plaintext.blog

2023-11-18 10:03am

My wife to me this morning: “Did you ever think there would be a universe where you willingly wake up at 6am and run eight miles for fun?”

Nope. Never. And that’s what makes it fun.

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2023-11-17 8:12pm

The kids’ school district sends a text message telling us they have an important announcement. 

For security reasons, we have to visit a URL in the text to read the announcement online.

The website then links to a PDF to download. The important announcement?

“Happy Thanksgiving! Don’t forget that schools will be closed next week!”

🙃

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2023-11-16 10:01pm

Ten minutes after a difficult phone call with a family member, my watch helpfully alerts me that I’m more stressed than usual today and should consider going to bed earlier tonight.

No thanks, watch. I’m going to eat a pint of ice cream and watch True Detective again instead.

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2023-11-16 12:53pm

Tech is bleeding today. Already seen two friends at other companies let go in layoffs this morning - and that's in addition to coworkers at my job.

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2023-11-15 11:23am

Like everyone these days, I'm futzing around with machine learning.

My photos app, Iris, has had pretty good face detection and recognition (running locally) for about a year now.

Over the weekend, I built a small Mac app that generates embeddings for all of my work notes stored in Obsidian. Then, borrowing the similarity ranking algorithm I'm using for faces in Iris, it's doing a really good job of surfacing notes related to the currently selected one.

Will it prove useful in the long-term? I'm not sure yet. But it has been a fun diversion to play with.

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2023-11-15 11:18am

This is a plain text blog. No images, links, or formatting. Sort of. I mean, it's still serving _you_ HTML with a little formatting, but only because I want post permalinks to work.

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