Inferred competence is the act of correlating performance of a highly complex range of tasks from a single performance of one (or a few) tasks. When Anthony Bourdain wanted to hire a cook, he’d invite the candidate into his kitchen, and issue a single command: Make me an omelette. A thoughtful CI pipeline tries to duplicate that same simplicity.
How To Open a Lockbox Gets 100K Views
9/11 Weekend in New York City
On September 11, 2001, my wife lived less than a mile away from ground zero. We hadn’t yet met. I went to work that morning, at my office in San Francisco, not even aware that thousands of people had already died in New York. On the 20th anniversary of the attacks, I told my daughters how I found out about the airplanes hitting the towers.
Five Types of Celebrity in the Disinformation Age
CI/CD Dashboards for Observability of Software Build Failures
When you’re one of 42 developers spread out across 5 timezones waiting to merge work into master, flaky test failures in CI can really chap your ass. The video below is a brief show-and-tell of the CI/CD tools and processes I put into place in the summer of 2020 to fix that problem for my engineering team. Details are summarized below the video.
Vaccination Card Scanner Part 2
AI-based card scanner app that lets you upload an image and view the result. Uses AWS textract and rekognition to determine if your file is a valid US covid vaccination card… or a picture of a cat. 😂
E Pluribus Unum: 13 Republican and Democratic States in Charts
Contrary to the absurd belief that republicans are rugged individualists, born in log cabins they built with their own bare hands red states like Texas frequently receive WAY MORE from the federal government than they give. Put another way, red states, on average, enjoy the redistributed wealth produced in places exactly like New York and New Jersey. This blog post lays it out in a series of charts.
80 pound weighted chin up on gymnastics rings
One of my feats of dad strength – a weighted chin-up. This particular one was done with 80 lbs, using 3 kettlebells strapped to my waist.
Using AI to Discern Cats from CDC Vaccination Cards
The NYC Covid Safe app can’t tell the difference between a valid CDC vaccination card and a picture of a cat. Doing this isn’t just possible, it’s pretty easy. With AI – using node.js, textract, and rekognition – in fewer than 300 lines of code.
15 Foot Hands-only Rope Climb with 35 pounds
As part of my ongoing feats of dad-strength benchmarks, I did a fifteen foot hands-only rope climb with a 35lb kettlebell attached to my waist.
Feats of “Dad Strength”
Dad strength is the kind of physical strength that’s useful when stuff goes wrong and people are depending on you — in clutch situations. Every dad ought to meet or exceed his own minimal definition of strong, but I think these strength benchmarks are generally applicable because they scale to any weight.
Concerns of July 13, 2021
Simple Randori Check List
Improving your Jiu Jitsu is a bit like software development in that you want to be able to try new things, experiment, and collect data – when the stakes are low. Effective training should be empirical, not emotional. Stop giving a crap if you get tapped out during randori, and become more interested in collecting data.
Essential Workplace Requirements
Animatronic AI: Story Generator
AI-Generated Short Story: Time to Dial 911
A story by run_2 (an up-and-coming retrained gpt-2 model). A young assistant professor of classics receives an email from the department chair. It is addressed to “your excellency”. Is he a robot?! All he wants is a a high-end apartment in New York City, but isn't even aware that he already lives in a house the size of Delaware.
AI-Generated Short Story: Water is just Earth Soup
AI-Generated Short Story: Malaysian Sasquatch Guard
My Mother
When I was a boy, I remember the amazing bedtime stories my mom would tell me about ancient times in Korea, about monks and wisemen and sorcerers. She was a remarkable storyteller and teacher. Half the time, I wasn’t sure if she was just making stuff up. I tried testing her by asking her to retell stories (to identify inconsistencies) but I don’t think I actually cared about keeping score. The stories were that good. She taught me how to grow vegetables, how to use an abacus, how to roller skate, how to write cursive letters, how to draw a face, how to invent games from string. She did this without the internet.