Weeknotes: Week of 3/29/26
Published: Apr 5th, 2026 š
Whatās New
Griefādisplaced in time.
In the early 2020s I was pretty involved with a neighborhood mutual aid group, mostly on the tech side. One of the other members from the early days of that group, basically the woman who was handling the tech needs pretty much on her own when I joined up, apparently passed away in 2023. I only found out about it this week because the orgās domain name, which she registered in 2021, finally expired and they contacted me hoping I had access still.
Five years since she registered the domain. Three since she passed. The site may be down temporarily, but the mutual aid group is still here. Neighbors helping neighbors, keeping each other safe.
May her memory be a blessing.
Reading
- I finished reading Twin Wolves, a short and sweet e-book by friend of the site Q. Ethan McCallum. Qās experience with risk management, machine learning, and AI (but like, real AI) runs deep and heās distilled a portion of it into this book, which I think can be accurately summarized as āhow to do risk management with AIā. I think this is a fantastic read for any engineer (or manager) who is being asked to implement LLM-based functionality and wants to be able to think clearly about what the risks and rewards might be. Highly recommended!
Other Things Besides Reading
- Listened to the Ologies Quilting episode and really enjoyed it. Now Iām toying with the idea of making the #OlogiesQuilt.
- We went to Puppetpalooza on Friday night! Puppetpaloooza is the annual Chicago Puppet festival celebrating puppets in music, headlined by Reverend Punchfizz and The Congregation. The Reverend always puts on a good show, but I wasnāt really able to see most of the other acts very well because the bar was incredibly packed. A good problem to have, but I hope they find a bigger venue next year. We still had a great time, though!
- I signed up for the beta over at gem.coop! Not only does that mean Iām helping to support an actual community alternative to RubyGems, but I also get to have access to some of their beta features like namespaces and cooldowns. Pretty neat!