Notes From the Field

  • AI Doubles Productivity of Top Researchers

    A study of artificial intelligence on productivity at a materials research lab found that the bottom third of researchers saw no improvement but top researchers doubled in productivity (as measured by materials discovered, patents, and “downstream product innovation”).

  • Why I Like Incidents

    A lot of tech company workers dread incidents. They are a high-pressure and often high-stakes ordeal that requires urgent attention.

  • Emacs Sticky Buffer

    Sometimes I want an emacs buffer to always be visible but I want to ignore it when navigating between buffers.

  • Manual Spam Filter

    I block every unwanted email I receive to keep my email inbox as signalful as possible (“block” is Gmail speak for “create a filter for this one email address and always send it to spam”).

  • AI Search Optimization

    With the growing popularity of tools like Perplexity, OpenAI, Search GPT, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and a healthy dose of skepticism in artificial intelligence (e.

  • Personal Log

    I often find myself wondering what I did yesterday. I want to be able to reflect on the day before as I get ready in the morning for the day to come.

  • FEMA Waffle House Index

    The impact of storms can be measured by the status Waffle House in 1,600 locations from the mid-Atlantic to Florida and across the Gulf Coast.

  • Mañana

    “Mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.

  • Dokku on Aws

    I’m setting up dokku as a personal infrastructure PaaS for running services like the personal indexing service.

  • Limitations of IOS Shortcuts

    Shortcuts add a scripting layer on top of iOS (and macOS but I don’t use that) that can be executed across any app or screen.