There are times when I am embarrassed to realize that I have accepted a painful limitation for years. In this case, it is my resistance to restarting my IDEs because I don’t want to lose my terminals. Now, thanks to a burst of motivation and a modern chatbot, I’m setup for my IDEs to resume exactly where they left off.
Continue reading “Truly persistent terminals in VSCode and Cursor”There’s a saying that changed my life as a programmer:
YAGNI: You ain’t gonna need it
It’s the antidote to perfectionism. YAGNI comes from the observation that we are very bad at predicting the needs of the future. Adopting YAGNI changed how I code. I also try to apply that to decluttering my life. But every now and then, something you have held on to for years actually does come in handy.
Continue reading “You might actually need it”
For a few brief moments, my stock holdings in my former employer were hypothetically worth $5 million. This is the wild story of how I realized less than 1% of that value.
I’ll be pretty specific about some of the numbers, because equity compensation is a mystery to most people. Until I went through this, I never knew what’s possible and what’s normal. It’s a very complicated topic, but I hope that by sharing a real world situation, someone else might be able to learn something useful.
Continue reading “$5 millionaire for a week: riches to rags in the startup world”
For almost a year, I have been crafting and re-crafting a project I call The Fake Story of Music. It has been stuck in its present state for more than half of that time, and there’s so much more I want to do before it matches the vision in my head. However, I think it’s already pretty good and I’m letting go of my perfectionism.
Start with the story behind the fake story, or jump right in.
Let me know what you think in the comments on this post.
In my town, a surefire way to make everyone mad at you is to suggest that we consider merging with the much larger town that completely surrounds us. But I can’t resist.
New Jersey is a high tax state, and the property taxes in Metuchen are the highest in Middlesex County. Some people are interested only in using this as a political cudgel, but I’m interested in the question of why, and what options are there to bring the costs down? The question of whether merging with Edison, our neighbor on all sides, would bring down our taxes is an obvious question to consider.
I decided to do some digging.
Continue reading “Edtuchen: Should my town merge?”After finishing Alice In Chains: The Untold Story, I’ve been on a real AIC kick, which led me back to their Unplugged performance of Down In A Hole. And man, what a masterpiece.
The Superbowl Halftime show might have been the most polarizing in history. Some thought it was a triumph, others thought it was trash. I loved it.
To start with, without a doubt, there has never been a halftime show with the same sense of drama. Kendrick’s music has always played with themes of politics, pride, and liberation. How far would Kendrick go on the biggest and most American of stages, in this new MAGA era?
More importantly, would he sing “Not Like Us” and elevate hip hop beef to a level that will never again be topped? Given the subject matter of the song, surely, the NFL would not allow that even if he tried.
Wrong!
Oh, did he go there. He teased “Not Like Us”. Then he performed it. Then he hosted a guest appearance of Serena Williams crip-walking over the beat. It was delicious.
Other than the fact that some people were immediately turned off by the imagery of the performance and what they presumed it represented, I think a lot of people simply don’t know Kendrick’s style of artistry.
I really want to talk about my own experience with Kendrick’s music.
The first time I really took notice of him was his performance of Untitled 8 on The Tonight Show. It gave me chills, and still does.
First of all, this is not a track off of a traditional LP. Most of Kendrick’s music is out there in mix tapes, freestyles, and guest appearances. As many know, he often reserves albums for full concept works, and drops tracks like this as one-offs.
Immediately, he comes in over a strident jazz beat. Already, that’s different from a lot of pop hip hop of the time. This isn’t a club song.
Also, pretty quickly, I take notice of his stage presence. He looks like an immovable object in front of the mic. His eyes make him look like he’s almost in a shamanic state of consciousness. He doesn’t look like he’s seeing anything, nor does it seem like he’s concentrating overly intensely. It’s like he’s medium or something.
He changes up his flow for the first time (of what will be many) at 0:34. And his face starts emoting with each bar. I’m not the best at hearing lyrics or understanding poetry in real time, so I’m picking up on the vibes he’s sending more than the actual content.
At 0:50, another flow change over a change in the texture of the music, and step up intensity. I’m seeing that this is going to be a build-up song, and I love a good build-up song.
One of the things I notice at this point, is his hands look like they’re choreographed. He’s not just chopping aimlessly, but his hands are telling the story right along with this face and delivery.
At 1:38, flow change, (after a refrain). We’re getting up to jogging speed now.
At 1:50, he stretches a note for the first time. Not often done in hip hop. And then finally he rests for a couple beats
At 1:54, flow change! Oh man, I do love a call-and-response. That’s a nice touch.
At 2:19, oh, he’s on a roll now, we’re rolling.
At 2:28, tom tom drums come in and he’s still picking up steam. I love some rolling toms. The lighting is starting to get strobey.
At 2:41, flow change to singing. I’m not sure if this is a reference to another piece of music, but it’s pretty dope and definitely adds another layer of emotion to this performance. That’s a lot of Cape Town, but I’m here for it. We get to catch our breath, but surely this is just a rest stop…
At 2:58, emphatic grunt and we’re back to rhyming over a plodding beat. We’re still building to somewhere, and the breaks in the rhymes for sound effects seem to be signaling that anything can happen.
At 3:14, we’re going triplet flow now. At this point, the chills start to kick in. I’m seeing something special.
At 3:47, oh shit, he took the mic off off the stand! Full chest voice. Whoa!
At 4:00 “level 2, level 2, no I’m not done” whaaaat?
From this point, I don’t think I need to analyze it, this is just overwhelming intensity.
At 4:31 “YES I’M THE ONE” damn, you might be.
Big picture, I felt like I watched a piece of total art. The lyrics, delivery, instrumental, choreography, staging, and progression felt tightly designed to transport me into another world. It’s almost a spiritual experience.
I stopped following hip hop in the early 2000s. I grew up in the gansta rap and bling eras. Eminem and Outkast were the last artists that really blew my mind, and to me, they were a high-water mark of artistry. Objectively, Kanye would also fit this mold, but I never connected with him.
Seeing this performance put me on notice that hip hop was not a spent force. It made me emotional and frankly, proud.
A few months ago, I saw Bruce Springsteen for the fifth time in 15 years. I’m still trying to figure out how to think about his music.
As a New Jerseyan of Midwestern origin, I’m a latecomer to Bruce. I was aware of him growing up. People made a big deal of his iconic song Secret Garden on the Jerry McGuire soundtrack. But I thought of him as in the mold of other folk-rockers.
It wasn’t until I started dating a Jersey Girl that I realized that Bruce is something closer to a demigod than a musician in the Garden State. It has taken me a while to understand why.
Continue reading “Who’s The Boss?”My next door neighbor died earlier this year, and it has been a new experience for me with death.
I used to think I had experienced a lot of death compared to most people. But now I’m 40, and at my age, everyone has seen some death, and many of my peers have certainly surpassed me. Many have lost a parent by 40, and I’m so fortunate to still have both of mine.
My neighbor was a good friend of mine, and his passing has made me realized that I had never experienced the absence of someone whose daily presence I’m used to. I didn’t see him every single day, but working from home, with my office window looking at his house, I certainly felt his presence. And for most of this year, I have also felt his absence on a daily basis. In some sense, I am grateful for the reminders, because as I get older, I get more practiced at compartmentalizing and getting on.
Most recently, I have watched as his sister came up from out of town periodically to handle his affairs and belongings. That’s a process I haven’t dealt with at all. I know it has been hard for her, because not only has she been sorting through his things, but because he bought the house from his parents, who passed on long ago, it has been a repository for the larger family.
Their cousin’s family just bought the house from his sister and is moving in. I’m really excited that the house will remain in their extended family for a third generation. Their legacy continues.
It’s interesting to see scientific people categorically reject the notion that LLMs “think”. People write them off as “fancy autocomplete” or regurgitating their source material, and conclude that they do something categorically different than what humans can do. That it’s all just a parlor trick. I think1 that’s wrong.
Continue reading “LLMs think”
Never Down, Always Up 