Alex W.'s Blog

Tl;dr: Coway’s Airmega 200M has a CFM of ~100 CFM on speed 2 vs. ~250 CFM on speed 3.

We introduced a “confidence scale”, a new form of communication shorthand at my company several months ago.

I put it in a safe spot. -- a phrase my mom would always say when she’d lost something.

situational-awareness.ai Situational Awareness is submarine marketing so Ilya can raise a fat round for SSI.

I am severely lactose intolerant, so I strictly avoid lactose in my diet.

Thesis: AI companions will be mainstays in human life.

Summary Altruist’s1 bundled custodian + platform software model presents an existential threat to Schwab & Fidelity’s ~$5T AUM hold on the independent RIA market.

Resources Of the 100s of articles/podcasts/books I’ve read, these are the best concentrations of healthcare knowledge that I’ve come across: EconTalk | Podcast | Vivian Lee: The Long Fix - overview of hospital procedure pricing and broken market incentives

Across the startups I’ve been at I’ve seen early employees struggle to know what to talk about with C-suite executives in 1:1s (one-on-ones).

I use a program called Wakatime to track my IDE usage.

As of December 2022, I’ve got 34 houseplants1 in my 14’ x 14’ apartment in Manhattan.

On Wednesday morning I got a call from Scott Xiao, Luminopia’s current CEO, letting me know that we’d finally done it: Luminopia had an approved medical device. 5 years ago when we had our first face-to-face with the FDA, Scott had forgotten his Canadian…

from typings import Generator, Iterable, TypeVar ChunkT = TypeVar("ChunkT") def chunks( iterable: Iterable[ChunkT], size: int ) -> Generator[Iterable[ChunkT], None, None]: """ Break *iterable* into lists of length *n*: >>> list(chunked([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6],…

Several key pieces in Pinwheel’s tech stack are: Python (CPython) - Language + Runtime FastAPI - Web framework Pydantic - I/O data object validation Starlette - ASGI framework uvicorn - Event loop ASGI server SQLAlchemy - ORM psycopg2 - Postgres DB driver…

Other great big tree websites: Gathering Growth Foundation Maui, HI - April 21, 2021 Lahaina Banyan Court.

Learning + References Accessibility a11y project | collection of accessibility resources, including a checklist to audit websites Algorithms Algorithms by Jeff Erickson Android ADB Commands — Part III - ProAndroidDev Architecture Realworld implementation…

This is hilarious.

Testing out WebAssembly features that are only present in webassembly/spec’s reference interpreter is hard because the interpreter is written in OCaml and can’t be run on the web.

I was unable to get Jupyter to report any logs from my custom kernel, even when I was running jupyter labs --debug.

Moving colors from one iTerm profile to another is difficult because all the color configurations appear as separate, un-namespaced entries in the profile’s exported JSON.

Some packages open up a terminal UI to ask you several questions after you install them with dpkg -i.

There is an incantation to get a translucent status bar in a PWA (progressive web app) on iOS, e.g. the first image vs. the second image: Though the screenshots omit it, this is particularly relevant to phones that have “The Notch” (see CSS-Tricks).

homebrew-core requires binaries to be compiled from source, you can’t just download an asset from GitHub Releases and then use the bin.install command to setup the binary.

In Windows, subprocess.run uses CreateProcess (docs) which (appears to?)

What is “FOUND.000”?

The Harvard Alumni Association offers a forwarding-only email address for alums at custom_username@alumni.harvard.edu (anyone with a Harvard Key can access it here).

The Get contents of URL action in iOS Shortcuts conveniently has a JSON payload type.

This approach ignores everything by default and then whitelists what’s permitted.

This is from a note I wrote in 2017, there is likely a better way to do this in modern Docker.

Calling got.stream(url, options?)

The sindresorhus/got documentation provides a hooks based approach which can be found at Advanced Creation: Limiting Download & Upload Size.

I was trying to figure out why my RSS feed was showing the wrong article times in Feedly, even though they looked right in other RSS readers.

In fp-ts a Task is just a a lazy Promise, eg. () => Promise, since Promises are eager normally (ie. they execute their computation when created, not when await-ed on).

Google Sheets has a bunch of wonderful database features: built-in version control, collaborative management, a great table browser, powerful data processing functions, and basic visualization tools.

’twas a virtual graduation thanks to COVID.

I submitted my undergraduate thesis for Honors in Computer Science at Harvard on “WebAssembly as a Multi-Language Platform”.

As reliable as Google is, it can be worrisome to depend solely on one company to maintain all of your data.

npm1 is the de-facto package manager for JavaScript code.

With NPM’s recent acquisition of ^Lift Security and the Node Security Platform, as well as the release of their package-lock.json and the npm ci command for reliable CI installations, it seemed like a compelling time to reavaluate the value proposition of…

Co-founder and CTO at Luminopia, where we were working to cure lazy eye (the team’s working on even more now!).

Woohoo!

Following the spirit of The Second Quarter of 2015: Items, I’m going to also post an infrequent summary of the projects that I have been working on and other transgressions that have occurred as of late.

I was inspired by a website I stumbled across on called My Faults My Own by Ross Rheingans-Yoo in which he keeps a live post for each month where he lists worthwhile articles he’s read and other things he “would like to signal-boost, but won’t take the ti…

I just did a minor revamp of the TEC Club homepage in order to include a live, JS generated network of floating dots.

I was reading the solution to a problem on Stackoverflow when this thread caught my eye http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/35569/tweetable-mathematical-art/.

More than once I’ve come across a situation where I’ve needed to download a set of files from a website, all on the same page, and all with a similar HTML markup pattern.

Intro What’s the best looking smartphone?