🕰️ Less frequent newsletters from now on
It’s been six months since the last one of these, and it was six months since the one before that.
That’s a little because we got busy with work, but also because life’s settled down a bunch and there’s not as much newsworthy going on now as there once was.
But we now have six months of backlog, and so!
🌞 Eclipse
In April my parents came to visit and we drove up to Lake Erie to watch the eclipse!
It was much more impressive than I expected it to be, and I was particularly struck by how badly it’s caught by camera. The experience just isn’t conveyed at all by photos. If you’ve the chance, there’re eclipses in Spain in 2026 and 2027, and in Australia in 2028.
Two related things I’m happy with:
The weather was forecast as cloudy in the weeks leading up to the eclipse, and there was a lot of adjusting-of-plans based on weather.us’s raw weather model output, NOAA’s live satellite imagery and Eclipseophile’s summary of the historic data. That we nailed a ten-minute window between the clouds feels both like wild luck and a payoff from a careful set-up.
Following the eclipse, we and a million other people drove back south from Erie. We left at about 2pm and got back to DC at 2am. It was twelve hours of Ella & I alternating shifts, and I’m kinda proud we were chill through the whole of it.
🥄 Cooking
I’ve long claimed I don’t have any interests outside of work, but while repacking the cabinets recently I realize that’s just not true.
Since lockdown - and especially since moving to DC and working from home - cooking’s grown into my principal displacement activity. I cook lunch & dinner most days, I try at least one new recipe a week, and I watch way too much cooking YouTube.
Speaking of, I have found no reliable way to know which cookery YouTubers actually produce good recipes other than to just try a few of their ideas. There’s a weak predictor of
Do they iterate on recipes before presenting them?
but it’s not a sure thing. Usually that pushes me away from anyone presenting themselves as ‘traditional’ or ‘authentic’ and towards ‘professional chefs & recipe developers’, but again it’s only a weak indicator.
Some of my faves:
Chinese Cooking Demystified and ChainBaker are superb for their respective domains.
Kenji Lopez-Alt is more responsible than anyone for bringing scientifically-minded cooking to the masses. SeriousEats was his old haunt and is still a good repository >ten years on.
ChefSteps, America’s Test Kitchen and Minute Food are good sources of principles and techniques.
Latif’s (British Indian), Ethan Chlebowski (everything), Brian Lagerstrom (pizza), Bong Eats (Bengali), Rick Bayless (Mexican), SheSimmers (Thai): I’ve all had a few good recipes from, but I haven’t tried enough of their recipes yet to be fully confident in them.
Much of the scientific stuff is descended from Modernist Cuisine, which will never be in my budget but I hope to one day sit down and read a good pirated copy of.
🪐 SF/F Recommendations
My other displacement activity is still reading too much sci fi & fantasy, and I recently wrote up my all-time recommendations for some friends.
✈️ Bicoastal Life
I’ve been spending a week a month in SF for a year now. It’s been a much better experience than I expected when we first moved to DC!
A big part of that is that SF is where all the me-shaped people in the world congregate. More than that, it’s the place where I can work with those people on challenging things. The shared trauma of pushing through a challenging project together is a kind of fertile ground for friendship that is hard to replicate outside of school or work, and so even after a year away most of my friends are still in SF.
And Ella’s found pretty much the same thing in DC: DC is where all the Ella-shaped people of the world congregate, and here she has a ready supply of challenging projects to struggle through arm-in-arm with those folk.
And so we’re probably going to do this bicoastal thing for the foreseeable future. There’ll be an apartment on each coast, both of us will spend some of each month in each place, and we’ll schedule as needed to make sure we can still spend most of our time together.
It’ll be expensive and it’ll be exhausting and it’s kinda ridiculous, but considering the impact we have in our respective cities and how happy we are together, it’s wildly better than any of the alternatives.
🎶 Sonnet
Copilot has been around for years now, but it never hit the spot for me or most of the other senior engineers I work with. It felt like something that was useful if you were writing a lot of boilerplate for common applications, but my role (and most other senior roles) are much more about finicky alterations to niche code.
But Anthropic released Sonnet 3.5 a few months back and it’s the first language model I actually use all-day, every day. I have it hooked up with Zed, and being able to punt entire directories into Sonnet’s context and get useful Q&A out is both magical & scary.
I got into the machine learning game ten years ago because DeepMind’s 2012 Atari stuff unsettled me, made me feel like something big was on the horizon. Then four years ago I looked at GPT-3’s words-in words-out and saw enough of my behavior in there to change industry & continent.
But it’s taken until now for the models to enter into my economic domain, and even with all those years of intellectual preparation it’s still an emotional thing to have happen.
🐈 Cats
Courtesy of our downstairs neighbor; best with sound: