Last year, we decided to launch Tiny Awards, a small prize to celebrate interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be. We hoped it would be a small contribution to celebrating ‘people making stuff on the internet for the fun of it and the love of it and the hell of it’. We were...

It's been a while since I used my own website as much as I did during this year's WeblogPoMo. The daily posting routine revealed some small annoyances which made visiting this site a little less fun. For starters, I haven't redesigned this site since I got COVID back in 2021. 13 year old Tim would have been mortified at how long we've gone without...

Like many people I’ve been dealing with the collapses of the various systems I relied on for information over the previous decades. After 17 of using Twitter daily and 24 years of using Google daily neither really works anymore. And particular with the collapse of the social spaces many of us grew up with, I feel called back to earlier forms of the...

Where I have settled in my own work is to strive to keep some meaningful part of my mindset hungry and foolish. To continue to be open to new opportunities and eager to explore them. I don’t want to end up miserly defending what I have already achieved, I want a professional life still rich with tackling interesting problems.

Lately, I've been working on several projects which interface with the OpenAI APIs. Since this is 2024 and I'm far too lazy to open the official API documentation and write code myself, my first step in generating code is to ask the 4o model of ChatGPT something like this: Write a Python script which uses the latest OpenAI APIs. I'd like the...

If you’re a painter, you’re still allowed to paint landscapes. Singers are still allowed to sing about love. And heck — I’m betting the first time your critic learned about this particular topic, he wasn’t standing atop Mount Sinai. Knowledge transfer is a vital human activity, and it’s all about synthesizing, refining, and incrementally expanding...