Recently: Cycling and Autumn

I still use Bandcamp almost exclusively to buy music, and keep a big library of MP3s. The downside is that this marks me as a weirdo, but otherwise it’s great and has been working well for me. Since I last wrote about it, Bandcamp was acquired by Epic games (?) and then acquired from them by Songtradr, and its employees are trying to get...

Reading It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. Ted Chiang’s article about AI in the New Yorker started slow for me, and having read a lot of...

Reading Since last time, I read a few books: Sea of Tranquility, a book club book, Doppelganger, the new Naomi Klein, and Manywhere, a collection of short stories. Sea of Tranquility was very digestible sci-fi. I haven’t read that much sci-fi overall, so it’s probably inaccurate to say that it’s spiritually similar to Ted Chiang, but that’s the...

I skipped Recently last month. This one’s even more of a grab-bag than usual! The element and browser abstractions I was reading Iván Sánchez Ortega’s thoughts on maps4html (at the time of writing, his website is down, so that’s an archive.org link). The post is about a theoretical HTML element that embeds a map on a webpage - something that...

Some light reverse-engineering of websites has been a source of entertainment and knowledge for me. I’ll poke around in the Chrome DevTools and figure out the basics of how popular websites work. Sure, it’s common to compress JavaScript and other resources, and the HTML source of webpages no longer give many hints for technology – long gone are...