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It didn’t take long for me to slip. “I built…” Pause. “Claude built…” I don’t remember exactly when it first happened, but it’s happened many times since. I’m not ashamed to admit when I’ve been helped by AI, but I find myself tripping over my words when I describe my work with it. Just now, I wrote and then deleted “our work.”

I am deeply suspicious of anthropomorphizing LLMs too much. I do not dwell on questions like “is ChatGPT conscious?” Still, I can’t bring myself to treat them like tools the way I do my text editor (NeoVim, btw). I say “please” and “thank you” when talking to them. I also feel suspicious of claiming too much credit for the code they write. Though they do not write code without human instruction, however abstracted that instruction is from fleshy fingers touching a keyboard or a fleshy brain choosing every character, it seems wrong to say that I built something when they produced the code. Like I’m changing the meaning of the word “build” to puff myself up.

I’ve found myself unemployed with a bit more free time than usual for the last few months, and I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to learn a bit about LLM tool use and to try out this whole “vibe coding” thing. Inspired in part by one blog post by Thomas Ptacek saying I was nuts not to use LLMs more and another by Thorsten Ball explaining the nuts and bolts of “agents”, I set out to make one with the right ergonomics and features just for me - a CLI application I could run in tmux beside my NeoVim pane while editing code.

I seem to have a habit of announcing my return to blogging roughly every six years. One might reasonably question whether someone who has to post 3 “hello, world” announcements is truly committed to this whole blogging thing. Maybe it’s a sign that I can’t help myself. That no matter how hard I try, I just can’t quit you, dear reader.

Even though some of my old posts make me cringe, and even though I’ll likely feel the same way about my next batch of posts in a further 6 or 12 years, I still think writing in public is an important exercise. Maybe more important than ever. As I’ve said before:

In this video, I cover a few more interesting features of Roam Research that I find helpful for my note-taking. I particularly recommend considering attributes for your page metadata templates - I learned the hard way that I should’ve used them from the beginning. You’ll learn how to create attributes, and how you can use them in queries and attribute tables, as well as some new keyboard shortcuts, how I use emojis, and more!

I did a quick livestream today showing some new (and some not-so-new) features in Roam Research, including:

• Improved precision in inline calculator
• New block reference features, especially for using “template” blocks
• The new mysterious Delta (Δ) button for spaced repetition
• Mermaid diagrams
• Code highlighting support for new languages
• Themes and versioning

Hope you enjoy it!

I’ve done a previous video about some cool features in Roam Research, but this time I decided to show what it actually looks like to take notes on something, live. If you’re wondering if Roam is worth the money, this video should give you an idea of how valuable it is to me. Let me know if you’d like to see more live streams in the future!

I recorded an audio version of my first Intellectual Denial of Service Attacks blog post from March 2019. Let me know what you think!

Over the last few years, I’ve seen several instances of (and reactions against) an intellectual denial of service attack that I’ll call “The Number One Priority”. Maybe you’ve seen it, too.

conversations lately:

“let’s terraform mars!”

“let’s fix earth, first 😒”

“let’s do both!”

”... anyway terraforming venus makes more sense 😒”

“it really doesn’t! [details!]”

“whatever, people are a virus 😒”

“that is a quote from the matrix! the evil guy says it!”

— Mike Solana (@micsolana) March 24, 2019

We cannot do anything until someone’s Number One Priority is satisfied. Exploring Mars? What about the starving Earth children? Developing a decentralized alternative to the current global monetary system? Fix this one first! Building a mobile scooter company to facilitate easy travel in big cities? NOT EVERYONE LIVES IN CITIES!

In this episode, I show how I use Roam Research to take book notes (among other tangents). Hope you enjoy it.

I finally bought a camera for my desktop, so I figured I’d give it a spin with OBS Studio. This was mostly a trial run to see how my mic, camera, video quality, etc. were working. In this short video, I give a quick rundown of how I write Go code, and mention some VIM plugins I find useful.