Originally to my mother who is a bibliophile who loves libraries as much as a person can.
This question was posed to patrons of the library today. Can you imagine Seattle without its libraries? I can. It’s actually made very easy by SPL itself. My local library shut down on Jan 25, 2025 until “Late 2026”. My closest library is Green Lake, a 1.5 mile walk each way. If you only go to the library twice every 6 months like I do, that isn’t that big a deal. If you need the exercise or have a bus pass, you can just spend the time. But even when my library was open, I found it to be a pretty minor landmark. Because I have Suzzallo, Allen, Engineering library, Math library, Music library, East Asian library, and libraries I don’t even know about I go there. I’m kinda spoiled for libraries. I do use the online features of SPL quite a lot – the audiobook, an ebook here and there, Kanopy, the newspaper access, and the search feature.
This dystopian vision allows us to consider what kind of world we want to live in.
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May 4-5, 2025
I’m getting closer to the end of Scott Harris’ Character Art Course. I started in 2020 and tried to do as much of the homework as I could. As I learned more, I realized how difficult the homework would be to do legitimately. I wrote down the time commitment he was suggesting and it is massive. Here I’ll do a bit of the math just for fun. See below. If you want to become a good artist, you need to have a lot of muscle memory. Where does that muscle memory come from? From drawing, painting, and so on. If you have time and want to get to it, the homework is a pretty powerful tool. Along with the course which explains why bad drawings look bad, how to improve your character art, and so on, this course is something else. This blog post goes into my experience.
I’m not going to say it’s perfect. If it was, I would’ve finished the course and by now I’d be a skilled artist.. Oh wait. I think it makes sense to draw to show you what I mean. You see M1A1, the first assignment (module 1 assignment 1) tells us to draw a character so that we can look back over time to see how much our art has improved. This is helpful in getting a mindset of growth – that you most certainly need. Because if you’re taking a drawing course, you probably think that your character art looks bad. How do we go about understanding good vs bad?
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April 4-20, 2025
Notebook Python Source code
Electronics learning and development are an underserved market for Generative AI. In a handful of tests, I determined that leaders in the market do not do a good job of creating valid circuits when the information is readily available on the internet. Generative AI has most of the capabilities necessary to achieve this substantial goal of generating valid circuits from description. In this code I use few-shot prompting with hand-written circuits tested by a hobbyist. The project also demonstrates the opportunity to use image understanding in the context without needing a different provider. Indeed in tests, we found it possible to get Gemini to generate a netlist based on an image.
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by Javantea
March 18, 2025
Duolingo has a lot of problems. I know this because I've spent 1232 days learning Portuguese, Spanish, and a little bit of Finnish and Klingon. I have a 1232 day streak and am in obsidian league. I'm hoping that the developers at Duolingo who are watching for negative sentiment find this post. Here's my duome if you want to see where I'm at.
Duolingo is for beginners. If you end up at day 400 in Duolingo, you might think that it is useful for intermediate and advanced speakers. This isn't true. The only argument that I have really accepted for why intermediate learners should accept Duolingo as a daily tool is that it's important to avoid losing ground in a language. By spending a few minutes you're able to avoid dramatic loss of vocabulary that often coincides with not using a language for weeks.
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