For all you #jekyll and #hugo users, a question: Did you consider #pelican (https://getpelican.com/). If not, why not? If you did, why did you not choose it?

All my vibe coded projects in 2025: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Dec/my-vibe-coded-projects-in-2025/ #ai #llm #vibecoding

Back when I wrote in Word and LaTeX, I would naturally use the em-dash all the time. It's sad that it has become a marker of AI generated content. In protest, I've converted all the hyphens in my blog to em-dashes […]

#Irreal: #blogging Without #emacs https://irreal.org/blog/?p=13483 Well, I'm even worse: I took a break from blogging for a couple of years until I had the first working version of *the* blogging system I wanted to use for my #orgmode workflow: #lazyblorg 🙄 https://karl-voit.at/tags/lazyblorg/

Remember the #accessibility lawsuit that resulted in UC Berkeley taking down tons of free educational material in 2016? They settled in 2022, and agreed to restore much of the material by Dec 2025. Does anyone have an update on it? […]

Writing #math in #latex is so much nicer with an #llm. I write my equations without a lot of the syntax, and just let the LLM clean it up. I've done this a lot in the last few weeks and it hasn't made a single mistake! #mathematics #ai

Gemini 3.0 likes to stoke my ego: "Since you are using Org Mode, you have the most powerful query engine available for this." #emacs #orgmode

@simon Just added Opus 4.5 pelican on a bicycle (raytracer edition) here: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/ Significantly worse than Opus 4.1! #povray #llm #opus45 #pelican

I've updated my LLM raytraced pelicans to include GPT-5.1 models: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/ #pelican #llm #povray

Breaking news (to me): "If wheel running is indeed caused by captive housing, wild mice are not expected to use a running wheel in nature. This however, to our knowledge, has never been tested. Here, we show that when running wheels are placed in nature […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

Study: Elon Musk's behavior resulted in over 1 million fewer Tesla sales, and also boosted the sales of competitor EVs. https://www.nber.org/papers/w34413 #musk #elonmusk #tesla

I strongly recommend the book "I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt". https://tinyurl.com/iscaaigwtlts About a smart woman who grew up in poverty, and how she tried to make sense of it all. Audiobook is excellent - narrated by the author herself. #capitalism

A twist on @simon getting LLMs to draw pelicans on bicycles: Getting it to do it using a raytracer: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/ #llm #raytracing #povray

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Always provide a printable version of your docs! Pointing fingers at you, Anthropic! 😠 (No, Markdown files are not sufficient!)

I just realized that the movie "Memento" taught us about LLMs. The main character has a short context window, and has to operate with just his knowledge prior to a cutoff date, and that context window. https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/insights-a-25-year-old-movie-can-give-us-on-llms/ […]

"Every hard drive I’ve ever bought has been larger than all my previous hard drives combined. And this is without even trying." https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Sep/every-hard-drive-ive-owned-has-been-larger-than-all-my-previous-ones-combined/

I place a `from pprint import pprint` statement in all my .py files. A coworker always removes them, and I'd revert his changes. Last night I was vibe coding with GPT-5, and it not only removed the import, it removed an actual pprint statement!🤦 I can hear my coworker laughing remotely. #llm

I began using #jj only about 2 months ago. I liked it, but didn't find it revolutionary. Then this week I had to use vanilla #git. So, so painful! I immediately missed `jj new` and the like. So of course, I made a song praising #jujutsu […]

as our timeline-addled memories erode important public knowledge, lest we forget that martin kool built a website where you can play King's Quest 1-3, Space Quest 1 & 2, and the Black Cauldron in live online multiplayer with hundreds of other people, right in a […] [Original post on dialup.cafe]

Has anyone figured out how to use #aider with #jj ? I have set jj to colocate with git, and aider not to autocommit, but I still get: #jujutsu

I managed to get #gemini to figure out my nephew's name. I wrote an #mcp server to let it access my (locally stored) emails. https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/May/gemini-figured-out-my-nephews-name/ #ai #llm #chatgpt #gpt

What do you call fictional non-fition? https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Apr/fictional-non-fiction/ #writing #language #vocabulary

An appeal to #documentation authors: Please ensure there is a way to print your whole documentation. https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Apr/an-appeal-to-documentation-owners/

When #ai encounters #fsharp ..... just #python :(

I rode in a #lyft the other day and there was an entertainment display that occasionally showed me #ads . Probably the first time I gave a driver a low rating.

No longer a loyal #southwest customer: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/11/southwest-airlines-charge-checked-bags.html

I had a sad feeling for a moment, then it passed. #nethack #cat

I upgraded #emacs from 28.x to 29.x. org-roam stopped working. Turns out on #gentoo, Emacs isn't compiled with #sqlite support. I added it to the USE flags and it works now.

The #orgmode tracker (Woof!) is down. Anyone know how long it's been down for? https://tracker.orgmode.org/

"That strikes home, because I know quite well that I wouldn’t want to give up my learning in order to occupy myself with the trivialities of any business. Fortunately, my learning turned out to be profitable as Isaac Berman’s did not, so I was never in a position of having to leave it to a […]

When you read articles on a browser, the things competing for your attention are email, social networks, and other web sites. Shifting to printing articles (or listening to them) led to a greater shift: Moving from articles/blogs back into books […]

@beetle_b https://kiko.io/post/Mentions-United-Native-Mastodon-Provider/

Yes, one can add #fediverse or #mastodon #comments to a static site like #pelican, #jekyll or #hugo. Respond to this toot to see your comment show up on my blog post below. https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Jan/adding-fediverse-comments-to-my-static-site/

Manager: Don't refactor. It already works! It's a waste of time. Me: OK, the next time I present something, I'll use my first Powerpoint draft. The information is all there! A reminder that we write programs for the humans, not for the machine […]

Why are entertainment UIs so prone to leaking spoilers? With recorded sports games, a mere "pause" can tell you who won the match. Tennis: The first set is over. You pause and the UI tells you you're halfway through. Now you know who won the match […]

Using LLMs to clean up the output of speech recognition has been a game changer for me in the past year: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/Dec/cleaning-up-speech-recognition-with-gpt/ Note: I've improved my workflow compared to that post. I should write a followup. #gpt #chatgpt #llm […]

Tax season will soon be upon us. Paying a professional tax preparer is a waste of money. Thrice in my life I've used their services. And *all* three times they made errors that I had to fix: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Nov/do-you-trust-your-tax-preparer/ #tax

The trouble with skeptics: "I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting’s sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath." – Rene […]

A while ago I made a checklist when evaluating cloud backup solutions: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2022/Jul/checklist-for-evaluating-cloud-backup-services/

Taming my soda addiction: 1. Buy individual cans, not packs. 2. Avoid triggering food (salt + fat) 3. Substitute it with a small sweet thing (e.g. Tic Tac). 4. Get addicted to slushy soda. 5. Drink smaller cans (250ml max) 6. Drink Spindrift instead […]

Some years ago I switched to consuming Internet articles offline - by printing them. It's been transformative. No ads. Almost like reading a newspaper/magazine in the old days. And paper beats screens - any day! https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2021/Dec/consuming-articles-offline/

"Mathematics is of two kinds, Rigorous and Physical. The former is Narrow: the latter Bold and Broad. To have to stop to formulate rigorous demonstrations would put a stop to most physico-mathematical enquiries. Am I to refuse to eat because I do not fully understand the mechanism of […]

It's the new year! Here's a detailed guide on planning for the year: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2019/Jan/annual-planning/ #newyear #resolution

A simple solution to eliminate all unwanted email: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Sep/solving-my-email-problem/ To quote an HN reader: "… the strategy of continuing to unsubscribe from things is based on the flawed idea that i want to opt-in to an ongoing maintenance task for the rest of […]

Do you use xonsh? Do you hate it when midnight commander doesn't exit into the directory you were in? This post has the fix: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2018/Apr/xonsh-and-midnight-commander/ #mc #midnightcommander #xonsh

Social Proof, and how to break the spell of the Bystander Effect (as is commonly taught in emergency trainings): https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2017/May/social-proof-and-the-bystander-effect/ #influence #bystandereffect

For years I felt the Golden Rule should be demoted to the Bronze rule. It often gets me into trouble. I occasionally bump into people who have had similar negative experiences with it. The book *Influence* by psychologist Robert Cialdini does a great job of explaining why the rule often fails […]

One thing I learned performing both coding and non-coding engineering jobs: Programming gives me *less* ergonomic pains than other engineering. There's a lot more tedious computer work in non-SW engineering jobs. https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2016/Jan/code-monkey-or-cad-monkey/ #ergonomics #pain

Simulating the effect of a tiny spotlight moving across print photos in the dark - something that can give a static photo a 3D effect. https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2015/Dec/shine-a-spotlight-on-those-photos/ I didn't quite achieve the effect I had seen with print photos. #photography

An analysis on whether it's better to put extra money to pay down your #mortgage or #invest it elsewhere: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2015/Jan/luminosity-masks-in-darktable/ The conclusion? If you are looking at a long enough timespan (e.g. 15 years), you're usually better off investing if […]