How to quickly cd to fuzzy directories without fancy shells| jodavaho.io
I found out today that Daniel Stenberg the guy behind curl, which is the library behind basically every web-enabled tool you use, was nominated developer of the year in Sweden. Now, honestly, this guy works hard, and curl represents the premier F/OSS experience. It’s free, ubiquitous, actively maintained, and essentially vital infrastructure. So, here’s a story about how he called my code bad. Christmas eve, 2021, I had a little time off and was enjoying some casual coding. I’ve always ...| jodavaho.io
A few tries at an LLM analogy| jodavaho.io
showing "Rants"| jodavaho.io
The Endgame for LLMs Might Look Like Windows XP Hear me out. 1. The commercial space already pays for heavy, local tools Mechanical engineers pay thousands of dollars per seat for their productivity software. Those profits go directly into improving the tools. Sometimes there are cloud add-ons, but the bulk of the functionality is local and offline. The feature sets are deep: automated FEA, rendering, parts databases. You run this on powerful machines with serious GPUs, fast CPUs, and large a...| jodavaho.io
I think we've reached the limit of first-order code automation already| jodavaho.io
showing "Writing"| jodavaho.io
My hardwon lessons for working on the weekend| jodavaho.io
If you were obsessed with minimal and re-useable technololgy, would you be a rabbit or a forth?| jodavaho.io
The problem is .. energy expenditure doesn't explain weight over short term| jodavaho.io
Pareto analylsis of possible hobbies and other signs of undiagnosed OCD.| jodavaho.io
Created with chatgpt + my own notes. System Analysis Check Boot Time: Use systemd-analyze to see the total boot time. Use systemd-analyze blame to see which services take the longest to start. Use systemd-analyze critical-chain to understand the critical path. Check Boot Logs: Review the logs with journalctl -b to identify errors and warnings. Hardware and BIOS/UEFI Update BIOS/UEFI: Ensure your BIOS/UEFI is up to date. Check BIOS/UEFI settings for any boot-related options (e.g., Fast Boot). ...| jodavaho.io
Wife and I are insanely busy. We both work 50+ hours a week. The kids don’t seem to mind - still hilarious, happy, and energetic. Our nanny is the GOAT. I have not been playing many games lately. I’ve been doing a lot of yard work, and we’ve been spending a lot of time at the cabin. I’ve been working a lot, too. When I do play, I prefer Helldivers 2 by arrow head games. It’s insane. Check out some videos on youtube. The back yard is coming together! We built the deck, landscaped the...| jodavaho.io
No snow, kids are precocious, work is bumpy, and playing board games!| jodavaho.io
Data Driven Dieting using LLM, Differential Equations, and Some Stats| jodavaho.io
Data Driven Dieting using LLM, Differential Equations, and Some Stats| jodavaho.io
OK, let’s talk about my diet some more. I’ve started a diet, with the goal of losing 32 lbs, or ~15% of my bodyweight, to get back to my circa 2000-2005 weight. I’m happy if I achieve 80% of that loss, ending up under 200. This is a long post, in which I describe the plan, and some misunderstandings I had about dieting and weight loss. Along the way, I built an estimator that uses data to determine my real calorie intake, needs, and activity level. In practice, the hardest part about ca...| jodavaho.io
Data Driven Dieting using LLM, Differential Equations, and Some Stats, Part 0| jodavaho.io
I’ve been journalling for 10+ years. In addition to forcing me to actually write down what happened that day, reviewing old entries provides a feeling of history that makes life feel soooo long and so rich. I can review my now-wife’s rocky courtship and feel grateful we made it. I looked back 3 years ago and found the day our children were conceived :D (we have twins). I can review the anxieties of my PhD years, etc etc. For some reason, feeling like my past life has not been short helps ...| jodavaho.io
I play hunt showdown a lot. It’s very fun. It’s also insanely frustrating sometimes. The game has long matches, very frantic, quick battles, and a wide variety of meaningful character specialization and equipment options. It can take dozens of matches to determine if a loadout is worth it, and there are many loadouts, and a match takes an hour … In short, it is very hard to get feedback on what equipment loadouts, tactics, or friends are useful. Furthermore, it’s hard to know if you...| jodavaho.io
All blockchain games are predicated on guessing random numbers in exchange for money. How is this not gambling? Did you know that two percent of USA’s energy is just bitcoin mining?1 This is dumb. Blockchain is automated gambling. I don’t mean “I’m gambling the cost of bitcoin will go up, so I buy some” I mean the entire system is: Guess a number Plug it into an equation, and see if the output matches a random number generated by another equation. The only difference between this co...| jodavaho.io
Multi-agent systems AAMAS proceedings Planning & Scheduling ICAPS conf page, proceedings Robotics ICRA conf page IROS conf page Space related MASSpace ‘24 conf page Linux & OSS Linux Foundation events Open Source Summit events Scale homepage FOSSDEM homepage DEFCON homepage Learning RustConf homepage CppCon homepage PyCon homepage| jodavaho.io
Tools asciinema: Record and share your terminal sessions, the right way. Web services wttr.in: The right way to check the weather from your terminal. qrenco.de: Generate QR codes from the command line. cheat.sh: The right way to get help from the command line. rate.sx: The right way to get currency exchange rates from the terminal.| jodavaho.io
Leadership and Teams Turn the Ship Around homepage, amazon Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams amazonRelated: “Let me tell you a secret” it’s the people Five Dysfunctions of a Team summary, amazon High output management amazon Army Leadership Manual pdf, cached local copy No Bullshit CTO /Tech lead guide web| jodavaho.io
Humanity Why you, personally, should want a larger population link: https://rootsofprogress.org/why-a-larger-population description: Various reasons for above, including faster progress, more opportunities or options, deeper patterns (agglomeration effects) Learning Mathematics for the adventurous self-learner link: https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner A set of books to read / work through to learn math Meta-skills All strength comes from repetition [of the basics] link: http...| jodavaho.io
Why do GPA and ACT scores matter? Recently, there’s been some pushback against standardized tests and college entrance exams. It begs the question: What is all this testing good for? After all, well-to-do families and students can spend more time preparing for these exams, making them an unfair indicator of wealth moreso than IQ. I propose: They are not a measure of ability but of rule-following, self-regulation, and preparadness. If this is true, the fact that you can study for these tests...| jodavaho.io
Messing about with serious software In which we discuss setting up some spaceflight software from NASA inside a tiny webserver, inside an AWS lambda, and with Rust. There is no reason you’d ever want to do this, but I was stuck at home sick and needed to scratch an itch: How does one know if the sun is shining on any particular part of the moon right now? The solution is very complicated, actually. Is the spot occluded by, e.g., being in a crater? How high above the surface are you? Are you...| jodavaho.io
As of today, we’re at 1.0 for the Highfleet tools / cogitator site. https://hfopt.jodavaho.io We provide: uploading ships, and getting a permalink for sharing. creating collections of ships you have uploaded, which can also be shared getting ship design hints from the optimizer One nice thing is that all downloads are verified to be valid .seria files. We hope you find it useful - especially as a permanent archive of ships! We have several improvements on the horizon: Downloading collection...| jodavaho.io
Over-engineering Highfleet load-outs using Integer Programming I built a highfleet ship optimizer by bundling a fast C optimizer, binding to a higher level language, and providing a web API. Then, Altho built a front-end. Try it at hfopt.jodavaho.io/optimizer This post is about setting up the problem. See related posts. Dieselpunk warship schematic. Made with Midjourney. Highfleet is an incredibly fun game. You take control of a small set of ships, raid and pillage and revolt your way to glor...| jodavaho.io
I’m not an optimization guru by any means. It’s never been something I’ve been allowed to focus on at work, sadly. At some jobs, performance is secondary to correctness and robustness, and at others, it’s secondary to flashy features. But, I’ve used the following tricks in hotloops Dimension reduction (esp via convolution) Branchless calculation SIMD SIMD gets a lot of love, but it’s a constant-factor improvement and can be tough to coax out of the compiler (unless you use a libra...| jodavaho.io
I’ve been tracking my OKR’s since 2014. Sometimes I accomplish what I set out for, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I accomplish what I put in OKRs but didn’t accomplish what I wanted. Here’s what I’ve learned. There are usually four types of OKRs, and not differentiating types makes it really hard to get what you wanted Not only are there four, but they are roughly speaking prerequisites of each other. Not only that, but looking at all the self-help books I’ve read, it actually see...| jodavaho.io
I regret to inform you that member initialization lists will not make your program noticeably faster. The point of this post is to vent, so it is highly opinionated. Style-based performance optimizations are a waste of time Good fundamentals are more important than micro-optimizations Compile and test times are vastly underrated For some reason, code / function generalization is valued higher than ergonomics or real performance. I form this opinion based on experiences with: The near-constant...| jodavaho.io
As I sit in a hotel lobby at 4:00 AM drinking awful coffee (story for another time), I’m reflecting on: If happiness from a boon or gain or accomplishment is just the loss of the pain of not having that gain, then maybe we can just short circuit that process and stop wanting the thing in the first place Of course, this is a well-studied idea1. But what gets me is: Is that what happiness is? Can I really be happy by removing desire (which, presumptively, prevents happiness by showing me a fu...| jodavaho.io
I own a 2022 Tesla Model Y. Or rather, my powerhouse wife does. Regardless, I’ve driven approximately 10,000 miles in one, and have formed a long list of opinions. The Good The performance The cold / icy driving experience is fantastic. It’s the easiest to drive in slippery conditions that I’ve owned except my old toyota 4x4 SUV, but that’s a high bar. The adaptive cruise control eliminates 90% of the annoyances from highway driving (though the industry has caught up) The 360 cameras ...| jodavaho.io
Building things is our higher purpose Ergo, the most shameful thing is not not finish a creation I feel deep in my bones that making things is the higher purpose of humanity. It’s our secret weapon against devolving into tribes. The simplest creations improve ones life, and that’s what makes us human: Having agency to improve our lot. The true strength of our gift is making for others. Making something desireable from something less desireable underpins every part of cities, is the founda...| jodavaho.io
Oh sweet, coffee One time, $employer was having an all-hands event. During these events, everyone is in town from all over. I walked in the first day and saw a table of treats and gourmet coffee, and was like “oh sweet, coffee”. I walked up and was intercepted by someone who told me “Those are for the investors”. Of course the first thing out of my mouth was “I’m investing my life” like that was supposed to mean anything to him. Life is a funny little sequence of random occurren...| jodavaho.io
This is the first in a series of posts describing how I’m keeping data about my self, environment, work, and goals. You can read the whole series here --- As part of my journalling habit, I used to keep excellent metrics about myself. From the year 2014 to about 2019, I recorded almost everything that I felt was important. This included workouts, spending, and time spent in a variety of areas, such as grad study. I logged each “good” awake hour. This allowed me to generate reports like ...| jodavaho.io
Midjourney's rendering of a painting of someone doing a retrospective journal by a lake. Half way through the year, time for a brief retrospective. Each of these could be a post on their own. Job It’s been a little over a year since I left JPL. After a brief hiatus at Amazon, I’m settling into my new job at Outrider.ai. Last year I was laid off from Amazon Robotics, AI, which I don’t think exists any more as an organization. They cited “Marcoeconomic factors” of course. So, the year...| jodavaho.io
Hi Tarkhans, u/althowd and I are excited to present our highfleet shipyard, with cogitator backend! https://hfopt.jodavaho.io We’ve been working on it for about a year, and current the site provides two things: A free ship hosting / sharing service (Upload requires registering, downloads do not) A free “cogitator” to help you rapidly test designs and check in-game statistics Check it out, or see more details here! Since we’re self “hosting” (paying), we wanted to limit useage to t...| jodavaho.io
On the optimality of sawtooth careers I was having lunch at JPL with their Chief Engineer, Rob Manning. Normally, you’d expect the Chief Eng. to reserve their time for more important people, but that’s not how JPL works. I had posted in the New Researcher Support Group slack channel, asking for stories from folks who regret some part of their career. Gloomy, I know. He was curious, and so we we got lunch. Being early career is fraught with uncertainty. What should I specialize in? How can...| jodavaho.io
Building a highfleet ship optimizer Me and Altho built, essentially, a cogitator for your dieselpunk legos game. Highfleet (koshutin.com) is a game by Konstantin Koshutin, of Hammerflight fame. In that game you have to bulid, peice by peice, huge rocket-propelled fleets to fight above a primitive desert society. The attention to detail is immaculate. Radio communications, electronic intelligence / warfare, and strike fleet management are just the tip of the iceburg. It’s great fun, for engi...| jodavaho.io
This post is a work in progress… We have enough AI to explain conscioiusness now, and therefore to create an AI that feels “General”. AI can generate words from sounds GPT is well known to generate narratives and conversations given rough priors Something like Dall E to generate mental imagery around those narratives, when required Constantly retrained by feeding what we hear (verbally) and what we see (after “object detection”) in a feedback loop, with all of our “story” as wel...| jodavaho.io
I recently read a wonderful piece by the New York Times titled “What happened when 7 Trump voters and 6 Biden voters tried to find common ground”. What struck me was how quickly even the most middling of issues quickly diverged along party lines, often with classic party narratives appearing. It is absolutely worth a read. These folks are living profoundly different American experiences, and yet both feel that the future is bleak. Today, one person can blithely say that an entire politica...| jodavaho.io
Feel free to issue a pull request or file issues at github.com/jodavaho/conversational_rights Preamble The ability of humans to exchange information quickly and efficiently is our super power. Our other limited abilities and general fragility could not have made us the dominant species of the entire planet, and enabled us to do the things we do. More specifically, the written and verbal expression of culture has enabled the alignment of the individuals of our species toward long term goals of...| jodavaho.io
As mentioned I try to journal frequently in plain old bash. I keep journals for my work and home projects, each of my group members, my section duties, my publications … you get the idea. Since my code is automation-aided text editing, and my publications are automation-aided text editing, why would I use anything else for my project management? All the code I use is wrapped up here: github.com/jodavaho/bashlog but it’s easy enough to do without that. Basics For managing todos, I use bull...| jodavaho.io
I try to make a habit of journalling. It’s been shown to be very good for you, and I love reading old entries or periodically scraping it for data. The big accelerator for my journalling habit was to lower the effort required to actually create and edit entires. In short, I use plain text, in markdown files, backed by GitHub. There are a few tricks I use to keep it manageable. For example, I use separate files for each calendar day, and I structure some of the text so it can be easily parse...| jodavaho.io
A prayer book of litanies for technologists| jodavaho.io