Articles tagged as "thoughts"

Going backpacking is a surreal experience. There are few moments in modern life where we bundle up everything we think we may need in a single pack and then wander off into the unknown. Before departure, we have plenty of time to check (and double check) our packing list in the comfort of our homes. Once we are out in the wilderness however, all bets are off, you either have a working system or you have a problem.

We consume and generate, a lot of information per day. With more people using the internet and generating data around the world, there will be even more communication: more emails sent, more articles written, and more data to store and recall. During the period 2011 through 2021, the percentage of individuals worldwide using the internet almost doubled, from 31.2% to 59.6% [1]. People are joining the interconnected infrastructure of the modern web at a blistering pace, and yet there are still billions more that remain unconnected. When they too join the global network, we can expect even more ideas to join the chorus.

This weekend, I changed my neovim configuration from nvchad to kickstart nvim. The primary reason was that the level of abstraction in nvchad was a bit too much, and I wanted a single init.lua file in which I could comfortably add plugins through lazy.nvim. I hadn’t recognized it up until now, but not fully appreciating the structure for the config was presenting a significant barrier to further making my setup my own. Not only was kickstart neovim incredibly easy to setup, I have been able to tweak so many things that I had put off of the past year because I now have a much better handle on how to implement those changes. Throughout this experience, I learned more about the trade-offs of complexity, and reflected on how my neovim adventures differed from revamping my website with 11ty. In one instance I was building from the top down — I took a template and began to strip away and tweak the components I didn’t need. In the other, I removed most of the complexity and started from a more bare bones configuration to build off of.

I like reading blogs from around the web in either miniflux or russ and for a while I thought it was just because they both used catppuccin[1]. However, I now think that it is because the reading environment is less cluttered, and there is nothing between me and the text that the author wrote. The web has become so cluttered that reading just text in a quiet environment with no bells and whistles feels like relaxing on an island with a good book and a cool glass of ice water.

There is a distinctive feeling that comes with travelling, a blend of discomfort and excitement about leaving what is known and venturing into what is not. In airplanes, we have time to think, or to truly enjoy a book or an album, purely because there is nothing else to do. Without connection to the internet, there is nothing new to discover, only new things to appreciate in what we already have.

Over the past few months, I finished Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. Solidly in the self-help category, this book was more a reminder than a lesson, but one important takeaway that I had was around the paradox of choice. Even in a world of abundance, we still face the key constraint of time, and this single element of our lives inherently limits the scope of what we can achieve. The term “paradox of choice”, first popularized by Barry Schwartz in a book by the same name, has even more significance in a world that is digital, fast-paced, and rooted increasingly on comparison and expectation. We all know and recognize that it impossible to live a perfect life, yet we may be tempted to maximize our life to the best of our ability. We do this against a backdrop that feels like a never-ending series of choices. I could be doing so many things right now, how can I possibly know that writing a blog post is the best action to take.

I recently switched from an iPhone to an android. In doing so, I lost access to Apple books, and can no longer read the items in my collection on my new phone. This was a wake-up call for me, I realized just how far I had committed myself to the belief that I would always have an Apple protect, and limited the freedom to switch to something different down the line.

Since Large Language Models (LLM’s) were introduced in November 2022, there has been a near constant buzz about their potential, limitations, and real-world consequences. When ChatGPT 3.0 was first released, I remember bringing my laptop around to colleagues in my master’s program, explaining how this was the tip of the iceberg of something new. While our cohort was just about to graduate, and therefore unlikely to have our trajectories altered too heavily by this new gravitational pull, the year after us could use this new tool to radically change how they went about learning the basics of concepts in statistics and epidemiology.

A little over a month ago, I ran into an issue on this blog with ContentLayer. In short, I had transitioned to NextJS 14, and the package did not yet support it. There was an open pull request that seemed to fit all the criteria for the fix. Perfect! Now all that was needed for a maintainer to merge…

Take a look through any internet security forum and you will find a ton of debate around the right way to stay secure online. For some that means using a password manager that never touches the internet, and handling the backups yourself. For others, this means the expertise and infrastructure that comes with a cloud option. For MFA, a hardware security key used to be the absolute best answer, however with passkeys now entering the mix, there is renewed debate around how necessary these devices are. Regardless, all of this makes very little sense to the average non-technical user, and that’s a huge problem.