lesser daemon (Page 23)

20

Dec

LLMs and The Trap of Frictionless Design

A lot of friends who teach have commented on a trend that's accelerated since the pandemic: students don't know what a filesystem is anymore. This is, as you might imagine, a fairly difficult stumbling block when you're trying to teach people to Do Computer. The students entering college over the past few years are, by no coincidence, the first generation to grow up with smartphones. For a lot of them, they cannot remember a time before their smartphone was a part of their daily life.

I got my first iPhone when I was about 17. For better or worse, as

5 min read

15

Sep

context prolapse

(Thank you to my friend jeremy for coming up with the title joke. It's a good one.)

Lately I have often found myself wondering what the fuck anyone is talking about. This is not particularly abnormal for me as a pretty dumb guy all around but recently it seems to be more of an external phenomenon and less of a personal failing. I was reading a blog post by dante douglas yesterday about the death of the mainstream internet, which I generally agree with, but I think it helped solidify some stuff for me about social media and why I

4 min read

26

Jul

Summer '24 Update

I haven't updated this blog in seven months! I feel like a real personal blogger now that I've abandoned my blog for an extended period of time. I spent spring of this year extraordinarily busy due to an excess of unexpected crises both professional and personal, but have made it through them unscathed. It was a reminder that sometimes, in your adult life, you just have to deal with a bunch of bullshit that's out of your control. To be honest, in some ways it was nice to be, for once, fully assured that none of the things that were

4 min read

07

Dec

Fall/Winter 2023: Loops and Stepping Back

It's been a while since my last update, but I think mostly for good reasons. I've taken on a bit more of a management/coordination role in my day-to-day work, which has been surprisingly rewarding but cut into my free time. In that free time, I've been trying to actually live what I believe, in terms of trying to, I don't know, actually enjoy my life. This has, thus far, meant spending less time trying to do things for anyone's sake but my own or my loved ones.

Especially in light of an ongoing genocide and the continued failure of

4 min read

14

Sep

Loop Study 000: The Loop

Tomorrow I'm embarking on my fourth hundred day project - a 100-day-straight practice of iterating on an idea, practice, piece of software, etc. Previously I've done:

100 Days of Three.js
100 Days of Website
100 Days of Banjo (not shared publicly anywhere because I am still not very good at banjo)

The hundred days framework works well for me. I do well with structure and consistent deadlines, and "I have to do this every day" is an extremely simple and effective way of creating them. So far I've only missed two days out of three hundred (not counting a

5 min read