After some research, I learned about a small, local conference, which felt perfect for my first at...

I wasn't sure if I even wanted to write about this. It feels like I'm bragging by acknowledging it, but it was so exciting that I have to talk about it. Yesterday, I woke up to Monday's article about OSM, Rust, and WASM at the top of Hacker News. Here's how I found out: I woke up early and started poking around on my phone and scrolling through Hacker News on Glider , which is a fantastic FOSS app for HN that I highly recommend. At that point, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Then...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 257  | Feb 21, 2024 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/measuringacademics.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/measuringacademics.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/measuringacademics.html

I'm excited to share that I am one of the speakers for this year's All Day Hey ! I first attended All Day Hey in 2018, and it has since been one of my favourite conferences. Well, technically, this is a comeback to the stage since I did give a lightning talk at All Day Hey back in 2019. So, five years later (I can't believe it has been five years), I will be back, but this time to talk in a longer format about my new experiments with the Web Speech API and thinking a bit more about voice inte...

Subscribe to Taylor's Town Hall via email . I'll be visiting the San Francisco Bay Area next week, from Tuesday (Feb 20) to Friday (Feb 23)! Email me at hello@taylor.town if you'd like to grab coffee, resist authority, or play some pinball. Meanwhile, I've fallen into a research rabbit-hole surrounding Samuel Colt and the birth of the revolver. I know nothing about guns, so feel free to email me with insights and reading recommendations. Writings Clean your codebase with bas...

Hello! I always wish that command line tools came with data about how popular their various options are, like: “basically nobody uses this one” “80% of people use this, probably take a look” “this one has 6 possible values but people only really use these 2 in practice” So I asked about people’s favourite git config options on Mastodon : what are your favourite git config options to set? Right now I only really have git config push.autosetupremote true and gi...

Five-ish things that I loved this week. Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us? (article) I've heard a lot of buzz about the Arc browser this week. As a Linux user, I've mostly ignored it as the Arc browser is currently only available on Apple devices with no roadmap for Linux support. However, as a blogger, this article caught my attention. I didn't realize that one of Arc browser's major features is an AI feature that digests and summarizes pages. Personally, I don't monetize ...

0.0 Context Setting Wednesday, 14 February, 2024, the day after I made lots of pancakes and ate lots of pancakes. Quite a bit today. 1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention 1.1 Context is King Lately, I’ve been thinking about context. Or, I guess, one way is reading the room . The reply management stickers 1 I made the other day went nuts on Bluesky and Mastodon, they vanished comparatively without a trace on Threads. The argument against these stickers -- and it’s one ...

I recently built flashcasts , which delivers spaced-repetition software via podcast feeds. There are plenty of excellent off-the-shelf SRS algorithms out there, but I needed something (1) optional, (2) debuggable, and (3) cheap. Optional Via the website, you can record whether you remembered or forgot each card, and it'll adjust future episodes based on your input. But podcasts are a very "on-the-go" medium, so I needed an algorithm that wouldn't punish you for inconsistent or non...

The edge of a sheet of paper slices through the tip of your finger and blood begins to flow from the wound. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Blood cells rush to the site, clotting, scabbing, healing. You never asked for it, but a few days later your finger is as good as new. It has been said that humans are passengers on Spaceship Earth . This view is too simple. Earth is not a vehicle but a body — the body of a planet-sized being that is developing senses, an intellig...

Last week Google introduced Gemini Pro 1.5 , an enormous upgrade to their Gemini series of AI models. Gemini Pro 1.5 has a 1,000,000 token context size. This is huge - previously that record was held by Claude 2.1 (200,000 tokens) and gpt-4-turbo (128,000 tokens) - though the difference in tokenizer implementations between the models means this isn't a perfectly direct comparison. I've been playing with Gemini Pro 1.5 for a few days, and I think the most exciting feature isn't so much the...

My TODO list is a .txt file on the desktop About six months ago, I finally reached a breaking point: my email-based TODO system stopped working. It was beyond its breaking point for a few years, actually... ever since I my average daily email volume increase from maybe 5-10 'important' emails to deal with to 50+. My email-based TODO system used to go like this: Email myself things I deemed important enough to do the next day Next morning, when I checked my email, knoc...

I sometimes get asked what my process is for researching and writing Substack posts. I always enjoy reading other people’s discussions of their writing process, so I thought it would be worthwhile to explain mine. First, some background. In school I was a competent but unspectacular writer (my verbal SAT score was a full 100 points lower than my math score). Like most millennials, I’ve spent the majority of my life in a sea of text (reading online, writing emails, instant messages, gaming ch...

If you haven't read "The Layoff" yet, you should do so before reading this post. This post is a behind the scenes look at the story and contains spoilers. Or, it's not about AI or even layoffs When I wrote "The Layoff", I was trying to write satire of the tech industry. It's not about AI, layoffs, or even the future when both of those are inevitably combined (let's face it, you know it's gonna happen, I know it's gonna happen, let's hope lawmakers prevent it from happening)...

This post is a work of fiction. All events, persons, companies, and other alignment with observable reality are the product of the author’s imagination and are either purely coincidence or used in a fictitious manner. These serve as backdrops to characters and their actions, which are wholly imaginary. The company Techaro as depicted in these stories , does not exist and is purely a vehicle for satire and storytelling. A dull thud hit James' wrist. Again. And again. He slowly opened...

Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable. Halfway through my third year, I created a device called TinyPilot. It allows users to control their computers remotely. The product quickly caught on, and it’s been my main focus ever since. Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google ...

Cut out everything that's not surprising. -- Derek Sivers Surprise The following equation measures "surprise" : It's easy to estimate the surprise of text files: const rx = /[\s,\]\[\(\)]+/g; const counts = {}; for (const file of Deno.args) for (const x of (await Deno.readTextFile(file)).split(rx)) counts[x] = 1 + counts[x] || 1; const total = Object.values(counts).reduce((a, b) => a + b, 0); let entropy = 0; for (const c of Object.values(counts)) { co...

I love grits. Really, I love corn in all its forms, and grits is one of the best forms. Buttery, cheesy, maybe with a dash of turmeric and pepper (it fights inflammation!) A few months ago, I found this article from TastingTable titled "Elevate The Texture of Grits With A Pinch Of Baking Soda" . I can say, after making a few pots of grits, it totally works. Usually, when I make grits, they end up quite thick, but I'm pretty impatient, so my grits can be more on the al dente side. When I add...

0.0 Context Setting It’s Tuesday, 13 February, 2024 in Portland Oregon and I’m going to have pancakes tonight. I killed one of the goblin leaders by hilariously shoving them into a chasm but now am trying to figure out how to off the other two without bringing down the entire goblin camp on me. 1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention 1.1 Alt Text Okay, usual disclaimer: this is me thinking out loud. Thinking out loud like this means “not really having done any research”. In...

Hello, It's Earendel back for another electric adventure. You got your first look at Fulgora in FFF-398 . (If you haven't read that already please read that first.) Now let's take a look at the new planet's mechanics. Lightning storms Every night on Fulgora brings an immense lightning storm. Lightning hits things at random based on material and height. If you're wandering around in the middle of nowhere expect to get zapped a few times. It can kill you and wreck your stuff ...

Water cooling is overkill for Pi 5 tl;dr : 52Pi and Seeed Studio's water cooling solution for the Raspberry Pi 5 can be fun, and works better than any other solution—but at a steep price, and with a number of annoying quirks. A few months ago, 52Pi reached out and asked if they could send a new water cooling kit they were working on for the Raspberry Pi 5. At the time, the hope was we could figure out a way to get very high overclock with adequate cooling. Unfortunate...

I've been thinking, especially since the recent Spotify layoffs, that I'm due to delete my Spotify account. I haven't paid for it in years, and I have also significantly reduced my usage. The other thing is that I've had this draft for ages and procrastinated on this topic. Luckily, today, I stumbled across this post from Raed explaining their reasonings for deleting their account . I thought, "Yeah, see, I had the same idea but procrastinated on it!". Not anymore!! I have reasons similar t...

I'm working on a revamp of an old project of mine called Line Buddy (github) . It used a now-deprecated API library called themeparks (github) and A-Frame to visually represent the wait times in the Disney World theme parks in 3D. The original project used OpenStreetMap screenshots as the base, with columns representing the wait times. (They're all zero now since this version of the API no longer works.) My plan...

Photographing the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse On April 8, there will be a Total Solar Eclipse covering an large swath of the US, offering hundreds of millions of people the opportunity to witness one of the most spectacular displays of our sun. I wrote two blog posts about the recent 2017 eclipse, as well—check those out: Photographing the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse DIY threaded solar filter For this year, I was considering going all-in on a custom Raspberry-Pi-ba...

0.0 Context Setting Friday, 16 February, 2024 in Portland, Oregon and it is cold. I wanted to make this one short and I could not. I am sorry. Believe me, for this one especially, I am just as disappointed as you, but probably not very surprised. 1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention Going to try to make today a quicker, shorter one. 1.1 Justice in Forensic Algorithms A couple of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have this bill they’re trying to pass, the Justice...

Hello there, Where shall we go today? Welcome to Fulgora You land on an unfamiliar planet, a lifeless and desolate place. The thin air is freezing cold but bone dry. A distant sun twinkles in the dull purple of the sky. Wispy clouds race by as a gale whips up sand that grates against your armour. As you look around, you find yourself in a desert with endlessly snaking dunes of dust-like sand. The dust almost seems to hover as though gravity were overwhelmed...

I recently built a tool to deliver flashcards via podcast feeds . Let me start by saying that I hate SQL. Its verbose, inconsistent syntax feels like bathing in strangers' vomit. Unfortunately, SQL is the best means to get reasonable performance from real-world datasets. Postgres is an unbelievably consistent platform, where I can test all my queries in a live environment and inspect the state of the DB without a separate debugger. Large classes of errors don't exist, thanks to transactio...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 256  | Feb 14, 2024 🚀 ❤️ 🛰   ...

0.0 Context Setting Monday, 12 February 2024 in Portland, Oregon. I started writing this around midday, but didn’t get around to finishing it after dinner. 0.1 Hallway Track News No Hallway Track news yet, but fingers crossed I should have an announcement for Hallway Track 010 this Thursday. Last week’s Hallway Track (009 Infrastructure and Systems with Deb Chachra and Georgina Voss) went down a treat. Here’s what Carl Coryell-Martin Martin had to say: I attended the Hall...