Jason A. Heppler

If there’s one thing I’ve come to appreciate about generative AI, it’s the ability to automate routine things.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is a persistent critique—one I’ve expressed myself and think is completely valid—that code generated by Claude or Codex immediately becomes technical debt.

I wanted to jot down my current workflow for this website.

My website just went through a big re-design and I wanted to document some of the changes here.

Richard Beard, “Computers Can’t Surprise”: To escape the dead man’s handle of cliché, readers live in hope for organic associations, speculative leaps and surprise inferences.

I’m in the process of slowly trying to inventory my library using LibraryThing (where I’ve been for twenty years!).

Dave Friedman: Two frontier AIs debated a strategic question and quickly slid from sensible analysis into confident, theatrical nonsense.

A little over a year ago I wrote about how I use Obsidian for historical research.

Amelia Wattenberger: We’ve been successfully removing all friction from our apps – think about how effortless it is to scroll through a social feed.

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.

Every year we have a rotation of Christmas movies that we watch this time of year.

Aldo Leopold: What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works.

With the weather starting to warm up in Nebraska, I’ve had a chance to start coming to terms with the Farmall H restoration project.

Oliver Burkeman: [V]arious acquaintances – and me too, in some ways – started doing what I called “living inside the news.”

A number of years ago I founded, along with Brandon Locke and Sarah Melton, Endangered Data Week, designed to highlight threats to publicly available data as well as train folks to work with data.

Jason Koebler: If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by…

When it comes to types of work I do, I like a certain amount of friction—what Alan Jacobs calls “constructive friction.”

Charlie Stross: The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable.

Jason Koebler: If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by…

For the past few weeks I’ve been using the Zen browser, a fork of Firefox that comes with some preference changes and nice interface updates: the vertical tabs are really nice, as is the workspace management.