Posts categorized under: Tech

Side quest: creating a "main" tool

I like Simon Willison's framing of using large language models (aka LLMs, aka "AI") to enable side quests of things you wouldn't normally do. Could I have done this without LLM assistance? Yes, but not nearly as quickly. And this was not a task on my critical path for the…

Basic anti-abuse monitoring for Mastodon

Back in February, Mastodon and the connected Fediverse faced a spam attack caused by unattended instances with an open signup policy. Bots quickly registered accounts and then sent spammy messages that were relayed through the Fediverse. It was annoying and the normal moderation tool of limiting or blocking entire instances…

Implementing search for my blog in WebAssembly

If you visit my blog (most likely what you're reading now) and have JavaScript enabled, you should see a magnifying glass in the top right, next to the feed icon. Clicking it should open up a search box that lets you perform a very rudimentary full-text search of all of…

Advent of Code 2022, in Rust

There's a yearly programming contest called Advent of Code (AoC). If you haven't heard about it, I'd recommend reading betaveros's post explaining what makes it unique. This was my third attempt at AoC, previously trying it in 2019 (made it to day 5) and 2021 (day 6). This year I…

Current thoughts on Mastodon

The majority of posts on Mastodon right now are about how to get started, discussions about various features or making fun of the dumpster fire that is the birdsite. This is mostly unavoidable as new people sign up, but I've tried to keep using Mastodon as an actual social network…