Monica Dinculescu

I keep forgetting to write a post.

An article from 2015 is making the rounds again because the internet has no new ideas and neither do we, that says Shakespeare (yes that Shakespeare) was quite possibly absolutely baked out of his mind the entire time.

A Ritz-Carlton hotel in California closed an entrance after a hummingbird made a nest on a door handle and, amidst all the daily ambient horror of simply being a person with a phone in 2026, it is nice to be reminded of the kinds of small lives we still a…

There’s something good going on with music these days.

Thinking about resuscitating regular written updates.

I have 4 (rounded up) beefs with language-y AI bots that have resulted in me sort of avoiding them altogether: They have the personality of a middle manager who writes Google Docs all day that nobody wants to read They’re reallllly good at guessing but not

Wow, long time, no posts!

(This is a post mostly about art but I swear there’s a moral in here for all you tech readers, or at least a discounted therapy lesson.)

A couple of months ago my friend Jana helped organize HashiConf Europe, and asked me to work on generating custom artwork for each of their speakers.

It’s been one week since you looked at me 8 months since I’ve been writing these weekly notes, and I think I’m going to take a small break from it.

On Monday Frances took me to the teamLab exhibition at the Asian Art museum.

First off: I think I’ve done a bad numbering in some of these recent weeks, because I wanted to write about what I actually did on July 13/14, but apparently I’ve already counted that week?

So here’s what happened: I went on vacation and because I’m leaning so hard into this funemployment life I didn’t open my laptop once.

The last time I changed something big on my site was 3+ years ago.

It’s true, I did.

Weird flex: been making cheese fondue for lunch because I make the rules here.

Trying out titles because I have enough weeks that even I can’t tell them apart and I lived through them.

Chopped off 10 inches of my hair and I feel unstoppable.

normalcy resumes chez nous.

Ya look at that?

One of my favourite kinds of art to make involves taking nature and seeing it as simple shapes.

I’ve been skipping weeks because a) literally nothing happens and b) I don’t have a good system to update these notes.

First week of being funemployed!

Let’s not bury the lede: I quit my job.

Calico came out and I finished it in 2 days!

Trying something really revolutionary this week which is “doing nothing”.

It’s been another week of people being shit, innit?

I took the whole week off because I was very tired of life.

This week was entirely consumed by the fact that I opened an online store to sell generative “art” prints.

I got deep into geocaching, friends.

I skipped week 5 because all I did in the panna cotta was watch 3 seasons of “how to get away with murder”.

Tahoe (where we currently live during this pannie-d) got a ton of snow this week, so I’ve been in winter mode.

Monday was off which ruined any routine I had formed.

Still into soups: I made a bomb cream of broccoli.

I’ve been thinking for a while about setting this up, and this week seems as good as any.

My one policy about blogging is “write the blog post you wanted to find in the search results”.

Back in the day when I worked on Polymer I got used to relying on a bunch of useful CSS classes that at the time we called iron-flex-layout.

My job nowadays involves a lot of music and JavaScript.

One of the first things you stumble on when you start using TensorFlow.js is that sometimes you need your data as a Tensor, and sometimes you need it as a JavaScript number.

Inktober is a project where artists make an ink drawing every day for the whole month of October.

Magenta.js is a JavaScript library that helps you generate art and music on the web.

Machine Learning (ML) is the dope new thing that everyone’s talking about, because it’s really good at learning from data so that it can predict similar things in the future.

When you have a float CSS property on a box (with a value different than none), this box must be laid out according to the float positioning algorithm.

Before I wrote the JavaScripts, I got a master’s in AI (almost a decade ago 🙀), and wrote a thesis on a weird and new area in Reinforcement Learning.

So testing, right?

You can tell I hate writing year in reviews because this one is really, really late.

Updated May 18, 2020 (get it?

There’s this thing I hate about the modern web which is that sites are rarely one giant html file filled with goodies.

Shadow DOM is a fairly recent-ish spec that gives you DOM tree encapsulation – it’s one of the superhero lions in the Voltron of specs called “Web Components”.

The Meownica Web App Workflow™ goes like this: Write bad code until the file is too long Refactor that code into some web components Repeat steps 1-2 until done Realize you forgot to do the PWA dance, so your app is scoring 45 on Lighthouse Make it into a…