Updated September 4, 2024

_Last updated on 2024-09-04._ Welcome to my “Now” page. This page aims to give you an idea of what I’m up to now. It’s necessarily always out of date. For a better sense of what’s on my mind, check out my snippets or just ask me. Highlights these days are: machine learning research for code generation at Google DeepMind, Go Note Go, table tennis lessons, writing snippets, and exploring tools to reduce cognitive friction. I also regularly run “mini hack sessions” – really enjoying helping foster the NYC AI hacker/tinkerer community. My recurring hack is building a conversational spaced repetition system for myself. I’m thinking about AI assistants (voice, conversational, and more) like Bieber Bot and beyond. I’m particularly impressed by Dot and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. I’m reading Blood in the Machine and I Don’t Want to Talk About It (and just finished Brave New Words yesterday).

Updated September 4, 2024

I’m currently living and working on the un-ceded lands of Tiohtià:ke / Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I’ve been actively working as a Web developer (programmer) for the past 10 years. I started my career making things for browsers. I was initially focusing on HTML and CSS, with some light interactivity. As time went on, I found myself working closer and closer to the servers. Following the needs of the projects and the teams I was a part of, I picked up PHP, Python and a handful of other programming languages. I started working with databases and SQL. I discovered the fun of tinkering with Linux server administration. Previously, I studied Information Science at the University of Montreal. Back then, I was deeply inspired by the work of the Internet Archive. I wanted to be a digital archivist. Somewhere along the way, I was lucky to get an internship outside of my university department. I was hired to help adapt some existing course material to be published on the Web, for online learners. I joined a small team of developers and content specialists, where I had the opportunity to learn the ropes. This was such a good experience that I decided to refocus professionally. I had been programming for some time before that. Like many others my age in the ’90s, I have memories of tinkering with BASIC on the family PC. Around 1995, we upgraded from DOS to Windows and got access to the Internet. That’s when I discovered the Web and HTML. It truly changed me. In many ways, I have learned to think with the Web. I also discovered Linux towards the end of high school. I remember overhearing a few teachers casually talking about “a new Linux machine”. The word _Linux_ just stuck in my head. Maybe it sounded mysterious and cool, to a bored suburban kid. A few years later, with access to my own computer and quite a bit of free time, I took the plunge and never looked back. To this day, I’m still a full-time Linux user and I’m passionate about free and open-source software (FOSS). Outside of work and programming, I enjoy reading, listening to podcasts and journaling in paper notebooks. I’m also an amateur musician. I play guitar and a few keyboard-based instruments. I’ve been noodling and recording myself for many years now, but I’ve never really published anything. It’s my little secret. Something I can do to blow off steam at the end of the week, without really thinking about making it palatable for others. Who knows, someday maybe... _Last updated: 2024-09-04_

Updated September 3, 2024

We founded Interline Technologies in 2018 in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we continue to serve our customers from here, along with a team that's distributed across the United States. Principals ---------- #### Drew Dara-Abrams ****Drew Dara-Abrams Ph.D.**** is a co-founder and Principal at Interline Technologies. At Interline, Drew manages the firm's consulting engagements and product development. Drew's previous experience spans both industry and academic labs in transportation and geography. His experience in industry includes serving as Head of Mobility Products for the Mapzen division of Samsung. While at Mapzen, he recruited and managed a team to build the Transitland open transit data platform, develop a worldwide routing/trip-planning engine, and build a global system to derive road traffic speeds from GPS data for The World Bank. Previously, Drew served as Chief Technology Officer for Kinnexxus, Inc. where he and his colleagues completed two successful Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR) grants from the National Institutes of Health. He's developed and managed web applications serving upwards of millions of users, and has provided strategic, technical, and statistical consulting to major corporations, universities, and start-ups. Drew holds a Ph.D. in computational geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-authored two textbooks, __Supporting Web Servers__ and __E-Commerce & Internet Law__, published by Prentice-Hall. #### Ian Rees ****Ian Rees Ph.D.**** is a co-founder and Principal at Interline Technologies. At Interline, Ian leads engineering and operations efforts, building and maintaining open data pipelines to power publicly accessible trip planners, accessibility analysis, and data validation for Interline’s clients. Prior to Interline, Dr. Rees was a software engineer at Samsung’s Mapzen division and technical lead of the Transitland project, an effort to create an open, user-contributed, user-editable, fully validated repository of all public GTFS data in the world. Previous to Samsung, Ian held postdoctoral positions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Baylor College of Medicine, where he administered a data center and developed an online platform for biological imagery analysis. Ian holds a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Houston, and a Ph.D. in Structural and Computational Biology from Baylor College of Medicine. Ian is proficient in several programming languages including Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, and is experienced building complex applications using PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, and all three of the major public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure). Associates and Partners ----------------------- Using both our physical location in Silicon Valley and relationships across the North American transportation sector, Interline has built a network of specialized associates and partners to serve our clients. Interline’s associates enable our firm to deliver large results to SaaS customers and our consulting clients. Interline’s partners organizations join our team to support critical projects: #### Garnet Consulting ****Garnet Consulting**** (Portland, OR) specializes in collaborative and inclusive transit technology, operations, and software consulting for rural, small urban, and intercity agencies and the organizations that serve them. #### DCR Design ****DCR Design**** (Southern California) is a cartographic services and information design firm with deep experience in public transit, active transportation, and geospatial analysis. #### Lab Zero Innovations ****Lab Zero Innovations**** (San Francisco) combines user-centered design skills, agile management methods, and full-stack engineering capabilities. #### Trillium Solutions ****Trillium Solutions**** (Portland, OR) specializes in the creation of transit data and creates GTFS feeds for hundreds of transit agencies around the United States. Interline enlists Trillium for engagements that involve custom GTFS creation and data analysis. Small Business Certifications ----------------------------- Interline Technologies LLC is certified as a small business by the following organizations: * California Department of General Services * Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) Associations ------------ Interline collaborates with fellow companies, researchers, and institutions through participation in the following associations: * MobilityData as a dues-paying member company * Urban Computing Foundation with Drew Dara-Abrams serving on the foundation’s Technical Advisory Council * OpenTripPlanner with Drew Dara-Abrams serving on the Project Leadership Committee * Transportation Research Board with Drew Dara-Abrams serving as a member on the standing committee on transit data (AP090) and the Transit IDEA review panel #### Learning how to use Transitland? If you're a developer, we recommend you start by signing up for a Transitland Free account and review the documentation. If you have questions, please post them to the Transitland discussion board on GitHub.

Updated September 3, 2024

Hello, thanks for your interest in what I am doing now. **Writing a ‘short’ book** I’m working on The Antiguide to Living. It’s one of the most risky and most difficult book projects I’ve worked on. You can take a peek into some of the early chapters here. This is in addition to byDamo.la, the daily-ish blog I write. You can read the latest ones or subscribe to receive them via email here. **Enabling clarity and authentic connection through woow** One of my core beliefs is that the more defining clarity we have, and the more authentic connection we make within and around us, the easier it is to make decisions that ennoble our spirits and solve the biggest challenges facing us. Some of what has been released at woow include: One \[Question\] Today, which sends you a daily question to clarify your thinking and make better decisions. No fluff, no noise, just one quality question daily. Each question has been helpful for me and the 300+ people who engage with it daily. I hope it’s valuable for you too. Check it out, your first week is on the house. An array of other tools to aid access to clarity. Check out woow. * * * **SOME OTHER THINGS** **EXPERIMENTING** When responsibility calls, I contribute independently through Curiosity. I used to co-invest in founders and platforms enabling a flourishing future for all. This aspect is passive these days. Curiosity serves as a holding for my creative experiments, collaborative projects, investments, and initiatives that align with my overarching goal of contributing to the long-term future of humanity hinged on flourishing people, platforms, and policy. **PAST TENSE** Sometimes, the experiences from some of the things I had helped build in the past come in handy – both expanding my range and helping to form unique perspectives. I had worked on the ethics and governance of AI initiative at Harvard, rationality community building, and an international standard / recommended practice on the impact of autonomous and intelligent systems on human wellbeing. I used to be a strategist at innovation hubs in Nigeria and co-convened an innovation platform that birthed a million USD investment in fostering innovation in a state in Nigeria. Until recently, I was COO at a human flourishing media and teaching company (joyinc.xyz) present in the USA, UK, and Nigeria with a mission to build safe, warm spaces across business, government, and culture and equip a new generation of Africans with happiness and flourishing skills. I have been on the founding team since 2017. I still support the good people and ideas at AllforDevelopment, the development organisation I founded and led from 2009 to 2017, contributing to policy, global education, leadership, and human development initiatives. Most previous adventures can be found here. _Updated July 22, 2024._ \[This page was inspired by the amazing Derek and his /now page.\]

Updated September 3, 2024

Letter from Codeberg: Software is about humans ---------------------------------------------- Tue 03 September 2024 _(This is a stripped-down version of the news letters sent out to members of Codeberg e.V. – not member of the non-profit association yet? Consider joining it!)_ Dear Codeberg e.V. Members and supporters! It's been a while since our last update. The past few months have been relatively calm … Category: Letters from Codeberg What we can learn from the Fediverse spam for Codeberg ------------------------------------------------------ Wed 28 February 2024 At Codeberg, we want to join the Fediverse, the ActivityPub-powered world that connects Mastodon, Pixelfed, flohmarkt and so many other cool social networks and tools. Forgejo, the software that powers Codeberg, is actively working on making this possible. In our dreams, this will soon allow users on one server to … Category: Contrib Letter from Codeberg: Looking into the new year ----------------------------------------------- Thu 25 January 2024 _(This is a stripped-down version of the news letters sent out to members of Codeberg e.V. – not member of the non-profit association yet? Consider joining it!)_ Dear Codeberg e.V. Members and supporters! We wish you all the best for 2024, including maximum success with your projects! Let's have … Category: Letters from Codeberg One year into the war, your help is still needed ------------------------------------------------ Fri 10 November 2023 _(This text has been written a rather long time ago, with discussions starting in Spring 2023. It took a while to draft, have Codeberg e. V. members vote and to finally publish it. The latter was also due to other more important things in our work queue. We apologize for …_ Category: Letters from Codeberg Letter from Codeberg: November 2023 ----------------------------------- Thu 09 November 2023 _(This is a stripped-down version of the news letters sent out to members of Codeberg e.V. – not member of the non-profit association yet? Consider joining it!)_ Dear Codeberg e.V. Members and supporters! Let's take some time to look at what we have achieved in the past months, and … Category: Letters from Codeberg Letter from Codeberg: September 2023 ------------------------------------ Mon 04 September 2023 _(This is a stripped-down version of the news letters sent out to members of Codeberg e.V. – not member of the non-profit association yet? Consider joining it!)_ Dear Codeberg e.V. Members and supporters! Let's take some time to look at what we have achieved in the past months, and … Category: Letters from Codeberg The permissions for your scoped access tokens might change on Thursday ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mon 07 August 2023 Dear Codeberg users, we are excited to deploy Forgejo v1.20 to production, bringing tons of new features, bugfixes and improvements. However, there's a caveat with scoped access tokens: They will change, eventually granting more permissions than expected. Please read on if you use them. We additionally email all users … Category: Announcement Letter from Codeberg: May 2023 ------------------------------ Mon 15 May 2023 _(This is a stripped-down version of the news letters sent out to members of Codeberg e.V. – not member of the non-profit association yet? Consider joining it!)_ Dear Codeberg e.V. Members and supporters! Our Annual Assembly for Codeberg e.V. legal members is nearing (May 21). We now share … Category: Letters from Codeberg Letter from Codeberg: Happy New Year! ------------------------------------- Wed 08 February 2023 _(This is a stripped-down version of the news letters sent out to members of Codeberg e.V. – not member of the non-profit association yet? Consider joining it!)_ Dear Codeberg e.V. Members and supporters! The past months at Codeberg have been intense, and it's overdue to share some updates. Organisational … Category: Letters from Codeberg The hardest scaling issue ------------------------- Wed 25 January 2023 **_If you want to know more about our current technical scaling issues: Rest assured that we are working hard on it. Read on to learn why this is not as fast as you might expect._** When people like me talk about scaling, it is pretty obvious what we are referring … Category: Contrib

Updated September 2, 2024

Ivaylo Durmonski is not an online guru who will magically transform your physical existence by forcing you to buy tools that do little but cost a lot. Quite the opposite, he despises the self-proclaimed con artists online who’d say anything to lure you into their programs and endless streams of “must-have” products. He is a professional book summarizer with one simple goal in mind: To help you become a less sucky person by exposing you to big ideas from best-selling books. While the cover pics of the books he summarizes are impressively dull, to say the least, the contents inside these mini versions of best-selling books are carefully designed to upgrade your thinking. Durmonski is an MBA graduate but he considers himself a self-learner in the fields of business, marketing, productivity and to some degree in psychology. Additionally, he’s a fan of tech stuff. However, he’s worried that the algorithms that are chasing us around so they can show us the right ad, the addictive social media platforms that make us feel anxious, and the toxic sites that share trivial news are all degenerating society. With the content on his site, he wants to help more people escape the modern dogma: Consume more offline, share more online and you’ll be a happy bunny. ### About The Content on This Site: This site originally started as a personal blog where Durmonski shared his minimalism journey but quickly evolved into something more: A place to learn key ideas from best-selling books and understand big ideas from smart folks who live now or are long gone. Here’s what he writes about: * **Articles:** After much thought and consideration, he finally found a format – what he believes is practical and easily understandable – to share interesting ideas from the fields of business, habits, productivity, and other domains that can help his readers kick-ass in real life. * **Book Summaries:** Ivaylo believes that reading is the best way to learn, focus, upgrade your thinking, expand your world view and resolve problems faster. Unfortunately, a lot of folks seemingly can’t fit reading into their lives. So, Ivaylo thought, “Why not present the best ideas from the books I read in posts and also make them sound not so boring and complicated?” While the idea of summarizing books is not new, he believes that his approach is quite awesome. * **Courses**: After reading over 200 books and summarizing most of them. Durmonski realized that _just_ reading isn’t enough. Reading books feels like you are moving towards a better place but that’s just a feeling. To _actually_ transition from being paralyzed by modern media procrastinator, to a place of solace and strength. You need something more… you need discipline. The online course Beyond Discipline will inspire you to commit to continuous growth and live a life based on your personal core values. ### Tools He Uses To Create This Site: * **WordPress:** Content management system that allows you to start your own site without learning a bunch of programming languages. * **SiteGround Hosting:** Bespoke WordPress hosting that takes care of everything server-related. * **Blocksy WordPress theme**: Simple, yet extremely powerful WordPress theme that can transform your plain site into a magazine-worthy piece of art. * **Memberful**: A tool that restricts content unless visitors pay you money. * **Baronfig**: The best tools for thinkers – notebooks, journals, habit trackers. * **MailerLite**: Email platform that grants you the ability to schedule emails to subscribers. ### Interesting Facts About Ivaylo Durmonski * He’s a proud father of a son named Alexey. * He wears (mainly) black clothes. * He has social media accounts but he rarely uses them. * He prefers riding his bicycle to driving his car. * He’s not a native English speaker that’s why he (sometimes) uses fancy words in the texts he writes to improve his writing skills. * He recently donated a large portion of his hardcover books and now he reads primarily eBooks (for the environment!). * He’s a serial creator. This is his 8th site. The old ones miserably failed. * He lives in the oldest city in Bulgaria, Plovdiv. Thanks for checking Durmonski’s About page. If you want to say Hi, use the contact form here. If you somehow felt connected to his persona by reading the above and now you want even more, you can subscribe to his mailing list by entering your email below: Get Updates: ------------ Get updates when new articles are published: See you around! Regards, Ivaylo Durmonski Instagram | Twitter | GoodReads | LinkedIn

Updated September 2, 2024

Updated Sep 2, 2024 by Peter Hagen. Here are things that I want to work on, but for which haven't found the right collaborators or moment yet. Send me an email if you want to chat about something! 1. Some way to connect people on the internet who want to work on the same things. I noticed that the best things in my life happened when met new people -- they made me realize what is possible and gave me the motivation to keep going. But local networks are quite limited unfortunately, and on social media you have to post regularly to get noticed. 2. A CRM for personal relationships that reminds you to stay in touch with the people you meet. The trick would be to automatically sync with your chat & emails so that you don’t have to manually enter information (which I always forget to do).

Updated September 2, 2024

Updated Sep 2, 2024 by Peter Hagen. Here's what I'm doing right now. See /ideas for what I want to do next. 1. Building lindymaps.com to find neighborhoods to explore while traveling or walking around. And you can share your disoveries with others. I always wanted an app like this. 2. Helping sublime.app make their social network for ideas more useful. A recent (secret) project that's pretty cool is Sublime Canvas: 3. Enjoying the summer and taking photos. 4. Reading a lot about the Russian Revolution and Soviet Union.

Updated September 1, 2024

On 6-Point Grading Scale ------------------------ During my 12–year journey through formal education I became very familiar with 6–point grading scale. It’s one of those things you are exposed to so early in life, that you accept it as a truth about the world. And for me, empirically, it made sense. I could always say if something was _excellent_, _very good_, _good_, _acceptable_, _bad_, or _tragic_. How to Become Immortal 101: Shamir’s Secret Sharing --------------------------------------------------- Have you ever wondered how to protect your master password from getting lost? Or how to create a _perfect_ democracy where nuke access is shared between most important people in the government _equally_? Or how to achieve immortality by splitting your soul and putting the pieces into objects? 🪄 If so, then you’ve come to the right place. Join me, my friend, on this discovery of Shamir’s secret sharing. Generating SVG Avatars From Identifiers --------------------------------------- When you create a new social service on the internet, one of the things you need to think about is how to make a user’s space feel like their own. Services like GitHub, Roll20, or Reddit generate — or allow you to generate — a custom avatar (i.e. Identicons) for your account. Avatar auto-generation is especially neat, as it does not require any engagement from the user. Let’s try to figure that out on our own. Best Performance Analysis of Python’s `dict()` and `{}` -------------------------------------------------- Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring `dict()` over `{}` in new Python code. They argued that `dict()` is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any counterarguments, so I passed. Yet that made me wonder: what’s the difference between the `dict` type and `{}` literal expression?

Updated September 1, 2024

1. blog.bdw.li/ 2. Hi, I'm jwb/ I’m a computer enthusiast and would place myself somewhere ops-related. I also really enjoy taking photos and hiking through the Brandenburger forest. Most feature images for my posts are generated using text-to-image systems. You can easily identify them by the posts tagged with Bing Image Creator or Chat-GPT. The prompt I used is displayed as caption below the image. What’s currently happening? (09/2024) # --------------------------------------- Inspired by the /now movement, I decided to participate: * I was on a nice vacation in Portugal in August * I passed probation at my current job and can work from home full time now * I’m looking forward to extend my license and drive 125ccm motorcycles next year Datenschmutz - A bad pun on privacy # ------------------------------------- You won’t find any cookies, trackers, third party extensions or what not on my website. If you do - I fudged up. Please let me know: hello@bdw.li. You can do it securely as well: PGP Key.

Updated September 1, 2024

Drikerf is an independent publication launched in September 2024 by Fredrik. If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Your subscription makes this site possible, and allows Drikerf to continue to exist. Thank you! ### Access all areas By signing up, you'll get access to the full archive of everything that's been published before and everything that's still to come. Your very own private library. ### Fresh content, delivered Stay up to date with new content sent straight to your inbox! No more worrying about whether you missed something because of a pesky algorithm or news feed. ### Meet people like you Join a community of other subscribers who share the same interests. * * * ### Start your own thing Enjoying the experience? Get started for free and set up your very own subscription business using Ghost, the same platform that powers this website.

Updated September 1, 2024

Updates, tips & opinions from the maintainers of Vue.js. * Published on September 1, 2024 Announcing Vue 3.5 ------------------ Today we are excited to announce the release of Vue 3.5 "Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann"! This minor release contains no breaking changes and includes both internal improvements and useful new features. We will cover some highlights in this blog post - for a full list of changes and new features, please consult the full changelog on GitHub. * Published on March 21, 2024 Announcing VitePress 1.0 ------------------------ Today we are happy to announce the (long overdue) 1.0 release of VitePress! VitePress is a Static Site Generator (SSG) designed for building fast, content-centric websites. In a nutshell, VitePress takes your source content written in Markdown, applies a theme to it, and generates static HTML pages that can be easily deployed anywhere. VitePress is built on top of Vite and Vue, and is the spiritual successor and modern replacement of VuePress. * Published on December 28, 2023 Announcing Vue 3.4 ------------------ Today we're excited to announce the release of Vue 3.4 "🏀 Slam Dunk"! This release includes some substantial internal improvements - most notably a rewritten template parser that is 2x faster, and a refactored reactivity system that makes effect triggering more accurate and efficient. It also packs a number of quality-of-life API improvements, including the stabilization of `defineModel` and a new same-name shorthand when binding props. This post provides an overview of the highlighted features in 3.4. For the full list of changes, please consult the full changelog on GitHub. * Published on December 15, 2023 Vue 2 is Approaching End Of Life -------------------------------- With 2024 almost upon us, we would like to take this opportunity to remind the Vue community that Vue 2 will reach End of Life (EOL) on December 31st, 2023. Vue 2.0 was released more than 7 years ago in 2016. It was a major milestone in Vue's journey of becoming a mainstream framework. Many current Vue users started using Vue during the Vue 2 era, and many great things have been built with it. However, active maintenance of two major versions in parallel isn't sustainable for us. As Vue 3 and its ecosystem have matured, it is time for the team to move on and focus our energy on the latest major version. * Published on May 11, 2023 Announcing Vue 3.3 ------------------ Today we're excited to announce the release of Vue 3.3 "Rurouni Kenshin"! This release is focused on developer experience improvements - in particular, SFC `