Motivation

Years ago when I was still in university, I had the opportunity to learn from Tiago Forte back when he was first getting his start in becoming a sort of note taking guru. I was slammed with trying to complete two thesis (double major), some tough math classes, an RA gig in the freshmen dorms, and trying to apply for the peace corps (under the old system mind you). I was originally just supposed to just get his advice on how to put my peace corps application together but after simply admitting that I felt completely overwhelmed and unable to put in the time to do it. Tiago calmed me down over zoom and instead offered to give me a rundown on his task management system that he was trying to sell a course on. Since then I’ve watched him go from teaching David Allen’s Get Things Done, to a class on Evernote, onto a more generalized Building a Second Brain course, and now I believe Personal Knowledge Management is what he terms his craft now.

Thoughts on the LA Fires

I’m currently sitting in a park by the Taipei Expo Center and Los Angeles is experiencing what could very easily be one of the most destructive natural disasters in recent history. I myself recall getting a call one day from my office informing me that the hillside by my mother’s home was on fire and if I had gotten my cat out. I remember driving like a maniac back home and shouting in fury at people who parked their cars along the road up to our family home with phones outstretched to film the fire and smoke. The cat was evacuated prior by the friend of my late mother who called. While I spent a few nights in apprehension waiting to see if everything would go up in smoke, thankfully aside from a lot of soot our home remained untouched.

Grief: Final thoughts

This is the final part of my three part set of reflections on grief you can find part one and part two in these links.

How to Vote in US Elections from Taiwan: Quick Guide

Here’s the main steps for U.S. citizens living in Taiwan who want to vote in the upcoming U.S. federal elections based on information from the American Institute of Taiwan:

watering plants

This is part two in my own personal reflections on grief. Along with commentary about a book about life falling apart, weird 90s N64 games, and attempting to keep orchids alive.

First things

what follows is a personal walk through a difficult time in my life. There’s going to discussions of topics relating to cancer, death, grief, hopelessness, anger, and spoilers for the N64 game Majora’s Mask. Before experiencing any of these things I never quite understood content warnings but do now. Take them seriously before proceeding. And if this all hit close to home, I’m hope you find comfort here or in the ocean of love that surrounds all of us.

A Simple yet Useful Local LLM Project

Hey everyone like all of you (hopefully), I too have been looking at large langauge models and trying to integrate them into my workflows in new and creative ways. In particular I’ve been enjoying working with the Ollama project which is a framework for working with locally available open source large language models, aka do chatgpt at home for free. Here’s a short script I created from Ollama’s examples that takes in a url and produces a summary of the contents. I use this along with my read it later apps to create short summary documents to store in my obsidian vault. Thereby integrating pieces of information into my boarder and searchable second brain just by providing a url, eventually I want to hook this up to the newsletters I read so I can automate the process further. Here’s the full script with added comments.

What could go wrong when invoking the legacy of Cyrus the Great?

I grew up going to private baptist elementary school and while my beliefs have evolved from the version of christian reconstructionism espoused there I don’t regret reading the bible from end to end as a part of our curriculum. America is an overwhelmingly Christian country, and while I would fundamentally oppose making the bible a part of school’s curriculum. Given the amount of times it’s used to justify policy stances or used in civic speech, understanding it gives one an edge in decoding political messages. One that’s been around ever since Trump started courting and successfully winning over evangelicals has been the idea that Trump, while imperfect, was being used by God for good ends.

Why do we keep on getting narcisists running things?

Oddly as we move up in responsibilties we experience less oversight, though our impact and potential to really screw things up is higher. Think about the CEO of a large fastfood chain and think of the janitor cleaning the toilets. One has a sign in sheet and can be let go when the vibes feel right. It’s not the one in the suit. Why do we take this a granted? And why do we seem to think of it as natural. I’ve been delving into ancient Chinese and Roman history (I do think about it a lot) and a runing theme is a cycle of good and bad emperors. It seems comical to me that plenty smart philosophers of those times couldn’t get past the idea that they needed some kind of dude who wielded absolute power. Times can be exquisite if you get marcus arelius but usually you get a Nero. Accountablity is annoying, watching the news is exhausting, showing up to the local city council or HOA to call out petty corruption is a drag. The HOA is beautiful in theory but in practice seems to be where narcissist who were smart enough to get on the school board go to act out their condition. Note I understand narcissism to be a medical condition, but until we manage narcissism like they do in Aldous Huxley’s Island they at least need to be kept away from any buttons. I think we are doomed to repeat bad emperor cycles until we do see holding groups and those in authority accountable like we see throwing our litter in the correct waste bin. Because not even courts given the title supreme will do it for you.

Save money use a static website generator

I created my first youtube video and it’s a overly long and meticulous tutorial on creating a completely free website with github pages, similar to the website hosting this blog.

Trump’s Election Defense Fund

I’m slowly but surely picking away at getting a interactive UI in front of the political campaign text messages I’ve been collecting for the past year or so but while I dally between different frameworks and troubleshoot my etl (excited to try out airflow for this). I figured I’d give a shout out to the fact that some of the data I’ve been gathering has been mentioned in the news lately.

Since around the 2020 election I’ve been getting regular text messages from both the Biden and Trump campaign via text messages. In preparation for the midterm elections in 2022 I decided to work at mining these text messages as data to gain better insight into how these medium in used in partisan campaigns and try to decipher how these campaigns view their base. The dataset currently spans January 2021 to the current date of me writing this November 2021 and contains all of the text messages sent to me from 88022 which is the Trump campaign, 52005 the Warnock campaign, and 43367 the Biden campaign. My ultimate vision for this project is to gather text messages from as many campaigns as possible and display both the text and visualizations in a web based dashboard. But for now this is a preview of the data as it stands today.

Introduction

With the election behind us once again the electoral college, that most peculiar feature of American presidential elections is bubbling up as a part of the conversation. Typically when the topic comes up it usually pits Democrats against Republicans, with Democrats favoring an overturn of the system and with the Republicans favoring the system in place. While it’s pretty apparent that the electoral college does disadvantage Democrats who are primarily located in more urban states. I was curious to see if it in fact also disenfranchises Republicans as well. The strongest argument that I hear in favor for the electoral college is that it gives a bump to more rural populations who would otherwise never have their concerns met. And it’s typically Republican voices that bring up this concern. Which I don’t fault them for advocating for their consituents. But I’m not sure if addressing that concern on a state level really makes much sense. While our typical idea of a rural voter might be someone living in Kansas or other midwestern states. I think we underestimate how rural/Republican huge swaths of even very populous states can be. So I decided to pull some state level data on the population, number of registered voters, and their partisan composition and see if there is a difference in partisan composition in more populous states compared to the average composition.

Adding user comments to your website

In this post I’ll go over how to expand a basic html serving flask website to a more dynamic website including content that you the web developer has put in and content added by users of the site. While creating comments is the clearest use case for these techniques. The broad strokes apply to most cases when you want information from your front end to communicate with your backend.

Programmatic language aquisition

It dawned on me the other day while talking to someone new to programming that learning a programming language follows steps that mirror human language aquisition.

Transforming Rows into Columns

SQL is pretty straight forward to get into yet despite the ubiquity of SQL Databases, there is comparatively few online resources on how to think about and troubleshoot complex queries. While it’s maybe not the most alluring aspect of data science, it’s pretty darn near foundational. In my current job, basically my entire job in one shape or form goes back to queries to our MySQL Database. While generally you want to design your database in a manner that makes reading and writing to the database easier. You’ll often find yourself in situations where you’ll have to use more sophisticated SQL queries. One common case basically involves transforming data that is held in rows into columns. This can be achieved in a crosstab query.

Introducing Xlwings

In this final part of this tutorial series, we’ll go over how to make a basic yet functional front end for what we’ve created so far in this tutorial series. Typically when we refer to the front-end of our application we are referring to how a user interacts with the program we’ve written. A front end can take the form of a graphical user interface (GUI) which runs on a user’s own machine, or more commonly these days on a mobile platform (iPhone, android) or on a web site as a web application. For data science projects the web app is usually the optimal way to distribute your work out to the wider world. So If you’re looking to bee line to that step I’d suggest looking into Flask for the web development aspect and heroku for deployment.

Data and Visualization with Jupyter

Jupyter notebooks were originally conceived of as a portable means of combining code and written research, and in my opinion an excellent environment for exploring data and toying around with different data engineering operations.

Performing Descriptive Stats with Python

In my previous post we started with downloading and installing the Anaconda python distribution and loaded our health data CVS into a Python interpreter. I know that a lot of that installation work and perhaps figuring out pathing may have been frustrating. But like anything new we do, those initial challenges and frustrations are what build experience.

Getting started with Python

For this series I’m going to approach introducing the tools and techniques of Data Science, in a manner I’ve so far not seen online yet. Most introductions to Data Science revolve around datasets that are already well known and with the foreknowledge of what can and cannot be extracted from it. A certain 20Th century tragedy and various flower specimens come to mind. While there’s not exactly wrong with learning data science through these kinds of examples, I think it removes the element of data science I personally love the most: discovery!

Getting started in the Programming World

There are a myriad of ways to get started programming and in general I don’t really prescribe to any notion that there’s one or even a few right ways to start out. What I think is important is that you start getting into a process of producing code and seeing the results. And I think the best way to do that is to learn to code via projects. I’ve heard from countless people that they tried learning to program but quickly dropped off because they spent hours and hours writing scripts that really didn’t do anything. I don’t think it’s their fault but a lot of programming tutorials out there seem to be fixated on covering all the basics until they moving on to producing actionable artifacts. I’m sure for the more orderly left brain people that makes sense, but for me personally no amount of will power is sufficient to keep me doing something that doesn’t have a clear goal to strive for. What follows are a few options for what I think are pretty reasonable paths that I know of to get you programming and more importantly creating something that either you or others will find useful. I am primarily interested and practice Data Science but like many newer programmers I do a fair amount of web development work. So what I’m going offer are my recommendations for what to cover when starting out in these two fields.

It’s really just about typing

Everyone should program, or well perhaps not everyone, just as not everyone should ride a bike, or drive a car, or browse the internet. Nor will everyone program even if they could, just as not everyone wants to read a book or figure out how to pay their taxes online. But in this day and age, we take it as given that most functioning adults should gain skills such as the ability to drive a car, be literate, or put together a PowerPoint presentation. In a historical sense all of the above used to be exclusive domain of specialists, who were privileged to know such elusive arts such as the how to read the written word, operate a model-T or type on a typewriter. But as the utility of such skills grew in an economic sense, skills such as typing became an assumed skill. And people, as they always have done adapted. And as more people adapted the adaptation process for others became easier. As reading and writing became more important, society produced teachers to educate the masses. When cheap automobile production was possible, not only did cars proliferate but more user-friendly features for using a car proliferated. Automatic transmission wasn’t a thing until a gear system was invented.