Brent

Brent

18
Jan

Checking Disk Space On An Ubuntu Server

du -cha --max-depth=1 / | grep -E "M|G"

From this StackOverflow answer - ncdu is also a good tool for this, allegedly, but its output didn't really seem to have any correlation to the actual folders on my server. I feel like I have to do this once a year because of storage issues and always forget, so hopefully this serves as a reminder going forward. Turns out snap is the culprit, as per usual. In a fit of pique I uninstalled snap and all of its files, and lo and behold I'm able to finally update Ghost!

18
Jan

Setting Up Tags and Post Previews In A Ghost Theme

After thinking through the appeal of boring technology yesterday, I've decided to stick with Ghost for my blog for the time being and actually, you know, put in the time to learn its theming system rather than start from scratch with something new. Ghost meets a lot of my criteria for my personal site: open source, self-hosted, and a pretty decent existing ecosystem. I'm not sure if it's quite at the level of boring that something like Django or Postgres is - things tend to break pretty badly whenever I update it, still - but it's been around for a

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4 min read
17
Jan

1/17 Link Roundup & Screenshot Dump

I've reached day 3 of my hundred days and I'm already out of ideas. A new record! However, I accounted for this inevitability in the goal I set for myself, which was just to "write something on my blog every day". I'd like to add some functionality to the blog to display shorter posts in the main feed - things like til or links with short notes attached - which will then basically allow me to do a hundred days of tweets but on my personal site if I so wish. In the meantime, though, I'm stuck with the blog

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6 min read
16
Jan

In Search Of A Second Brain

For most of the past decade, I have been pretty good about keeping notes. This is maybe the one thing I can consistently take pride in: no matter what else I'm dealing with, I tend to keep a journal and write things down. The format this takes over the years, however, has changed a lot.

A timeline of my private and public note-taking practice.

A brief summary: up until I started grad school in 2018, I kept my journal, to-do lists, writing drafts, and so on in Microsoft OneNote, taking paper notes in the context of classes because I felt

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5 min read
15
Jan

AI Inferno: Making A Reverse Roko's Basilisk With AI Agents

For those who weren't in some of the more toxic corners of the tech internet in the late aughts and early teens, Roko's Basilisk is an old thought experiment to the effect that, should a benevolent superintelligence come to exist in the future, it would be incentivized to punish people who were aware of its possibility and did nothing to help it come to exist. This is the type of pretty dumb thought experiment that really hits for a certain type of Online Tech Guy: it originated on LessWrong (more like More Wrong imo), made its way across the Slatestar

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11 min read