News

I'm Not Voting for Trump

There seems to be a lot of debate on both sides of the political aisle, and I’m far from a disinterested observer. While I strive to remain objectively detached in most circumstances, I’ve found that this particular election cycle makes that impossible. Being the polarizing figure that he is, the fundamental reason for this is obviously Donald J. Trump. This isn’t click-bait; I’m not voting for him. The reason for that is much more nuanced than some might expect, so I feel it’s important to explain my reasoning.

A Birthday Epiphany

I never got around to it, and I was going to write about how my birthday went last week, but I just experienced a kind of “Eureka” moment. It was a nice day where Jen and I went to brunch at Original Pancake House, did a bit of shopping for pants and other necessities, and then had dinner at Baxter’s Grille. I had a ribeye (of course) and I indulged myself with their flourless chocolate truffle cake.

Sustained Inaction

I woke up from a dream this morning where someone from my past was being incredibly unfair to me. At some point, I exploded in rage and started to yell about said injustice, and referenced being autistic. This being a dream, the person felt really bad about how they were treating me, and that’s about all I can remember. It’s very common for my dreams to “prime” me for the rest of the day, so of course I spent the next hour or so pondering my past as a result.

Bouncing of Ideas

This is a verbatim conversation I had with an older LLaMa 3 model hosted on my PC via Ollama a few days ago. It started because I wanted a translation for the name of an X account named gatos fazendo gatices, and it just kind of spiraled from there. The topic eventually touched on how AI could be improved, the effects on society, and the nature of cognition itself. It’s clear the LLM has a tendency to restate the question as part of the answer, or at least mine was.

Tripping Out

Last week was a very odd conjunction of coincidence I’m still trying to understand. The aftermath of which left a reverberating melancholy and nostalgia, difficult to dispel, and all too tempting to embrace. It was one of those times where I question the entropy of the universe itself, as pure serendipity would be an impossible convergence. And yet.. An Expert Opinion I drove to Chicago on Tuesday to present a talk on the pg_timeseries extension to the Chicago Postgres User Group.