Weeklyish notes from the field.

What I’m Reading

A mental math heuristic to convert between Fahrenheit and Celsius

One of those, “how have I made it this long without knowing this?” kind of posts.

To convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit, double it and add 30.
To convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius, subtract 30 and halve it (the reverse).

Running Claude Code dangerously (safely) by Emil Burzo

It’s been a minute since I’ve come across a post about using Vagrant. Based on experience, running AI in a VM is a simple way to streamline local development safely, though I would be wary of using it for production tasks (i.e. database migrations). Vagrant is such a useful development tool :)

So, what can Claude do with these newfound powers?

Since it’s running in a VM, I also gave it sudo access and instructed it that it has the power to do anything: install system packages, modify configs, create files, run Docker containers, whatever.

A website to destroy all websites by Henry Desroches

Preach, Henry.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.
…
You’re not crazy. The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons. But the path back to feeling like you have some control is to un-spin yourself from the Five Apps of the Apocalypse and reclaim the Internet as a set of tools you use to build something you can own & be proud of — or in most of our cases, be deeply ashamed of. Godspeed and good luck.

What I’m listening to

Reprogramming Bioelectricity with Tim Ferris and Dr. Michael Levin

On bioelectric memories, placebo, theories of aging, and the origins of cognition. This episode is chock full of mind-bending experiments and theories about how the genome and the bodies bioelectrical signals interact to produce the organisms of the world. I’m finding the discussion on cognition and the different means of intelligence particularly fascinating.

One of the remarkable things that living systems are good at is in credit assignment, in selective attention. So for example, there’s this old work on biofeedback from, I think, the ’70s, where they can show that a rat can generate a temperature difference of a few degrees Celsius between its ears if you reward for that. And so now, just think. And it doesn’t take years of practice, it’s pretty quick. And just think, you’re a rat, you just got some reward. So let me see. While my tail was pointing north and my whiskers were kind of vibrating and my gut was doing this and my toes were — what the hell did I just get rewarded for?

You would think, and this in computer science is called the frame problem, because trying to get robots and AIs to focus on the important thing. There’s an old — I forget who did this example, but imagine there’s a robot, and it’s in a room with a bomb, and the robot says, “Oh, there’s a bomb. I’ve got to get out of here.” And it leaves. Except the bomb was on a cart that was connected to the robot, so it goes with him, and of course, he blows up. So what does the next robot do? Maybe Dan Dennett, I don’t remember. So the next robot is like, okay, okay, we have to have them consider all the options. So now this robot he goes in, so the robot’s like, “Well, let me see. The walls are pretty vertical and the paint is dry, yeah, and it’s a 90 degree angle. Cool.” And so by the time it’s considered all these things, of course it blows up again. So that’s no good. And so biologicals are amazing at knowing what to pay attention to, “What was I just rewarded for? What was the thing I did, which I’m never going to do again which turned out poorly?” We don’t know how that works. And that I think is going to be a major part of that puzzle that you’re asking about.

Tools I’m toying with

Astro

I’ve been having a lot of fun tinkering with this site after migrating to Astro. The Framework is solid and deploying via Cloudflare Workers is a breeze.

Tools I Use

Speaking of tools, I recently published a post on the tools I use most often.

Quote I’m pondering

A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.

― Leo Tolstoy