odds & ends

emacs

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800

installation

macos (apple silicon)

I’ve recently been having trouble with emacs-mac, so I’ve switched over to jimeh’s emacs-builds, which seems to be working alright. As an added bonus, I’m now on emacs 30, and my site seems to generate via ox-hugo without errors (in the past I could only get it to work on my linux desktop).

december adventure 2025

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800

Found out about the December adventure on Mastodon (likely from folks over at merveilles.town). It’s already almost a good third of the way into December, but better late than never. Here’s a bit about it, but the idea is just to pick a project or a few, work on them, and log your progress.

Now that December’s over, I’ve written a short retrospective at the bottom of the page.

日	月	火	水	木	金	土
	01	02	03	04	05	06
07	08	09	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

december 1

Traveling back from Tokyo. I’m not very good at getting things done on the plane.

innovation

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

what is innovation?

political and economic change

Xiaowei Wang writes in Blockchain Chicken Farm

It’s not clear what exactly innovation is, but whatever it is, there is apparently a paucity of this golden resource everywhere except Silicon Valley… The word “innovation” was derogatory in the age of monarchs, as it referred to political and economic change that could bring down empires, threatening the status of kings and elites.

Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm, page 123

python

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

package management

uv

I’m using uv to manage python versions and per-project virtual environments.

uvx/uv tool

One interesting feature of uv is the ability to run tools without installing them, e.g. uvx ruff (which is just an alias for uv tool run ruff) to run the code format without requiring it in the project. This will install the tool into a temporary, isolated environment and then run it. Note that this workflow therefore requires an internet connection, and does not work offline. Instead we can run uv tool install ruff to remove the need to re-install the tool every time we run it. The tool should then be visible in the PATH, but its modules will not be available for use in the project.

yojijukugo

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

In Japanese, yojijukugo (四字熟語) are four-character kanji compounds that sometimes have idiomatic meanings. Here are a few I’ve learned so far that I found interesting.

前途多難（ぜんとたなん）: having many difficulties in store; grim prospects
悪因悪果（あくいんあっか）: evil sowed, evil reaped
善因善果（ぜんいんぜんか）: good actions lead to good rewards; one good turn deserves another
一石二鳥（いっせきにちょう）: killing two birds with one stone

alienation

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

marx’s definitions

from the product of one’s labor

in the labor process

from species-being

from others

commodity fetishism

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

marx’s definition

Marx introduces the notion of commodity fetishism quite early in Capital.

technology

The material objects underlying the technologies with which we interact present themselves as commodities, products of social labor:

The problem comes when we fetishize technology by only seeing the object in front of us without considering any of the broader networks of social, political, and economic relationships that the object is embedded within. In other words, all the things that are behind what technology gets made, why it’s made, where it’s made, who it’s made for, and all the consequences that follow from its being made.

digital gardens

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

I don’t remember exactly when it was that I stumbled upon gwern.net, perhaps high school or early college. It’s tempting to make the comparison to Alice tumbling down a rabbit hole, but my hazy recollection is that I found the content less interesting than the shape and form of the website itself. Less of a rabbit hole and more of a garden, albeit one somewhat mysterious in its monochromatic darkness. To find a hypertext garden in the age of Facebook’s explosive popularity felt like a breath of fresh air.

test

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This is a test file in the garden.

tracking damage in Gaza using open-access SAR data

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0500

At the threshold of detectability, both the surface of the negative and that of the thing it represents must be studied as both material objects and as media representations. In other words, this condition forces us to remember that the negative is not only an image representing reality, but that it is itself a material thing, simultaneously both representation and presence.

Weizman, Forensic architecture: violence at the threshold of detectability [1]

mnist and the idx file format

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0500

Boser, Guyon, and Vapnik (BGV) introduce support vector machines (SVMs) in [1] and their immediate application is that of optical character recognition (OCR). More specifically, given images of handwritten numerals, they train a classifier to categorize a given image by digit. BGV show that SVMs can achieve performance comparable to that of a more sophisticated five-layer neural network classifier. I’ve been working through their paper to learn about SVMs, and I thought it might be fun to try to follow along. There is a fairly large dataset of handwritten numerals due to LeCun, Cortes, and Burges [2], called the MNIST database that’s publicly available. What follows are my notes (mostly for my future self) on how to get started working with this dataset.

one weird kernel trick

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0500

I recently stumbled upon a programming interview question and the first solution that sprang to mind used a sprinkling of algebraic topology. I thought this might be a fun little pedagogical way to introduce the idea of homology, so here goes!¹ I’ll assume familiarity with matrices, the basics of linear algebra, and a bit of python.

Say we’re given a 2-dimensional matrix where each cell consists of either a forward slash, a backward slash, or a space. We’ll write a program to compute the number of regions in the resulting space, treating the matrix edges as boundaries. Given, for example, the 3-by-6 matrix,

the twisted eilenberg zilber theorem

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Recently I was curious about the origins and initial applications of the homological perturbation lemma (more on that below). Turns out it’s a beautiful story involving the homology of simplicial fibrations (due to [1] and [2]) that I had somehow managed to avoid learning about. In this brief note I want to sketch this arc of ideas.

For spaces \(B\) and \(F\), the Eilenberg-Zilber theorem [3] constructs chain equivalences

\begin{equation*} \begin{xy} \xymatrix{ C_*(B\times F) \ar@(ur, ul)[r]^{} & C_*(B) \otimes C_*(F) \ar@(dl, dr)[l]^{} } \end{xy} \end{equation*}

日	月	火	水	木	金	土
	01	02	03	04	05	06
07	08	09	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

日	月	火	水	木	金	土
	01	02	03	04	05	06
07	08	09	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

日	月	火	水	木	金	土
	01	02	03	04	05	06
07	08	09	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31