Jeff Kaufman's Writing

Several months ago I wrote a program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped.

Cross-posted from my SecureBio Notebook.

In It May Be Possible to Improvise A High Grade Bioshelter, Adin Richards discusses the possibility of improvising defenses against an environmental threat such as mirror bacteria.

I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up.

When I look at why I expect the world to change a lot in the next few years, and why other people expect slower changes, I think a big component is disagreement on the extent to which AI will affect non-computer work.

We should end net metering, including for existing solar installations, and compensate people with a one-time subsidy for battery purchase.

The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking.

The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking.

David asked a great question on my solar battery system post: why buy a small battery just for emergencies when electric cars have a large battery you can also use for other things?

Like most houses with solar, our house is capable of generating a lot of power, and it's basically useless [1] in a disaster.

I'm pretty worried about how AI might change the world a lot very soon.

My program that uses whistling to control a synthesizer is now available in the Mac App Store: It's free, no ads, and open source.

I've had several conversations with people over the last few weeks that have highlighted how far apart my view of the near future is from many people I talk to.

The standard recommendation on time out duration is one minute per year of age, often capping out at 5min.

For the last twenty years I haven't paid much attention to my State Senate race: Pat Jehlen hasn't had a close race since she won the seat in 2005.

In May 2025 I met Yo Shavit, who was working on national security policy at OpenAI and was thinking about how to prepare for a future in which models could seriously assist attackers in creating pandemics.

In raising my three kids I think a lot about how to cultivate independence.

In 2015 I made a little webapp that would use the NextBus API to show predictions for the MBTA: A few years later they moved from NextBus to their own API, and it stopped working.

A few days ago I took the kids to Canobie Lake amusement park.

When you have a lot of browser tabs open it can be very hard to tell them apart, especially if they're from the same site: Since monitors are wide and websites are tall, we should very clearly put tabs on the side in a vertical stack.

White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep.

Leading up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival the organizers asked Dudley Laufman to put together a band.

Someone submitted my musical multitasking post to Hacker News, where Rochus Keller saw it and left some fascinating comments.

Dudley Laufman passed away last week at the age of 95.

Our kids like listening to music on their tablets, and we decided it's worth it to pay some money so they can make playlists and don't need to listen to ads.

I like to play multiple instruments at once, and really enjoy how this lets me create a fuller musical picture.

I've been reading a lot of older writing, trying to understand how and why contra dance ended up with a strong and near-exclusive live music tradition when many other dance forms switched over to recorded music.

I've lately ended up calling a bunch of parties and I've been happy with calling mostly longways whole-set dances.

In 1992 Tony Parkes, one of the best-known New England contra dance callers, wrote a book: Contra Dance Calling: a Basic Text.

EDIT 2026-07-08: Gizmohub, despite the announcements, did not stop working on the 7th.

Choux pastry (the kind used in eclairs and creampuffs) is very picky, and depends heavily on the chemical properties of eggs.

I keep my recipies on my website, and like most of my website it grew over time instead of being designed.

Our family is on vacation in North Carolina for a week, spending some time at a pool, and they're playing a (weirdly short) loop of music.

I've been thinking more about disaster preparedness recently, and an important piece of that is food.

A contra dance organizer in another city wrote to me a while ago because they were stuck: the dance was in a few days and they didn't have anyone to run sound.

Daniel Drucker pointed me at a fun bug in Google's calculator: the parsec is wrong when you do math on it.