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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 The practical information is outdated but the pictures and descriptions are good.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.)
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.
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.
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.
More in programming
Here are the Vim forks I know about: Neovim: “a Vim-based text editor engineered for extensibility and usability, to encourage new applications and contributions.” Vim Classic: “a stable, long-term support fork of the ubiquitous text editor, maintained without the assistance of generative AI tools.” EVi: “a hard-fork of Vim v9.1.0 (Jan 2024) before AI was used in the project.” MacVim: “a macOS version of the Vim text editor, providing a graphical user interface for Vim, while tightly integrating with macOS and providing features specific to the platform.” This list doesn’t include Vim-inspired editors like Kakoune, Vim-style plugins for other editors like IdeaVim, or Vim “distributions” like LazyVim. Contact me if you know of other forks!
I’ve been taking a break from Mastodon as my social home on the web for about six weeks. It has been more difficult than I’d usually admit. I have an amazing local community in my town that I love and am deeply involved in. But nobody here is a programmer, or even a computer nerd, so it doesn’t serve my need for a tech community. I work alone, for myself, in my house. It’s a fortunate lifestyle with many upsides, but it means I don’t get that form of community at work, either. I’ve had this feeling before… as a teenager in the 1990s. It’s profoundly lonely. But when I got internet access, that started to change. I found my people. First in the Total Annihilation community (RIP, Annihilated), then the HardOCP Forum, then the Something Awful Forums, then Tumblr, then Twitter and our community of Apple bloggers, and then Mastodon. Communities form, change, and dissolve over time. None of those are, today, anything like what they were when I most enjoyed them. We change, too. I didn’t move on from most of those solely because they changed — it was usually because we both changed, and it was no longer a good fit. My break from Mastodon has been a relief in some ways, as I’ve felt increasing divergence between what I wanted and what I was getting from it, but I didn’t know where else to go. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all more video-broadcast platforms than communities. All I’ve found on Bluesky is even more anger and politics, the last things I need or want. Threads hasn’t yet stuck for me, and it’s owned by an asshole. Twitter was an amazing product and community that was previously owned by assholes, and now it’s X, which has a strong but different tech community, and is owned by different assholes. So I’ve just been… nowhere, for the first time since the 1990s. It has been, once again, quite lonely. Sure, it’s been relaxing, too, but in the way a vacation is relaxing. It’s great to take breaks, but after a long vacation, I’m ready to turn my brain back on. Without participating in a large, broad tech community, I’m exposed to fewer new ideas, both of my main jobs (app development and podcasting) are much harder, the quality and reach of my work have suffered, my skills aren’t improving as much, my mind is less stimulated, and I feel disconnected from my professions and passions. My world has gotten smaller. I could keep going like this to prove a stubborn victory or purity test, but I’d mostly just be hurting myself. Communities change, conditions change, and we change. We’re all better off if we’re willing to change our minds, and if our communities let us, no matter how strongly our younger selves declared a previous position. So I’m going to wade back in and see how it goes, trying to find a better balance to hopefully have better results, including on Mastodon. My people are spread across multiple services, and I’m going to explore them all, despite most of them being owned by assholes. I’d love to participate in communities without any assholes benefiting from it, but in the modern world, that simply isn’t possible. The only alternative is to isolate myself and not have a community at all (or a job, or a smartphone, or a computer, or internet access, or a car, or most of my food, or my country). That’s neither a price I’m willing to pay nor a condition I’d try to impose on anyone else. I’d love to have your support, forgiveness, and grace as I try to find my people again, and I strive to offer the same to all of you. Everyone deserves to be part of a community. And as I grow, I’m learning to declare fewer absolutes in a complex, imperfect, and constantly changing world.
My now-traditional “summary” of the conference along with my own commentary and thoughts.
Every year, browser vendors collaborate via the Interop project to synchronize their efforts on new HTML/CSS/JS features. This year, there’s a ton of super exciting features being considered! In this blog post, we’ll explore the CSS of the future, to get a glimpse of what we’ll soon be able to do.
