Chaotic Good Computing

Systems: Week 11 | Spencer Elkington Watch a human cope about bots taking his job in real time. Is he cooked! Find out tonight in Season of Systems: Week 11!

New blog post: "Season of Systems W11: Humans are Problems"

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An Annotated Guide to Hobbyist Protein Folding | Spencer Elkington Amaze (or bore) your friends and family by picking up on a hot new hobby that's all the rage — protein folding! An annotated starter to the 2021 paper "ColabFold - Making protein folding accessible to...

New blog post: "An Annotated Guide to Hobbyist Protein Folding"

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Agentic Programming as Theory Building | Spencer Elkington Do humans have a role in software development anymore? Absolutely — but we need to rethink what it means to program. An modern review of Peter Naur's 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building"

New blog post: "Agentic Programming as Theory Building"

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APL: Pattern 3; City Country Fingers | Spencer Elkington City, with natural stripes — or nature, with city stripes? Annotations for A Pattern Language, and tracking public opinion of where Americans want to live over the past 50 years.

New blog post: "APL: Pattern 3; City-Country Fingers"

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APL: Pattern 2; The Distribution of Towns | Spencer Elkington How close is too close? How far is too far? *A Pattern Language* annotations related to the statistical, economic, and ecologic concerns in balancing how dense human habitats ought to be.

New blog post: "APL: Pattern 2; The Distribution of Towns"

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APL: Pattern 1; Independent Regions | Spencer Elkington Home isn't where the heart is — it's a single node on a very, very large graph. Annotations for the "Independent Regions" pattern of *A Pattern Language*.

New blog post: "APL: Pattern 1; Independent Regions"

blog.chaoticgood.computer/content/anno...

APL: Pattern 0; Introduction | Spencer Elkington Can graphs be libertarian? Authoritarian? Annotations for the introductory portion of the 1977 book A Pattern Language.

New blog post: "APL: Pattern 0; Introduction"

Systems: Week 7 | Spencer Elkington Systems: Week 7 — As old as they are, emails still feel like magic Alright — if this system works, I’m going to flip.

New blog post: "Systems: Week 7"

Ants in the Neighborhood | Spencer Elkington Is Jane Street run by soccer-loving ants? Inconclusive. We *can* conclude that they're fans of Markov Chains, though — an invaluable tool for understanding complex data structures.

New blog post: "Ants in the Neighborhood"

A Pattern Language, and a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood The beginning of a topological review of the 1977 urban design and architecture reference book A Pattern Language, and a journey to understand Earth's greatest graph: the Earth, itself.

New blog post: "A Pattern Language, and a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"

Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow | Spencer Elkington Annotations for Greiner's 1972 paper "Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow", about the structural composition of organizations at different sizes and requirements.

New blog post: "Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow"

Quick Fix: Tone Down Obsidian List/Header Padding | Spencer Elkington Annoyed by Obsidian Live Preview over-padding headers and aggressively indenting? Some snippets to help keep your notes from jumping around, so you can focus on actually writing them.

New blog post: "Quick Fix: Tone Down Obsidian List/Header Padding"

The Advantages of Advantage: Intro to Probability Convolutions What *is* the advantage of rolling with advantage? Exploring dice roll combinations and probability convolutions.

New blog post: "The Advantages of Advantage: Intro to Probability Convolutions"

Dice Roll Distribution Widget | Spencer Elkington Discover the probability distributions of different dice roll combinations

New blog post: "Dice Roll Distribution Widget"

Quartz Widgets: Graphs, Galore! | Spencer Elkington I killed 4 of my blogs trying to implement MDX support. Will this one be next? Using MDX with Quartz to create interactive graphs, diagrams, and demos — clear as day.

New blog post: "Quartz Widgets: Graphs, Galore!"

LLMs; or, How to Run Your Own Hostage Negotiation | Spencer Elkington LLMs: Are we doomed to die, or born to garden? I'd like to make the case that AI is less like Terminator, and more like tomatoes.

New blog post: "LLMs; or, How to Run Your Own Hostage Negotiation"

Intro to Event Storming | Spencer Elkington Notes from learning Event Storming for domain-driven design. Thoughts on phases, color-coded chaos, and how to transition from fast pitches to full products.

New blog post: "Intro to Event Storming"

Kickoff: Season of Systems | Spencer Elkington I'm learning to live with the systems that stole my beloved em-dash. A season dedicated to negotiating how to live with the agentic models that have turned my career upside-down.

New blog post: "Kickoff: Season of Systems"

Review: Season of Rhythm | Spencer Elkington Looking back at my year-long attempt to build up long-lasting habits. A retrospective on routines, remote work transitions, and learning the art of slow-and-steady.

New blog post: "Review: Season of Rhythm"

LLMs: A Primer Presentation for Our Newest, Scariest Tool An engineer-focused primer on the mechanisms that drive Large Language Models. Basics on how we got here, how they work, and how to use them without feeling an apocalyptic dread.

New blog post: "LLMs: A Primer Presentation for Our Newest, Scariest Tool"

Typst Resume Template | Spencer Elkington A beginner-friendly resume template in Typst — 100% less LaTeX, 100% more opinions.

New blog post: "Typst Resume Template"

Terraform LocalStack Testing | Spencer Elkington $70/mo/seat? Just using live AWS may be cheaper. An evaluation of LocalStack as a testbed for Account Factory Terraform.

New blog post: "Terraform LocalStack Testing"

The Simple Economics of Open Source | Spencer Elkington Why do we do what we do? "Egoboo." Exploring economic models of OSS contributions beyond altruism and ego.

New blog post: "The Simple Economics of Open Source"

College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage | Spencer Elkington A dive into the hottest algorithm of the 1960s: Gale-Shapley matchmaking. Who knew that the mysteries of the heart could be solved with a matrix?

New blog post: "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage"

Feeling Right, Nothing Done: Don't Be the Death of Consensus Classifying opinions as "strong" or "weak" to stop wasting hours in fruitless engineering debates. How consensus can beat being "right", and an open letter for the tactically apathetic.

New blog post: "Feeling Right, Nothing Done: Don't Be the Death of Consensus"

Before You Slabtop Your Laptop: A Brief Warning | Spencer Elkington PSA: Check if your laptop needs an LCD for POST before removing the screen. Learned this the hard way after 5 hours and a fried motherboard. Learn from my dumb mistakes.

New blog post: "Before You Slabtop Your Laptop: A Brief Warning"

GPTinglish: Unnatural Language Processing | Spencer Elkington The only market crashing is the market for sanitized language. Stay human. Embrace typos.

New blog post: "GPTinglish: Unnatural Language Processing"

Turning SelfControl into Self Restraint | Spencer Elkington Building a Raycast plugin to schedule website blocks — because checking news "just one more time" destroys flow. Automate SelfControl and self control: take your laptop back.

New blog post: "Turning SelfControl into Self Restraint"

Caveat Lector: Reader Beware | Spencer Elkington I'm embracing being wrong on the internet in an effort to learn in public. A disclaimer on digital gardening, dead pixels, and the fear of terminal online-ness.

New blog post: "Caveat Lector: Reader Beware"

The Quest to Slay The Goblin | Spencer Elkington My life devolves into sleep-eat-procrastinate cycles without structure—I call this "The Goblin." Productivity tools, hating on hustle culture, and a new definition for horticulture.

New blog post: "The Quest to Slay The Goblin"