Google Sheet Sort

Today I learned about the sort function in Google Sheets. This came in handy to show different sorted views of one sheet on another. …

Hot-Potato Package Delivery

I ordered something from Walmart. They shipped it to me. Their delivery tracking said that USPS handled the final delivery. And USPS says …

Idempotent Home Directory Setup

When I set up a new FreeBSD jail, I pull my home directory configuration from a GitHub repo. When I initially put this together I …

The Dismal Science

Today I learned that the “Dismal Science” description of economics comes from a Thomas Carlyle essay. He argues there against …

A Two Card Strategy

Today I discovered that I was the victim of an instance of credit-card fraud. I disputed the charge. The purchase was labeled as “card …

Interviewing With AI

The vibe-coding trend is alarming to anyone who values correctness in code. Putting AI generated code into production without full scrutiny …

Scripting asciinema

The asciinema program captures shell interactions in a form that can be replayed, or turned into an animated gif file. It’s an …

Pipelines Without Pipes

The pipeline program constructs a pipeline from its arguments. The first argument is the separator. The program splits the command line on …

Friedman, Pigou, Coase

In a rightly famous 1960 meeting⊕ Famous among economists, at least. Ronald Coase persuaded a room full of University of Chicago …

How Fast Is Gas?

I gave this prompt to Claude today:

I want to estimate the total gasoline fueling capacity in the United States. The key questions are:
* …