sam firke dot com

Rare blog, rattlin’ blog

Category: ruminations

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    Another site migration complete

    In 2020, I migrated this blog to A2Hosting – I know that because I wrote about it at the time. I’ve just migrated again and am writing this brief post in part to check that everything is working (including sending via email to subscribers).

    I was up for renewal again this year at A2Hosting (now Hosting.com), looking at $450 for the next three years. I have gotten both more skilled at and more interested in self-hosted web stuff in recent years, so I took the plunge and started renting a little DigitalOcean Droplet virtual machine. I installed a little Docker Compose stack of these containers:

    • WordPress
    • MariaDB backend
    • Caddy frontend for SSL (and to lay the way for hosting other projects on this box)

    Then I exported my WordPress blog from my old admin panel, imported it on the new site, and it scraped all the media files from the old site. That’s all I had over on the old host. You’re now reading this page served from the DigitalOcean Droplet!

    I took the occasion to choose a new theme, Twenty Twenty-Five. I hadn’t realized that my old theme, Twenty Twenty, was not 100% compatible with the “new” Gutenberg block style that WordPress uses these days. This is a nice quality of life upgrade.

    Unfortunately I still have a lousy sense of style, including web design. I cycled through different layouts and color schemes, loving none of them. This was the best I could do but I don’t love the main font or the colors. If something is hard to read, let me know, especially if you have an idea for a better set of choices!

    EDIT: I’ve worked on this and am much happier with the aesthetics!

    The Droplet is about half the price of the hosted solution, but that’s not the only advantage. I can now also host family members’ WordPress blogs at no additional cost to myself using the shared infrastructure, including backups I’m piping to a separate cloud provider (Hetzner, in Germany). And I can host any other web projects that need a home. I have tinkered a little with a tool that will help me mealplan, basically suggesting to me what I should cook each week. If I ever get it running, I’ll host it on this droplet too.

    Just need to remember to do my maintenance on this VM and install upgrades. I have calendar reminders for that.

    I started this blog in 2015 which means I lasted five years at the first host and six at the second. I hope I can keep the self-hosting going indefinitely!

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    Caught sloppin’

    Past participle: when others see through your attempt to pass off AI slop as your own writing and thinking, usually due to carelessness.

    Ex.: “My teacher caught me sloppin’! I turned in my paper and forgot to remove a sentence at the end where ChatGPT asked, ‘if you like, I can complete one last pass of copy-editing.’”

    “Sloppin’” can be used on its own to describe this lazy and deceptive use of AI, e.g., “I don’t read emails from John, he stays sloppin’”.

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    Kidneyversary

    One year ago today* I gave away my left kidney. Taking a lap around the sun with only one kidney was everything I hoped it would be.

    My body has long been fully recovered. I started learning ice hockey three months after donating; now I play in a beginner league and feel no sign of the surgery no matter how I stretch or sprawl. Besides my scars, which have faded from red to cream, there’s no sign I donated a kidney. I’m staying active, staying hydrated, and feeling great.

    My one-year labs show my kidney function is as expected: about 60% of what I had with two kidneys. I gave away the larger one, which put me at about 45% remaining, but then the remaining kidney should have hypertrophied (grown) in response. At any rate, it’s getting the job done.

    When I see my test values charted right on the edge of the normal range, I remind myself that my numbers might be concerning for someone with two kidneys but that’s not the accurate scale for me anymore and I’m where I should be.

    This is, more significantly, my recipient’s kidneyversary. I still don’t know who they are and I remain satisfied with that arrangement. I hope the kidney is pumping away in good health!

    Other donors mention have written that after a while, they forget about their donation. That’s humble, but in truth, it still pops into my head regularly. When the thought arises, it affirms parts of my identity that are important to me (I covered that in in the “how it feels” section of my blog post linked above).

    One thing has changed since I wrote that earlier post: the donation never comes up in conversation. Immediately before and after the surgery, I talked about it with everyone. In the months that followed, people would ask me how I was feeling.

    But now that it’s not affecting my life, there’s no context in which it arises. Which makes sense, it’s pretty far removed from the regular things people talk about. I can imagine a different timeline where I’m always deciding whether I should mention it, and I’m glad that’s not something I even have to consider. Sounds awkward.

    I recently read The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I believe the book began as this essay. In the essay and book, she quotes a Brazilian hunter-gatherer who has killed an animal larger than his family can eat. Asked how he’ll store the surplus, he replies, “Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother.”

    * this sentence was true when I wrote it, but I’m a day late in publishing.

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    Notes on a Non-Directed Kidney Donation


    “Do you have any questions?” the surgeon asked. After a year of learning all I could about kidney donation, I did not. Following a quick debate over who would shave my abdomen – the surgical team, eager to start, waved off a nurse – it was finally happening.

    On October 30th my left kidney was removed via laparoscopic surgery, flown to California, and transplanted into a complete stranger. This kicked off a chain of paired transplants: in exchange for that person receiving my kidney, their loved one put their spare kidney up for grabs to another stranger with a loved one willing to donate, and so on. Last I heard, seven transplant surgeries were scheduled as a part of my chain.

    Those recipients will live longer lives. And richer ones: free from dialysis, they can play, work, and travel. This came at little cost to me. I spent a night in the hospital followed by several weeks of recovery at home, mostly spent reading and taking walks. During the screening process, a surgeon categorized me as a “chronic do-gooder” type – guilty as charged – and as such I will confidently say there is no better deal out there when it comes to doing good.

    Here are my collected notes from throughout the process. Along the way, I read, listened, and watched much of what’s out there about non-directed (aka “anonymous,” “altruistic,” or “good Samaritan”) kidney donation and have woven in a reading list of sorts. Those writings were above all what convinced me to donate.

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    The SEO garbage search result that sent me over the edge

    This post is a spiritual successor to LLMs are good coders, useless writers.

    After getting steadily worse for years, the experience of searching the web just hit a new all-time low. I clicked on the top non-ad search result and encountered the worst word-salad nonsense I’ve ever seen. It was too perfect not to share.

    I had let the small patch of lawn in my yard get knee-high. My reel mower can’t cut grass that tall, so I broke out the old weed whacker I got on the cheap at ShareHouse. It immediately ran out of the cutting string that it came with, so I found myself at the hardware store shopping for a refill.

    I didn’t know if I should replace only the string or swap out the whole head. So, standing in Lowe’s, I whipped out my phone and searched it up: “restring toro weed trimmer”

    (I winced when my kids started saying “search it up,” but I’ve since come to appreciate it. It avoids centering a corporation, unlike “I Googled it.” And I wasn’t using Google: the DuckDuckGo browser on my phone is, sadly, Microsoft Bing in disguise).

    The first non-video result was from “Backyard Lord.” I’ve included screenshots in case that link dies, as it sure ought to.

    Looking at it now, the “Pro Tips for Easy Trimming” suffix reeks of LLM garbage, as does the domain “Backyard Lord.” But the listed steps seemed like what I wanted. I clicked on it.

    The page started off okay:

    But that was the end of the plausible content. The next block was just keywords and mentioned a tennis racket??

    The next block contained the prompt for the LLM! All highlighting mine:

    From there it becomes free-association insanity. There’s a step-by-step guide … but each step discusses a totally different industry! Step 1, preparation, is about starting a business:

    Step 2 is about restringing a guitar:

    Step 3 is empty and Step 4 drips with irony as it talks about strings in the context of LLMs:

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    Relating to natural life today

    In the last month I took a family vacation to the Great Smoky Mountains and read two novels about logging: Ron Rash’s Serena and Annie Proulx’s massive Barkskins. Here are some resulting thoughts about trees, creatures, and the people who inhabit their world.

    The natural world in America is nothing like what it was

    We fall into the trap of thinking that climate change is unprecedented in its destruction of the natural world. But it has a clear predecessor in the deforestation of the period c. 1600-1960, documented in Barkskins, during which nearly every tree in America was cut down, every forest razed, and most wildlife extirpated. The first two sections of Barkskins start with Europeans trapping all of the beavers, minks, and martens in the northeast. Only after the furs are gone do they move onto logging.

    In Serena, the logging barons clear-cut the Smokies before selling the land to the government for a national park. Serena is fiction, but this part of the story is true. In the Smokies, we hiked to Avent Cabin, a structure built around 1850. It contains a picture showing its setting around 1920, when it sat in a clearing: all of the surrounding trees had been logged. Now the cabin is again back in the woods, as the regrown trees approach a century of age.

    Of course, letting the land go wild again does not recreate the complex webs of life that existed before Europeans arrived. Keystone species like the American chestnut and the passenger pigeon are extinct and megafauna like moose and bear – characters in both novels – have limited presences. The city nature areas and state parks I visit are a sad joke compared to what they held five hundred years ago. At the end of Barkskins, a character muses about “dark diversity,” the species whose absences from an ecosystem can be measured. There’s a lot of that here.

    Both novels do a good job painting the picture of natural splendor that was destroyed forever. As a Michigan resident, I particularly appreciated the Breitsprechers’ trip to survey the endless, towering white pines of this state. My family has stopped at Hartwick Pines State Park on our way up north, a tiny postage stamp of old-growth forest that escaped logging. It’s the closest we can get to experiencing what was once here.

    Despite being once despoiled, the trees and wildlife in the Smokies were still beautiful by modern standards. This lifted my spirits. There’s something encouraging about the fact that we’re a hundred years past the low point for trees in the Smokies and moving in the right direction. When it comes to logging, at least.

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    LLMs are good coders, useless writers

    My writer friends say Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Bard are overhyped and useless. Software developer friends say they’re a valuable tool, so much so that some pay out-of-pocket for ChatGPT Plus. They’re both correct: the writing they spew is pointless at best, pernicious at worst. … and coding with them has become an exciting part of my job as a data analyst.

    Here I share a few concrete examples where they’ve shined for me at work and ruminate on why they’re good at coding but of limited use in writing. Compared to the general public, computer programmers are much more convinced of the potential of so-called Generative AI models. Perhaps these examples will help explain that difference.

    Example 1: Finding a typo in my code

    I was getting a generic error message from running this command, something whose Google results were not helpful. My prompt to Bard:

    What’s the matter with this Python dict definition?

    details = {
    ‘electrification_lvl’: decoded_vin.get(‘ElectrificationLevel’, None),
    ‘engine_kw’ = decoded_vin.get(‘EngineKW’, None),
    ‘fuel_type_primary’ = decoded_vin.get(‘FuelTypePrimary’, None),
    ‘fuel_type_secondary’ = decoded_vin.get(‘FuelTypeSecondary’, None),
    ‘battery_kwh’ = decoded_vin.get(‘BatteryKWh’, None)}

    Bard told me I had a “significant issue”:

    “You used an assignment operator (=) instead of a colon (:) to define the key-value pairs. This will cause a syntax error because assignment statements are not allowed within dictionary definitions.”

    Yep! So trivial, but I wasn’t seeing it. It also suggested a styling change and, conveniently, gave me back the fixed code so that I could copy-paste it instead of correcting my typos. Here the LLM was able to work with my unique situation when StackOverflow and web searches were not helping. I like that the LLM can audit my code.

    Example 2: Writing a SQL query

    Today I started writing a query to check an assumption about my data. I could see that in translating my thoughts directly to code, I was getting long-winded, already on my third CTE (common table expression). There had to be a simpler way. I described my problem to Bard and it delivered.

    My prompt:

    I have a table in SQL Server called EV_VINs_Presence. It contains columns “vin”, “snapshot_date”, and “locale”. Every record that has a locale value of “Ann Arbor” should have a corresponding record with the same “vin” and “snapshot_date” but with the locale value of “State”.

    Write a SQL Server query to return any records that do not have such a corresponding record.

    Bard replied:

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    Finish The Book, Sam

    Another installment in what I’m realizing is a series of book-update blog posts.

    In November 2021 I wrote half of a novel. In another six months I’d finished the rough draft. Then in November 2022, I resolved to edit it so that someone could read it. Then I said I would get it done by the end of June. I missed that deadline, but finally “finished” this fall! Two finishes so far.

    In October I shared it with a few beta readers. There was good news and bad. The good news: it is not terrible! Most of the readers – my friends, granted – finished and enjoyed it.

    It is, of course, rife with problems. Most of them I can chalk up to the ignorance of a beginner. For instance:

    • The book opens with my protagonist, Dani, waking up. I now realize that’s a deadly cliche.
    • Dani’s emotional growth arc needs work. I failed to plan that aspect of the novel before writing it.
    • Beta readers universally disliked my handling of a small romance subplot. They are right.

    This is, in one sense, the worst news. Were the manuscript irredeemably bad, I would be done. Actually finished. But I believe there’s a chance it could become a good, solid book … with a lot more work. And it would be a shame to waste that chance. Argh. I was so glad to be “done” and finally hand it to people!

    It has been satisfying to discuss the world that only lived in my head with others who have now visited it. They had good questions and ideas for making it better. Now I need to steel myself and commit to re-entering that world, not leaving until I’ve shored up its weaknesses as best I can.

    If I buckle down, could I make the changes in … two or three months? The rewrite list isn’t enormous. For instance, I’m not changing the perspective from 1st to 3rd person, a task I would not accept.

    Discussing this at Workantile, my friend Anthony reassured me that I do finish things. And I have finished things. Now I need to keep finishing. I hope I can find the focus and willpower to finish until this is actually Finished.

    I keep coming back to this quote from an old interview with Andre 3000 about releasing imperfect art:

    As an artist you can sit and tinker with stuff forever. You can add and take away but I think that’s kind of the importance of having someone over you saying, “We need this, this is a deadline.” Sometimes those oppositions or those who push and pull are needed because we’ll just sit and tinker forever. There are actually songs on The Love Below that were not finished, but that’s how they are, that’s how it came out.
    …
    I just knew I wanted to put that [imperfect song] on there, but it wasn’t done, but it was enough.

    The GQ&A: Andre 3000

    The worst would be to sit on this book and not keep improving it. It’s not timeless material and I need to wrap it up and move on and stop having it paralyze me. So I think I need to say, February is the deadline. I hope I work hard on it until then and fall back in love with the story and the process. But even if I don’t, or I only complete some of what I hoped to, it might be time to say, it’s enough.

    In the meantime, feel free to ask me about the project and encourage and/or shame me depending on how it’s going!

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    Advertising Overload

    This post is a tirade against the ever-increasing presence of advertising in my life, prompted by attending a University of Michigan basketball game.

    I went to the Crisler Center last night, where Michigan lost an exciting shootout against Long Beach State. It was entertaining. Both teams were very talented and tried hard.

    I make it to a couple of Michigan sports events each year and will crown Michigan Athletics the victors and the best… at cramming advertisements into the experience. Always innovating. I’d love to see a photo series showing the interior of the Crisler Center over the decades, documenting the creep of ads.

    How many ads would you think can be placed on the basket itself? Let’s count. Here’s the view of the near hoop from my seats:

    That’s between four and six ads, depending on how you count: the base pad, the vertical pad (“meijer meijer meijer” lol), the State Farm pad by the rim, and a freaking TV ad mounted up top. Now let’s look to the other hoop and see what’s facing the court:

    From this angle we can see there’s also the UMCU ad and the Libman ad. Each basket is adorned with seven corporate logos plus a TV that plays ads for Coke Zero and Jersey Mike’s. I wonder how many ads I saw over the course of the game. Dozens? Hundreds?

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    Same Developer, New Stack

    I’ve been fortunate to work with and on open-source software this year. That has been the case for most of a decade: I began using R in 2014. I hit a few milestones this summer that got me thinking about my OSS journey.

    I became a committer on the Apache Superset project. I’ve written previously about deploying Superset at work as the City of Ann Arbor’s data visualization platform. The codebase (Python and JavaScript) was totally new to me but I’ve been active in the community and helped update documentation.

    Those contributions were sufficient to get me voted in as a committer on the project. It’s a nice recognition and vote of confidence but more importantly gives me tools to have a greater impact. And I’m taking baby steps toward learning Superset’s backend. Yesterday I made my first contribution to the codebase, fixing a small bug just in time for the next major release.

    Superset has great momentum and a pleasant and involved (and growing!) community. It’s a great piece of software to use daily and I look forward to being a part of the project for the foreseeable future.

    I used pyjanitor for the first time today. I had known of pyjanitor‘s existence for years but only from afar. It started off as a Python port of my janitor R package, then grew to encompass other functionality. My janitor is written for beginners, and that came full circle today as I, a true Python beginner, used pyjanitor to wrangle some data. That was satisfying, though I’m such a Python rookie that I struggled to import the dang package.

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