Lambdaland

Regardless of how you feel about generative AI-love it or hate it-the worst thing you can do with it is use it to write for you. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that there was an LLM entirely free from any ethical, ecological, or economic baggage: it h

If you add animations to slideshows, they should serve some semantic or rhetorical purpose. Animations should reduce cognitive load, not increase it by being a distraction. When should you add animations? I like adding animations to my presentations when

I got asked a good question today: what is the difference between Tree-sitter and a language server ? I don't understand how either of these tools work in depth, so I'm just going to explain from an observable , pragmatic point of view. T...

I started using Typst about a month ago to write my dissertation proposal. I had seen Typst before and decided to keep an eye on it as it matured. While it still is very much in development, it is mature enough that I was able to rewrite my dissertation p

The past few weeks have seen major AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare outages. I predict Google Cloud will have a major outage sometime soon as well. Each time one of these massive systems goes down, it takes a sizable chunk of the internet with it. This is troub

I got asked how I manage papers, notes, and citations for doing research. I started writing out a very long Slack message, but it quickly passed the threshold where I ought to just turn it into a blog post. The short of it: I'm an incorrigible Emacs user,

There are few sounds as satisfying to me as a lock popping open, especially when it's a well-machined lock that makes a nice, crisp "chink!" sound as the shackle releases. This post is some suggestions I gave to a friend of mine who wanted to get started

There's something icky about LLM-generated text when you think it's written by a human. I think I finally put my finger on one reason why I feel this way.

I just released version 1.5.0 of Emacs Bedrock -a super minimal starter kit for Emacs. This is a minor change: I've fixed a few bugs and added a package or two to some of the optional config files under extras/ .

The key principle I follow is this: how I take my notes will evolve over time . I do not stick to any system too dogmatically. That said, I've settled on a system that's been fairly robust and stable for the past few years. I have tweaked it here and ther