Diversions is the central hub for news about the membership, behind-the-scenes details of my personal projects, as well as a wide variety of links to people, places, and things that inspire me.
A bit of housekeeping: I’m turning Diversions public. While a fair number of people have signed up for both free and paid memberships (thank you!), my analytics show that not everyone logs back in to read each edition. Perhaps it is a bit too much friction? So, I’ll be turning the free membership into a more newslettery type subscription and the paid membership I’ll reserve for more exclusive content and still as a way to support my projects. Stay tuned.
I could bore you with excuses as to why there hasn’t been a Diversions since early June and that I plan to publish more regularly, but that would be breaking my very first tip for blogging – “Don’t post about what you will do, post about what you’ve already done.”
Summertime is moving at breakneck speed. As Anh put it in a recent, and lovely designed, weeknotes post “It’s July, and the passage of time continues to be disorienting.” Well, it is August and I only read that post today and so that just reenforces the point. I’m not sure if it is age, busyness, or *waves arms gesturing at everything* but disorienting is a great way to describe how time seems to be moving.
Since the last Diversions was published, we’ve had family reunions, building permits and variants filing, glamping trips, dinner parties (with us hosting 25 people 🥵), blueberry picking, trees falling, software updates shipping, and lots of customers. There was a week that felt like far too much. I need to be more careful with my scheduling.
That being said, things are good.
Spending 8-10 hours cutting a felled tree led to some meditations on lessons learned from the experience. This was a tree we knew would eventually come down. Fortunately, the only thing injured was a relatively new pear tree. But the amount of work to clean up after something like this was not expected. Trees are bigger when they are laying flat in your yard and you don’t want them there.
One lesson that was reinforced was to take large projects and make them into many small ones. We’ve had a hot summer so working in the afternoons would have been extremely unpleasant – so, I woke up early each day and got a little more of the tree taken care of. Steady progress made me happy and I also didn’t totally wear myself out. There is still a bit left to do.
Another lesson is that even though a less-than-great thing happened, I did get a few years worth of campfire wood stacked in the backyard. Each windstorm usually snaps enough limbs to give me a fair amount of sticks and branches to have some nice fires. But this new bounty means that I likely won’t need to go get fire wood for our fire pit for many summers. And it was free!
I’m using LLMs a lot lately. I continue to use them as an accelerator. And they’ve grown more capable and I’m able to run them locally (both to cut costs and to get more familiar with how they work).
I’m using Simon Willison’s LLM command line tool to install and interact with models locally (and, online). The command line isn’t the best interface for interacting with these chatbots – a web UI allows for dragging and dropping, easier copying and pasting, and other tools built on top of the chatbots. However, it is a great way to do quick prompts right from where I am in my project. I’m looking forward to seeing how local models progress.
Some links for your edification:
- Jordan Stone on TikTok – If you would like to trip on acid without harmful drugs getting into your spinal fluid, here is your chance.
- Aegir Hallmundur’s blog – A fun blog where each post has its own style. It reminds me of Jason Santa Maria‘s blog “back in the day”. Particularly V4.
- Zellyn Hunter Recreates Schotter by George Nees – Don’t miss the multiple parts. I cannot skip a blog post recreating analog generative art.
- The Nook by Isaac French – Yes please.
- Solstice 2024 – Ian Giffin shares a pinhole solargraph showing the path of the sun on the shortest day of the year.
- Meredith Frampton – Extraordinary work.