Ben's Website

As I write President Trump and NATO Secretary Rutte have announced a framework of a deal on Greenland, which makes it a fun time to step back and think more broadly.

Obligatory XKCD 1597 Git's dueling roles # Many are aware of git's tedious CLI, complex footguns, and other warts, but as a mostly-solo dev, what most annoys me is its orientation to code review rather than writing.

I was reading this article which mentions review-buying and ended up re-reading my post on "If I Were eBay" and had some additional thoughts.

Here are some highlights from a book I recently read.

Here are some highlights from a book I recently read.

Here are some highlights from a book I recently read.

With the recent launch of Google Gemini, much is being written about whether and how LLM AIs, like ChatGPT, will disrupt Google's search advertising business, and how Google will respond to that threat.

Here are some thoughts from the Reindustrialize conference: Industry is incredible.

Isn't it weird that massively scalable software relies on legalities and paper to look after itself, instead of...software?

Post-scarcity is often talked about in utopian terms.

Here are some highlights from a book I recently read.

Many contend that we are (or recently were) in the Information Age, by which they mean that ours is marked by the manipulation and use of Information in its various forms.

Does US freight rail need to improve?

Here's a quick post on a garbage bin transporter I made for my parents to help them transport their bins down their gravel driveway.

The Heroic Age of American Invention, 1961, by L.

How precision engineers created the modern world.

I've maintained that the real danger in digital privacy is when external actors know more about you than you realize you have revealed.

I think there's a natural opportunity to use connected cameras to improve communities, using the form factors pioneered by Ring, Nest, and Wyze but with a business model designed to guarantee local control and increase trust.

Writing is a timeless skill, our least-constraining technology for fixing and communicating thought.

I was glad to discover Havit's line of low(er)-profile mechanical keyboards, sating, for now, my desire for a flat keyboard with fast and clear tactile feedback.

"The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" by Richard Hamming, 1996.

Efficient markets are a choice!

Here are some highlights from a book I recently read.

Here are some highlights from a book I read recently.

In this post I want to write out some of my motivation for continuing to write a personal website, particularly given the ongoing developments in social media and the Substack newsletter trend.

I've found it increasingly frustrating to write posts with Wordpress' Gutenberg editor, annoyed by its slow and overly simple interface and the insertion of ever more layers of complexity between me and readers.

Almost from its start, Google Search has been regarded as best-in-class, delivering more relevant results to both general and specific queries than competitors.

Last fall I started getting a strong vibe that 2020 would be a transformative year.

I just shared some thoughts about the Sonos debacle and, were this an isolated incident, it's possible Sonos or another manufacturer could survive in this decision.

Apple's resistance to standardized cellphone charging is disappointing and discouraging: Apple doesn't want to be prevented from engineering its own, ever smaller connectors for ever rounder rectangles.

I've followed the Sonos planned obsolescence drama with interest.

Given the end-to-end encryption of https, 3rd party transport middle men can't determine what a user is doing without deep packet inspection.

'Fresh box for baking!'....

Seriously.

After my PhD I left UW-Madison for Prof.

The first way to view the ongoing struggles of department stores like Macy's, JC Penny, Yonkers, and others is by likening them to their internet adversaries.

A machine to help us communicate... # The last time I had free nights and weekends, 2011, our country was growing predictably chipper over the coming election, so I spent some of that free time considering debaterdebator.

Here's one of many articles describing the challenge of maintaining personal privacy amidst the spread of data brokers http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article166488597.html The core and often unacknowledged challenge

When I first saw the headline "India's first solar-powered train makes its debut," I envisioned something that actually grappled with their substantial energy requirements and somehow leveraged their uniquely distributed infrastructure.

As today's Day of Action on net neutrality draws to a close, I want to post a couple of thoughts from my FCC comment here.

This past Monday I completed my PhD in Mechanical Engineering, bringing to a close my years as a student and my time at UW-Madison.

TLDR: Patentese values superficial bets on the future of technology and society, to the detriment of technology and society.

I'm testing Simbody for mechanical system modeling, here are some quick notes.

I gave my prelim presentation this past January, recapping my work with Prof.

For any given product, it is always interesting to see which aspects are improved and which languish.

Reproduced from our lab post In recent years, minimally-invasive surgical systems based on flexible robotic manipulators have met with success.

I enjoy biking into Engineering every day and though not much of a problem today, the summer solstice, I like to see and be seen throughout the darker times.

I recapped my presentation at the 2015 IEEE ICRA conference over at the Robotics and Intelligent Systems website...reproduced below.

See my post at the Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab for a recap of my presentation at IEEE IROS 2014...reproduced below.

PDFs are a staple of academia and industry, but they're neigh-intolerable without the following: Foxit Reader - I've used Foxit for years; it's plain better than Adobe, allowing all sorts of commenting, highlighting, and manipulation tools that Adobe rest…