liquidbrain

I ran out of time to write a good blog post for September, so I wrote a quick blog post for September.

If you live in DC, and any of the events I mention look interesting, please feel free to reach out!

Over the past year of writing professionally, I have learned when to write dumber.

Everyone needs a ramen food: quick, mindless, cheap, and tasty.

I recently went on a ten day trip to China where I didn’t take my computer.1 I still wanted the ability to take notes quickly, so I bought a Bluetooth keyboard to use with my phone.

To my knowledge, I've set three concrete goals for myself about how much effort I am going to put into this blog: In A promise to myself, I made an (implicit) promise to write a blog post every month, in perpetuity.

Growing up, I was one of those kids who watched every YouTube video I could at double speed.

Note: I have a goal of writing a blog post every month, basically for forever.

There's an idea that success requires constant effort applied over decades.

TLDR: you should leave a comment, either spam or not, so I can test how well this system works!

I was a ten year old kid, reading the middle of the fourth book of the second series of Percy Jackson when I abruptly lost interest in the plot.

When I started as a full time journalist at Understanding AI, I thought I would want to write less in my free time.

Admire the following opening sentence: High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.

Note: I wrote this a couple of days ago.

[Note: I got this idea from a Reddit post.

I've been researching the privacy implications of AI recently (in a word: scary), and as a result, I've been reading a lot of terms and conditions of different services.

The year is half-over.

[Note: this is by no means a new idea: I learned it from Rohan Subramani.]

2025 has been my best year yet for journaling.

Previously: An Introduction to Correspondence Texting In my previous post, I divided texts into three buckets: (1) respond immediately, (2) respond within 24 hours, and (3) respond when convenient.

See also: Non-correspondence texting I hit a milestone today.

[Note: this is written in a op-ed style to be a writing sample.]

I.

Continuing the recent spate of AI-related posts ...

TL;DR: Download the shortcut here and follow the instructions in the appendix to get yourself set up.

In my previous past, I talked about using LLMs to learn more about coding1.

N.B.: I wrote this while at the Recurse Center (recurse.com) back in October, but for some reason did not post it.

One of the minor marvels of sunsets is that phone cameras cannot capture them well.

I often want to change or build a habit.

Note: this is most appropriate for the Northeast corridor, as this is what I am used to.

It isn't. 1.

In my previous post, I talked about using Wikipedia to expand my taste in music by repeatedly using the random page function until I hit a page about music.

In the internet age, how does one find new music?

Around a week ago, I made a typing test as part of a workshop on bad art.

Like many people looking for a CS job, I've had to do LeetCode style assessments, and have practiced by solving problems on leetcode.com.

1.

There's a tradition at RC that at the end of a batch, one should write a return statement to reflect on their experience.

I recently learned about python decorators from Dan Bader's excellent resource Python Tricks the Book.

My partner and I both have things we'd like to do every day.

One central difficulty with my present journaling habit is that it is brittle.

1.

Today, I learned about the Boyer–Moore majority vote algorithm - Wikipedia when completing a LeetCode problem about trying to find an element of a list which appears over half the time.

0.

Measuring Jailbreaks and Adversarial Robustness on a Toy Problem: Fixed Syntax Abstract/tl;dr Jailbreaks occur when Large Language Models are successfully prompted to generate harmful responses to questions, where they otherwise would not.