Thought Bricks

I finally got to upgrading my Linux Mint laptop from 19.3 to 20.0. 19.3 is supported for another year, but it seemed like a good time to give it a try. The upgrade process is well documented and straightforward. Basically, make sure you don’t have pending updates, reboot, take a snapshot, disable 3rd party repos and run an upgrade check. If it comes out OK, run the upgrade. The whole process took about an hour end-to-end on my Lenovo X1 Carbon.

I use AWS occasionally and on those occasions I almost always discover something new and interesting. Today’s discovery is fairly prosaic but interesting in a number of ways: AWS CloudShell. I’m running a little behind the times here as this has been around for well over a year and I’m somewhat familiar with the GCP and Azure versions of the same basic thing. AWS CloudShell is, as the name says, a browser based shell that is integrated into AWS.

Hugo has worked out well for creating this blog. To make it even easier, I wanted to make creation of new posts simpler. To date, I’ve basically looked at the last post and then created the next one in sequence by using the command hugo new ~/myblog/post/content/091.md, for example. To automate that some, I created a bash alias that looks like: alias newpost='hugo new ~/myblog/content/post/$(printf "%03d.md" $(expr $(basename $(ls ~/myblog/content/post/ | tail -n 1) .

I was experimenting with the NHL API the other day. It was interesting and I didn’t want to make things really complicated, but something that I did want was to be able to update the sceeen in place without it scrolling for each update. Curses is the obvious solution for this, but it seemed a little complicated for a simple little program. I did some digging and found Blessed which is a nice Python library that wraps up curses functionality in a much easier to use package.

The NHL has an interesting API that can access a wide range of information. It isn’t officially documented but I found some decent informal documentation. For fun, I wrote a Python program to get the live feed for the games going on today. It’s nothing special but was an interesting diversion. The biggest challenge is working with the live feed when I want to watch the game. The code is below:

Tim O’Reilly has a very thoughtful piece on web3. Since he is a guy who got many things right about web 2.0, I’m inclined to give his ideas some weight and I think he gets an essential truth about web3 right now: it’s too tied up in get-rich-quick thinking and not enough on the real value to be delivered. There will be value delivered by some of the new thinking in web3, but it’s really not clear what.

I felt the need to renumber my blog posts file names from a date (e.g., 20211222.md) to a sequence (e.g., 087.md). Hugo does a nice job of putting posts from the same date into a folder labeled for that date, so the date numbering was restrictive if I wanted to create two posts on one day (admittedly, a rarity). A number also is a nice way for me to keep track of how many posts I’ve written since I started doing this again.

The scale of the GPT-3 neural network is stunning. There are some models that are even larger, but GPT-3 is pretty much state of the art. It’s a very interesting thing to play around with. If you sign up and get a free account, you can access the Playground which has some examples of different kinds of problems (e.g., chat, explain to a second grader, translation, etc.). There is also an API that is straightforward.

Matt Stoller has a very interesting article about The World’s Most Profitable Traffic Jam in which he lays out the economic incentives that are causing big problems with the supply chain. The crux of the problem is a very complex intermodal system that gives large transocean shippers an incentive to slow things down once they hit the ports because they collect fees for congestion and don’t bear the costs. We might actually get some real legislation out of Congress to help sort this problem out.

My son is a senior in high school this year and is taking AP Statistics. My daughter also took this course when she was in high school. Overall, it’s a good set of content and being able to understand and reason with statistics is a valuable life skill. An odd thing is that the teacher has assigned problem sets that require using Python. He doesn’t know Python and I don’t know how he would be able to complete the assignments without having someone at home who does.