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The Trump campaign and his braintrust have been very clear and open about their planning for a second presidency, mostly under the umbrella of Project 2025. There’s been a lot of good journalism about it. Some examples: Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plan. Stephen Miller talking about plans to detain and deport millions of people living in America. Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term, the plan to turn the Department of Justice into an instrument of revenge against Trump’s enemies. Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025, a strategy to increase the President’s authority and ignore the traditional checks and balances of US government. A radical plan for Trump’s second term, details of how Trump would completely clear house in the executive branch and replace non-political civil servants with loyalists. Inside the Next Republican Revolution, more details of...
a year ago

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More from Nelson's Weblog

Angkor Wat resources

I took an amazing trip to SE Asia last month, including Angkor Wat. I had a hard time finding good reading or other resources to learn from before I went, in part because Amazon is awash in AI garbage. Here’s some books and podcasts I found useful about the Khmer empire in general and Angkor in particular: Ancient Angkor by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques. The closest thing to a coffee-table book to preview what you will see. The practical information is outdated but the pictures and descriptions are good. Empire Podcast #185: The God Kings of Angkor Wat by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. An entertaining and fully detailed account of the Khmer empire. It’s basically an excerpt from Dalrymple’s new book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. Fall of Civilizations Podcast #5: The Khmer Empire by Paul Cooper. Another history, not quite as magically well told as Dalrymple but full of good information. Angkor and the Khmer Civilization by Michael D. Coe. A highly recommended history of the Khmer region. Honestly I found this very dry and too detailed, but I did learn from it. Lonely Planet Pocket Guide: Siem Reap & the Temples of Angkor. We didn’t use this much but it seemed like a useful practical guide. OTOH it dates to 2018 so things have changed. My other advice for visiting Siem Reap and Angkor is: go. It is amazing. Plan for at least two full days of touristing there. Hire a private guide and driver if you can, it is absolutely worth it. (Email me for a recommendation.)

3 months ago 41 votes
Non-alcoholic apéritifs

I’ve been doing Dry January this year. One thing I missed was something for apéro hour, a beverage to mark the start of the evening. Something complex and maybe bitter, not like a drink you’d have with lunch. I found some good options. Ghia sodas are my favorite. Ghia is an NA apéritif based on grape juice but with enough bitterness (gentian) and sourness (yuzu) to be interesting. You can buy a bottle and mix it with soda yourself but I like the little cans with extra flavoring. The Ginger and the Sumac & Chili are both great. Another thing I like are low-sugar fancy soda pops. Not diet drinks, they still have a little sugar, but typically 50 calories a can. De La Calle Tepache is my favorite. Fermented pineapple is delicious and they have some fun flavors. Culture Pop is also good. A friend gave me the Zero book, a drinks cookbook from the fancy restaurant Alinea. This book is a little aspirational but the recipes are doable, it’s just a lot of labor. Very fancy high end drink mixing, really beautiful flavor ideas. The only thing I made was their gin substitute (mostly junipers extracted in glycerin) and it was too sweet for me. Need to find the right use for it, a martini definitely ain’t it. An easier homemade drink is this Nonalcoholic Dirty Lemon Tonic. It’s basically a lemonade heavily flavored with salted preserved lemons, then mixed with tonic. I love the complexity and freshness of this drink and enjoy it on its own merits. Finally, non-alcoholic beer has gotten a lot better in the last few years thanks to manufacturing innovations. I’ve been enjoying NA Black Butte Porter, Stella Artois 0.0, Heineken 0.0. They basically all taste just like their alcoholic uncles, no compromise. One thing to note about non-alcoholic substitutes is they are not cheap. They’ve become a big high end business. Expect to pay the same for an NA drink as one with alcohol even though they aren’t taxed nearly as much.

5 months ago 51 votes
Legal aid charities for immigrants (2024)

The Trump administration has made aggressive threats against immigrants in the US. It’s not clear what’s coming, my biggest fear is a violent display of fascism. (Don’t call them camps!) But even if it’s a polite legal process it will be chaotic and disruptive to many neighbors. Back in 2018 I donated reactively to the Trump administration’s cruelty to immigrant families. This time I’m trying to get ahead of it. The need for the money is now, no matter what happens it is going to be a bad few years for immigrants in the US. To that end I asked on Metafilter about charities to donate to. I got back a remarkable reply listing 18 charities that all have some California focus. I donated to most of them. I want to highlight two groups in particular. One is RAICES. They work in Texas, not California, but they are well organized and effective. The other is KIND. They have a simple mission. They try to ensure every unaccompanied minor has legal representation in immigration court (something not guaranteed.) The other groups on the list are all also deserving of consideration.

7 months ago 70 votes
AI enhanced search

LLMs are good search helpers. Here’s three search tools I use every day. All of these use an AI to synthesize answers but also provide an essential feature: specific web search results for you to verify and further research. I use these for conversational inquiries in addition to more traditional keyword searches. Phind is an excellent free LLM + search engine. The AI writes an answer to your query but is very careful to provide footnotes to a web-search-like list of links on the right. I use this mostly for directed search queries, things like “what’s an inexpensive TV streaming device?” where I might have used keyword search too. The Llama-70b LLM that powers the free version is quite good, sometimes I have general conversations with it or ask it to generate code. Bing CoPilot has a very similar output result to Phind. I find it a little less useful and the search result links are less prominent. But it’s a good second opinion. Bing has been a very good search engine for 10+ years, I’m grateful to Microsoft for continuing to invest in it. CoPilot results are sometimes volunteered on the main Bing page but you often have to click to get to the ChatGPT 4 Turbo enhanced pages. Kagi is what I use as my general search engine, my Google replacement. It mostly gives traditional keyword search results but sometimes it will volunteer a “Quick Answer” where Claude 3 Haiku synthesizes an answer with references. You can also request one. I think Phind and CoPilot do a better job but I appreciate when Kagi intercepts a keyword search I did and just gives me the right answer. Google has tried various versions of LLM-enhancement in search, I think the current version is called AI Overviews. It’s not bad but it’s also not as good as the others. Not mentioned here: ChatGPT or Claude. Those are general purpose LLMs but they don’t really give search results or specific references. In the old days they’d make up URLs if you asked but that’s improving.

9 months ago 112 votes
8BitDo Game Controllers

8BitDo makes good game controllers. A wide variety of styles from retro to mainstream, with some unusual shapes. And wide compatibility with various systems: PC, Macs, Switch, Android. They’re well built, work right, and quite inexpensive. A far cry from the MadCatz-style junk we used to get. The new hotness is the Ultimate 2C, an Xbox-style wireless controller for the very low price of $30. But it works great, doesn’t feel cheap at all. The fancier mainstream choice is the Ultimate 2.4g at $50 which includes a charging stand and extra reprogrammability. But what’s really interesting to me are the odd layouts, often small or retro. The SN30 Pro is particularly interesting as a portable controller. SNES-styling but a full XBox style modern controller with two analog sticks, easy to throw in a suitcase. There’s a lot of fiddly details for this class of device. Controller type (XInput, DInput, switch, etc), wireless interface (Bluetooth or proprietary), etc. 8BitDo makes good choices and implementations for all that stuff I’ve tested. They seem to work well with Steam. They’re a popular brand so well tested. It helps that PC game controllers have mostly standardized around the Xbox layout and XInput. Steam can patch over any rough spots for older games.

10 months ago 112 votes

More in programming

The 6 Hours of Lex

When I drive the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I spend a total of about 6-9 hours in the car, divided into stints of roughly two hours at a time. It's intense. But talking with Lex Fridman in Austin on his podcast? Over six hours straight! We only interrupted the session for five minutes total to take three bathroom breaks. All that endurance training has clearly paid off! But the magic of a good conversation, like the magic of driving at Le Mans, is that time flies by. Those six hours felt more like sixty minutes. This is what flow does: it compresses the moment. Besides, we had plenty to talk about. Lex prepares like no other podcast I've ever been on. Pages and pages of notes. Deep questions, endless attention for tangents. We covered the beauty of Ruby for half an hour alone! But also the future of AI, small teams, why we left the cloud, Elon Musk, fatherhood, money and happiness, and a million other topics (which Lex mercifully timestamps, so listeners without six hours to spare can hop around). It was a privilege to appear. If you're interested, the conversation is on YouTube, on Spotify, on X, and as a regular podcast.

2 hours ago 2 votes
Measurement and Numbers

Here’s Jony Ive talking to Patrick Collison about measurement and numbers: People generally want to talk about product attributes that you can measure easily with a number…schedule, costs, speed, weight, anything where you can generally agree that six is a bigger number than two He says he used to get mad at how often people around him focused on the numbers of the work over other attributes of the work. But after giving it more thought, he now has a more generous interpretation of why we do this: because we want relate to each other, understand each other, and be inclusive of one another. There are many things we can’t agree on, but it’s likely we can agree that six is bigger than two. And so in this capacity, numbers become a tool for communicating with each other, albeit a kind of least common denominator — e.g. “I don’t agree with you at all, but I can’t argue that 134 is bigger than 87.” This is conducive to a culture where we spend all our time talking about attributes we can easily measure (because then we can easily communicate and work together) and results in a belief that the only things that matter are those which can be measured. People will give lip service to that not being the case, e.g. “We know there are things that can’t be measured that are important.” But the reality ends up being: only that which can be assigned a number gets managed, and that which gets managed is imbued with importance because it is allotted our time, attention, and care. This reminds me of the story of the judgement of King Solomon, an archetypal story found in cultures around the world. Here’s the story as summarized on Wikipedia: Solomon ruled between two women who both claimed to be the mother of a child. Solomon ordered the baby be cut in half, with each woman to receive one half. The first woman accepted the compromise as fair, but the second begged Solomon to give the baby to her rival, preferring the baby to live, even without her. Solomon ordered the baby given to the second woman, as her love was selfless, as opposed to the first woman's selfish disregard for the baby's actual well-being In an attempt to resolve the friction between two individuals, an appeal was made to numbers as an arbiter. We can’t agree on who the mother is, so let’s make it a numbers problem. Reduce the baby to a number and we can agree! But that doesn’t work very well, does it? I think there is a level of existence where measurement and numbers are a sound guide, where two and two make four and two halves make a whole. But, as humans, there is another level of existence where mathematical propositions don’t translate. A baby is not a quantity. A baby is an entity. Take a whole baby and divide it up by a sword and you do not half two halves of a baby. I am not a number. I’m an individual. Indivisible. What does this all have to do with software? Software is for us as humans, as individuals, and because of that I believe there is an aspect of its nature where metrics can’t take you.cIn fact, not only will numbers not guide you, they may actually misguide you. I think Robin Rendle articulated this well in his piece “Trust the vibes”: [numbers] are not representative of human experience or human behavior and can’t tell you anything about beauty or harmony or how to be funny or what to do next and then how to do it. Wisdom is knowing when to use numbers and when to use something else. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

an hour ago 1 votes
New Edna feature: multiple notes

I started working on Edna several months ago and I’ve implemented lots of functionality. Edna is a note taking application with super powers. I figured I’ll make a series of posts about all the features I’ve added in last few months. The first is multiple notes. By default we start with 3 notes: scratch inbox daily journal Here’s a note switcher (Ctrl + K): From note switcher you can: quickly find a note by partial name open selected note with Enter or mouse click create new note: enter fully unique note name and Enter or Ctrl + Enter if it partially matches existing note. I learned this trick from Notational Velocity delete note with Ctrl + Delete archive notes with icon on the right star / un-star (add to favorites, remove from favorites) by clicking star icon on the left assign quick access shortcut Alt + <n> You can also rename notes: context menu (right click mouse) and This note / Rename Rename current note in command palette (Ctrl + Shift + K) Use context menu This note sub-menu for note-related commands. Note: I use Windows keyboard bindings. For Mac equivalent, visit https://edna.arslexis.io/help#keyboard-shortcuts

4 days ago 8 votes