Welcome to my personal digital sandbox.

About the site

This website is made possible thanks to several open source software projects.

Nutshell.js

:This is Nutshell

Nutshell is an open source JS program for generating expandable explanations built by Nicky Case (aka ncase) . This feature is driven in part by Gwern’s post Sidenotes in Web Design . Due to physical limitations, sources and extraneous but relevant information was relegated to footnotes at the end of the book. But with webdesign, information presentation is released from those limitations and sidenotes/margin notes surpass footnotes by allowing the reader to instantly read the information without having to refer back and for to the end of the book or webpage. There are several different ways to implement sidenotes, and Nutshell happens to be my particular solution. If you have JS disabled in the browser, then you should just see the block of text.

:x And only non-JS users can see this

Usually, this text would be hidden or nested in another Nutshell. But if you have JS disabled in the browser then you see all the information all at once. It can look nasty sometimes.

Vega Visualizations

Data visualizations to a certain degree are an art form to themselves. And rather than just generating flat images with vauge interpretations I really wanted to make interative data charts. The two popular options are D3.js and Vega / Vega-Lite . I went with Vega because for whatever reason I clicked with the language a little bit easier than D3. And since this was pre-GPT days, I was looking for the path with a managable learning curve. In the post-GPT days, I might end up switching back to D3 depending on my needs (or both. both could be good.)

An example Vega line char is below ⬇️

Plot Visualizations

Hugo

The blog is generated using Hugo, a static website generator.

Datasette

Backing up my posts with data AND making that data accessible to others was a dream of mine and the dream is realized in Datasette (thanks Simon!)

Armbian

Armbian is an ultralight version of Linux (this specific version has been optimized for a RaspPi 4). There are several options to allow for faster performance I might implement in the future.

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an old-school C program emulating a 1980s Symbolics Lisp Machine emulating an old-fashioned Motif-style Xt toolkit emulating a 1970s text terminal emulating a 1960s teletype. - Daniel Colasciones

Emacs is a conscious computer virus with the aim of hollowing Unix out function by function, eventually to overthrow it. It’s like a vampire: a shadow of what made it beautiful in life (elisp vs the old lisp machines), sustained mostly by blood (of its new users) and its long-term goal of revenge. - invalidOrTaken

Emacs (short for Editor Macros) is easily the oldest piece of software in this stack. I first bumped into it back in the 2010s when I was in my early AI phase. Org Mode could manipulate documents in ways I didn’t even know was possible and once I surmounted the learning curve Emacs is my daily driver when it comes to putting my thoughts to screen.