Blogs on Dean Dot Dog

Techno Pareidolia

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A Little Man in a Box

Imagine: An anthropologist visits a remote community who, until very recently, have been cut off the rest of the world and modern technology. The anthropologist meets with the village chief, who asks the anthropologist to demonstrate some piece of technology that she brought with her from the outside world. The anthropologist thinks for a moment, then remembers she has an old all-in-one CRT television and VHS player in van. This will rely impress them, she thinks.

Glucose Monitoring Self-Study

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A little background

A friend who is a bit of a biohacking nerd mentioned to me that he had a “hookup” for off-prescription continuous glucose monitors. I’m not quite sure what that meant, but I think some kind of middle-man in Germany was involved. In any case, this sounded like an invitation to do some self-experimentation so next time we hung out I handed him some cash and he handed me a small box containing a Freestyle Libre 3.

Parables About Wealth

Wed, 11 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Two Short Parables

Imagine a little town on an island. The townspeople are hardworking and, with their combined efforts, have managed to create a degree of meager prosperity for themselves. Some of them are farmers, some graze sheep, and some practice a variety of trades: making shoes, baking bread, etc. Each person produces what they can, and on the market day the town is busy with everyone buying and selling their wares. Chickens are sold for gold which are used to buy some carrots, or perhaps taken home to save up to buy a new plow from the blacksmith. But despite making the best of their resources, the townspeople are no strangers to want. It’s hardly uncommon, especially in years of poor harvest, for people to curse their fortune: “If only I had a bit more gold, I could buy another loaf of bread,” thinks one of the villagers to themselves; “If only I had a bit more gold, I could replace my old worn out clothes,” mutters another under his breath. Whenever the townspeople dwell on these kinds of thoughts, they can’t help but think about the dragon. You see, at the center of this island is an enormous dormant volcano where the grand dragon sleeps atop a gleaming horde of gold, waking only to devour the rare intruder who is foolish enough to venture inside.

Shel Silverstein GPT-3

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A few poems

I recently had the opportunity to play around with OpenAI’s API for their GPT-3 language model. Given some natural language prompt, GPT-3 will try to create text that answers a question, continues a story, creates a list, or whatever seems to make sense in context. The flexibility and power of the model is pretty incredible.

One thing you can do with the API is create a fine-tuned version of GPT-3 based on your own dataset of example text, so that the model’s output more specifically targets a particular format or style. So after using the stock models to make the AI write me the plot of a movie about a witch who goes to prom, and after I got a few suggestions of campaign slogans for a fish who is running for president, I decided I wanted to try building a fine-tuned model for generating poetry.

Pandemic Personal Finances Year in Review

Mon, 17 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Each year at tax season, I go through the exercise of adding up all the income my wife and I made over the last year, and each year, I find myself wondering where the heck all that money actually went. As it happens, with nearly all of my spending happening through credit cards, this is actually a fairly easy question to track.

I like to use Personal Capital as a dashboard of my finances and spending. It allows bulk csv download of credit card transactions over any time period with auto-categorization by spending type. In past years, I’ve had fun using this for a little “household finances year in review” data analysis: How often do we go out to eat? What did all that online clothes shopping add up to, net of returns? etc. In addition to being a check on my budgeting and spending, I’ve found that looking through this data is also like a ledger of my behavior, listing all the things I did and places I went.

A Brief Etiology of Bullshit

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re reading this, I probably don’t have to tell you that Donald Trump et al are lying about election fraud. Like me, you probably knew that Trump had complained of rigged elections in every contest since at least 2012 and laid out in no uncertain terms how he planned to do the same this year, so that when he inevitably began his caps lock polemicizing, you were ready to just kind of tune him out.

Exploring the Covid "Cost Mitigation Frontier"

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The tradeoffs we face

We did a bad job closing the economy and we’re doing a bad job of “reopening” it. But for as much criticism as there’s been for the handling of Covid-19 at the national and local levels, it’s important to keep in perspective that the alternatives would be merely less worse: there’s no set of policies in front of us that doesn’t result in severe costs to lives and livelihoods. It’s like a major natural disaster has befallen us: as the category five hurricane makes landfall, setting out sandbags and boarding up windows certainly helps the situation, but we’re still getting hit by a hurricane. The pandemic threatens enormous costs in terms of physical suffering and deaths, but to mitigate it requires paying dearly in economic and social costs.

Five Years of My Struggle

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I think about the books that have most affected me, or otherwise loom significant in my memory, it’s the longest ones that come to mind first: the types of books whose girth and weight can make reading in bed a challenge, or get left behind on vacation because they didn’t fit in my carry-on bag. I’ll admit there is a certain pride to be gained by casually leaving a Big Ass Book on my nightstand or coffee table for guests to look upon with (what I can only presume to be) awe, but that’s not what makes them special. When I’m working my way through the pages of any book, I can feel its presence a little bit even when away from it; the characters and themes simmer quietly in the back of my mind while they wait to get picked up again, faintly coloring the rest of my waking life. And so, the experience of reading a book includes not just the moments when my eyes are passing over the pages, but to some degree the entire elapsed time between front and back covers. A longer book, that might takes months to complete, means that much more time spent dwelling within the book’s world, while events in the text and events in my actual life proceed along in parallel. And so memories of some books become memories of periods in my life, such as “the winter of my senior year of college when I was reading The Brothers Karamozov”, or “when I was juggling two bookmarks in Infinite Jest and questioning how much more of my 20s I wanted to spend living in Palo Alto”.

Watching NYC Subways Shut Down

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Like a lot of people, I’ve been obsessively tracking the spread of COVID-19 through graphs rapidly moving up and to the right. So, to mix things up, here’s a new way to track the impact of the pandemic through graphs that are going down with MTA turnstile data. Each week, the MTA publishes a data dump of entry counters for every subway turnstile. I used this to measure the decrease in people movement over the last few weeks in New York City. When exactly did people start adjusting their behavior? Where has movement decreased the most?

Pandemic POV

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve always thought that a bike is the best way to explore a city, and when non-essential car trips are banned, all the better. With greatly reduced traffic, the city has never been better for biking. I did a loop around SF trying to hit spots that are normally pretty bustling and just see what the city looks like right now.

Some neighborhoods still had cars and people about, albeit less than usual. But areas further from where people live, like the Embarcadero or Fisherman’s Wharf, felt eerily abandoned. I tried to appreciate seeing this empty view of the city as something special that I may not have the chance to see again.