Lots of links this month...mostly about the tech industry being evil! Whoops!| evanhahn.com
Here are some of my notes from July 2025. See also: my notes from last month, and the month before, and so on… What I published this July “How I build software quickly” was my marquee post this month. I haven’t mastered the tension between speed and quality, but I’ve learned a few things that have been useful. It sparked a lot of discussion on Lobsters and Hacker News. I worked on this post for months, and I’m glad it did well (for me, at least). I informally compared the download...| Evan Hahn's blog
In The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast, author Andrew Blum gives a high-level overview of global weather forecasting. What complexity hides behind the simple interfaces of our daily weather apps? Three main points stuck out to me: “The weather machine has to be a global system, and it won’t work any other way.” International collaboration is critical. Weather models need lots of global data to be effective. Weather technology, like the internet, is closely tied to militar...| Evan Hahn's blog
Last month, I readEmpire of AI, a scathing tale of the invention of ChatGPT. This month, I read Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, a much rosier story of the invention of a more important technology: the internet. Authors Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon cover the history starting in the 1960s all the way up to 1994, just two years before the book was published.1 Here are my notes. Chapter 1: The Fastest Million Dollars This book argues that the space race was a precursor t...| Evan Hahn's blog
How do the sizes of local LLMs compare to the size of offline Wikipedia downloads?| evanhahn.com
I wrote a script that lets me run ocr image.png to extract text from images. This is useful for pulling text from screenshots, photos, and more. It only works on macOS because it uses Apple’s proprietary text recognition API. (I’ve used Frog for OCR on Linux, which I believe uses Tesseract under the hood.) Let’s say I want to extract text from this picture: I run this command… ocr /path/to/photo.jpg …to get this output: The author's reflections on his situation- Is deceived by a pro...| Evan Hahn's blog
This month, I saw some great stuff about AI ethics, bookmarked a few resources, and doodled a rainbow.| evanhahn.com
Know how good your code needs to be for the task at hand. Start with a rough draft. Try to soften requirements if you can. Don't get distracted. Make small changes. Practice specific skills.| evanhahn.com
How does "Binary Ordered Compression for Unicode" work? I started writing this but| evanhahn.com
Sometimes I want to sort a Markdown list. But I can't use normal sorting tools like Vim's :sort because the lists have formatting.| evanhahn.com