Posts

The LLMs Go to Court

July 3, 2025 Technology

13 minutes to read — 2585 words

Last week two San Francisco judges issued important rulings about the use of copyrighted works to train large language models. The both sided (mostly) with the AI companies, but there were significant differences between the opinions.

Android Isn't Fun Anymore

July 1, 2025 Technology

8 minutes to read — 1640 words

When the Android mobile operating system was released in 2008, it was surrounded by a wonderfully weird world of modders, hackers, and developers. Now it’s stale monolith that’s alienating the community that made it great.

Best of 2024

April 25, 2025 Culture

5 minutes to read — 945 words

It took me a while to get around to it, but here’s my roundup of my best moments and favorite things from 2024.

A Bluesky Primer

November 22, 2024 Technology

8 minutes to read — 1565 words

Over the past couple of years, the experience on the social media app formerly known as Twitter has become increasingly unendurable. Lots of people are searching for an alternative, and the hottest one right now is Bluesky.

Under 10k

July 16, 2024 Culture

11 minutes to read — 2255 words

A deep dive into songs I love by artists with 10,000 or fewer monthly listeners on Spotify.

Best of 2023

January 23, 2024 Culture

4 minutes to read — 795 words

I rang in 2024 from a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains, surrounded by family and friends. It was a pretty great New Year’s Eve, and now it’s time to look back on 2023.

WordPress Development with XAMPP, Gulp, and SASS

August 11, 2023 Technology

10 minutes to read — 2100 words

WordPress Development with XAMPP, Gulp, and SASS

One of my main programming projects is development of a complex site powered by WordPress, but I’ve never put together a description of my workflow. I build the site on my Windows box using XAMPP and Gulp to manage everything. It’s surprisingly difficult to find a good explainer¹ on how to set this up, so this post will explain how I get my WordPress development environment up and running.

"The Bear" by Andrew Krivak

August 6, 2023 Culture

3 minutes to read — 438 words

I’m not generally a fan of post-apoctalyptic fiction. I enjoyed The Last of Us for the acting and some of the human drama, but it wasn’t really my thing. Andrew Krivak’s remarkable novel is different, and I enjoyed it much more. It’s not a fast-paced story, but it’s short, and I tore through it in a day. It’s a truly beautiful novel about a father and daughter who happen to be the last two humans on earth.

The Windows Setup: 2023

August 3, 2023 technology

6 minutes to read — 1069 words

Every once in a while, I like to write about how I set up my various devices and the software I use. This is mostly for me, so I can easily set stuff up again in the event of a crash, loss, or new purchase. But some of it may be helpful to others looking to emulate some of this.

March 11, 2023 Technology

7 minutes to read — 1308 words

Adding a list of related posts to web pages is a great way to help users find new content and keep visitors engaged on your website. I was recently adding this feature to a website built on WordPress. There are several WordPress plugins that implement related posts functionality, but I wanted precise control over the function and styling of the related posts. I also didn’t want the overhead and hassle of installing a new plugin, so I implemented the related posts feature myself.