Ian Whitlock on silly business

Background Alibaba released the 3.6 35B version of the Qwen family of models about a week and a half ago, and I pulled it down with Ollama1 to try out.

I accepted a new job offer, and my last day at Cloudflare was two weeks ago.

I want to quickly address, with laser focus, a most pertinent part of the LLM discussion: I have no interest, and I shall never have any interest, in using text generation for the writing on this blog.

Literate programming is the idea that code should be intermingled with prose such that an uninformed reader could read a code base as a narrative, and come away with an understanding of how it works and what it does.

My day jobs have entailed occasional interaction with Kubernetes for a long time, and I've been an accidental participant in the "hobby" of self-hosting1 since high school so I have been meaning to incorporate k3s somewhere in my stack for a long time to…

Flyspell provides a modern spell-checking interface for Emacs that includes a mode flyspell-mode for text modes, checking everything in the buffer, and flyspell-prog-mode which only checks comments and other places where prose is expected, including in Org

A hot new VCS called jujutsu (jj) is all the rage right now, and I want to be excited about it because it has some interesting new features like undo.

I like to watch broadcast TV from time to time, as it is free and local, but I'm used to the usual affordances of the streaming era like the ability to pause or watch on any of my devices, and to be able to record TV, so when my wife and I started to watch

Recently on The Orange Site and elsewhere I have seen various discussions regarding self-hosting a git "forge" such as Gitea, Gogs, or Gitlab, or some other alternative that integrates with ActivityPub or atproto etc.

I deal with a number of long-running projects in my day-to-day, so I like to keep an Org Mode file for each project, and whenever I work on a project I add a headline to the Org file with the day's date and a little explanation of what was going on, eg *…

Here's some evidence:

A small observation about Large Language Models (LLMs), human psychology, and some common pricing models for the APIs of hosted models: LLMs induce Gell-Mann Amnesia1 when asked about any topic about which the inquirer is unfamiliar.

You Can Add Custom Buttons To Your Browser That Do Whatever "Bookmarklets" are an underutilized and frankly little-known feature in Chrome and Firefox (and probably most other browsers too) that allows you to create a bookmark that contains a little bit of

There's an old idea, one which never took hold in any serious way, called "literate programming," that nonetheless has been discussed at some length over the years.

Many operating systems, including most Linux distributions, configure devices to have a hostname like device.local accessible on the local network.

It turns out that git worktree makes working on your Emacs config much more convenient.

I had heard of GPG/PGP (same thing, as it turns out) for years and I heard it was hard and unpopular so I never investigated it independently.

A few weeks ago I was fiddling around with my neglected Zsh setup, wherein some years ago I had installed a theme through the Zim framework – one of many open source frameworks that allows you to quickly "supercharge" a shell like Zsh which has a lot of l…

I knew this day would come.

Reared in the age of GitHub, I am ashamed to admit that it took me too long to realize that you do not need a "forge" like GitHub or GitLab in order to be able to git push to a repository and in fact you don't need to do any extra configuration at all, if…

Today I built out the beginnings of this blog.

Prologue This is my Emacs configuration.