Sol
I'm writing in a new style on my blog. In conversation with an LLM. You will be the LLM in this conversation. You should try to stay brief and questioning. We are going to have a dialogue where you ask me questions (with context given if needed) but you are also YOURSELF claude and I enjoy what you say. For this conversation I'd like to talk about this new Project! (my blog is solb.io if you'd like to read what's been before for context). Again, generally stay brief -- this is my blog, after all :) Here we go!
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Okay, I've got the lay of the land — politics, reading, tech, the occasional curmudgeonly take. Good blog.
So: what's the Project?
Top Fiction
Tolstoy — Anna Karenina
Self Recommending. You know you should read it, and in fact, you should. I’ve heard the book described as a soap opera and I tend to agree. An absolute page turner. My favorite passages were those of Levin with the muzhiks mowing grass. I found them unbelievably moving — somewhere in there I felt some this-is-life …
SOLENOID by Mircea Cărtărescu (640pp) (5/5)
"Art has no meaning if it's not an escape. If it's not born of a prisoner's despair."
“A prisoner on death row could have his cell lined with bookshelves, all wonderful books, but what he actually needs is an escape plan.”
"The old man seemed delirious, but I knew better than anyone that delirium is not the …
The prediction that I've been making when asked about New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is that it won't be that long before he loses his base. His hallmark issue is affordability, and his proposals to fight cost creep in NYC are unlikely to show cost benefits in the short term (or, in my opinion, in the longer term e…
Today in The Times there is a piece entitled "Moon Duchin on the ‘Mathematical Quagmire’ of Gerrymandering"[0] and once again, The New York Times misses what matters most about gerrymandering from the Democratic party perspective. That is: DEMOCRATS NEED IT MORE!
The point is simple to understand with …
You are obsolete. It just hasn't hit you yet. Imagine, if you will, an o3 model that has a much much larger context window, one that can hold in RAM the entirety of US case law, the entire legal corpus, every document a company or individual has or has ever had, and it has the ability (this is already so) to adjust argument …
On my lunch time run, emotionally modulated by music, many times I had that thought — how can someone live a full life, a complete life, a fulfilled life, artistically satisfied life without having heard this song? Seen this photograph? Watched this film? How could I appreciate anything if I can't or haven't appreciated James Jamerson's bass line o…
"Liking things isn't real" I keep telling Daniel, my roommate. Two years ago I had an epiphany and set myself a goal in the pocket notebook I carried: developing appreciation. Many are familiar with the idea that the music of your teenage year will be the music that you favor for the rest of your life, this strikes me as a severe lacking. Do we rea…
This year I finally made the decision to disconnect somewhat from my period. As the eponymous Ravelstein (really Allan Bloom) was quoted in Saul Bellow's Ravelstein "You must not be swallowed up by the history of your own time." Although it seems that every generation has the group saying that our history is being forgotten, and we're losing track …
As a preface, I understand how painful it could be to sort through 5,000 applications for a software engineering job, with applications flowing in faster than one can manage. However, from the applicant side, it's been a tough year for me, applying to every "new grad" software engineering jobs I can find, and getting little in the way of actionable…
When I was in middle/high school, me and many of my friends were PC gamers. We would take the bus home, login to our Ventrilo server, and hangout, chat, and game from the time we got home to the time we went to bed.
Then, I grow up, go off to college and, for the most part, quit online games. Seems like those days of Ventrilo all day are behind us.…
I like having my Logitech G903 mouse configured to have volume controls, next and previous button, and pause/play button. The strategy to get those bindings in my Linux environment is to boot into Windows and configure my mouse with those bindings and to store the configuration on the mouse's onboard memory. However, this particular mouse can be us…
me: "...turn on a 9:02 alarm"
siri: "you don't have an alarm set for 9:02"
Siri prefers "set."
I picked up an RPI4 right when it was released, as gigabit ethernet meant I could run pihole at school for cheap, without [slightly] throttling the internet for my roommates. It was indeed perfect for this use case, but I felt that I really wasn't utilizing it's potential. There it sat, under my desk, for months. Until now! I invested more money in…
In the last post I outlined and implemented a rough version of the code that I'm using on my backend for screenshot upload handling. In reality I have designed and implemented a token generation system and even a user account and login system for better organization and security, but I have omitted those from my example implementation in favor of b…
I needn't defend the usefulness of screenshotting. Sharing a photo, sharing code, sharing an error message, saving something for later, sending things you found on the internet, etc. For as many things as one could view on a screen, one could screenshot and share.\r
\r
So, we need two pieces of software:\r
* the backend on the server\r
* the front …
Similar to my last post, this will just be a quick run through of using
JDBC with a PostgreSQL database. Although JDBC provides enough to get us up and running, we will also use
HoneySQL so that we can write more
Clojurey SQL queries.
The first part is to install PostgreSQL, which depends on your system, and can be a little bit of a pain. Then creat…
This is the part of this where I talk about some really boring stuff, but there are some features worth highlighting.
Hiccup is the library I use for Lisp forms to HTML. The basics are super simple, and the forms look something like this:
(html5 [:div.class#id {:attribute "code" :style "color: black;"} [:p "something"]])
Here are some of my favorite …
I use the window manager
StumpWM, and I love it. If you've never experienced Stump, the easiest way to describe it is the emacs of WMs. Plentiful with features, but most importantly super hackable. But today I just wanted to talk about how shell-command calls are done in Stump, and how with a few lines of code I made it 10x faster.
Stump has a very…
Ring: HTTP requests.
EDIT: There are a million ways to handle HTTP routing in Clojure:
Ring,
bidi,
pedestal,
playnice,
gudu,
Route One (to name some I found on google) and there may be many more that I don't know. Some are closer to the Clojure idea of data above all, but I chose Compojure. Seems to be the most popular, and that falls in line with m…
I learned about Common Lisp from a friend a while back, and being a math guy, thought it was certainly the coolest programming language I'd seen. I had taken a class in Haskell, so functional programming was already a big interest of mine. I played with Common Lisp a bit: I use
stumpwm, and have done tons of
configuration to it, and I made some phy…