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UI = f(data)(state)

patgavin:Former Bethlehem Steel siteSteelstacks, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

In August I bought a Kinesis Freestyle Edge keyboard off of eBay. I’ve been using it for about four months now, and I’m typing this review on it. I’d been wanting to try out a split keyboard for a long time but didn’t want to spend a lot of money on one. Good quality split programmable keyboards start at around $200. The Freestyle Edge I found on eBay was new …

I've decided to migrate this blog to a quarto-based blog format. All future posts will be found here: https://swingley.dev/blog2.

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard Season Three, which as of this writing has been out for the better part of a year.In the spring of 1994 Star Trek fans were treated to the wonderful TNG finale "All Good Things". It was a little technobabble-heavy, but it was still an affectionate send-off to the TV adventures of the Enterprise-D crew as they made the jump to the …

Vincennes Review of Books 2023 is here!Key:* = Excellent, highly recommend~ = Actively bad, do not recommendFirst readsThe Book of Form & Emptiness–Ruth OzekiLove in Idleness–Charlotte Mendelson Straight Man–Richard Russo *The Complete Magazine Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1921–1924–F. Scott Fitzgerald *The Book of Goose–Yiyun Li The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot–Lyndall Gordon The Liar’s Dictionary–Eley Williams The Coaching Habit–Michael Bungay Stainer Cleopatra and Frankenstein–Coco Mellors The Waste Land: …

I’ve been writing these posts since 2015, and, especially in recent years, I keep asking the same question: what is time anyway? This year is no different. Or, it is different because there are new griefs and fears and time is moving in ways both slow and fast and it slips through my fingers before I know what to do. Part of this feeling comes from the year’s circumstances. I …

This is probably going to be short as this year is perhaps the most unproductive year I've ever had.As usual, I start this off with a compilation of monthly "highlights" that I've already listed in my monthly newsletter.January ⌨️ Got my first wireless mechanical keyboard. 👨‍🎨 Made a diagram with Excalidraw. 📹 Made a nice video. 🎮 Played around with some pretty cool UI (1) (2). February 💉 4th jab. …

How to serve protomaps tiles with NodeJS.

While working on a changelog-generation script for my vsvg project, I wanted to display the list of contributors as circular avatars, just like GitHub does in multiple places. After a few Google searches and some failed attempts, I identified a couple of key tricks. The first is about obtaining the avatar image for a given GitHub account. Although the URL is hard to predict, adding .png to the account page …

I really enjoyed attending and speaking at LeadDev Berlin in 2023. Here are just a few of the things that I took away from the conference. When to make quick decisions I learned the most from Nicky Thompson’s excellent talk, “Making work (and life) less stressful by making better decisions”. This was jam packed with information to help us understand how our brains work (both for and against us) when …

Notes for season 5, episode 13, “return 0“ 08:26 Even with HR removed, it’s apparently not hard to find a bunch of cops at the precinct that would execute fellow officers for “a nice fat bonus”. 11:27 The music playing as Finch waits on the room is “Bunsen Burner” which previously appeared on the soundtrack of Ex Machina (2014). 14:02 “The suspense is killing me… in addition to the gunshot …

I don’t remember how I came across it, but this is one of the most exciting papers I’ve read recently. The authors train a neural network that tries to identify the next in a sequence of MNIST samples, presented in digit order. The interesting part is that when they include a proxy for energy usage in the loss function (i.e. train it to be more energy-efficient), the resulting network seems …

With a new year on the horizon, we pause to take stock of all the wonder in world, including some of our favorite classic episodes from the Atlas Obscura podcast. Join us as we reacquaint ourselves with bestselling author Mary Roach, whose take on science is both funny and fascinating, and meet Amir Siraj, a young astrophysicist who may have made the discovery of a lifetime. We'll also learn about …

When I started blogging again in 2020, I was using my work computer as my home computer was non-operational. Recently work appropriately increased security on the computers (which I fully endorse) so that I can no longer upload photos from that computer onto my blog. I received a Mac air iPad which is replacing the one I had been using since 2012 which really couldn’t do much. As such, I …