/about

A short FAQ about myself, which, like all good FAQs, is not questions I’ve actually been asked but rather questions I felt like answering …

Are you a real person? You use an awful lot of em dashes…

Boy, I sure hope so. Otherwise I’m not sure what these fleshy appendages are.

I use em dashes fairly consistently (and, I hope, correctly) because a long time ago I read Butterick’s Typography and shortly after started using the ⌥ ⇧- shortcut for em dash. Today the muscle memory is so strong I find it more difficult not to put an em dash when I need to.

You can read more about my usage of ai at /ai.

What’s with the lowercase lambdas (λ)?

I heavily use the Greek lambda as a personal symbol because I played too much Half-Life 2 as a child, because I had a brief, torrid love affair with the lambda calculus as a university student, because it’s directly descended from the Phoenician lamed 𐤋 and thus a good symbol for my interest in cultural technologies, and frankly just because frankly the lowercase lambda looks sick.

Are you from the Bay Area? If not, how long have you been here?

Oh no, definitely not. I’m from the North Shore suburbs of Chicago (but not, curiously enough, Naperville, where seemingly everyone else in the Chicago region grew up). I moved to San Francisco in mid-2019, shortly before my very first newsletter post!11 Which, curiously, references an older version of my newsletter hosted on TinyLetter. I have absolutely no memory of this other newsletter and no record of its existence.

Where else can I read your writing?

Well, you can’t, unless you happen to a.) hack my laptop and steal unpublished manuscripts b.) find the Wayback Machine archives of an older version of this site c.) have the bad fortune to work with me directly and read my RFCs d.) wait a few years (?) until I finally (??) publish a novel.

Why do you use so many footnotes?

I’m not sure. Footnotes were more common in old-school Web 1.0 blogging culture, and of course I love a good academic paper. But as for the specific vector, I’m not sure. Jason Kottke of the now-almost-30-year-old Kottke.org is a big fan of footnotes, and is also famously a great fan of David Foster Wallace and specifically the footnote-laden Infinite Jest, and I’ve been reading Kottke for a decade and a half at this point, so perhaps that’s a factor. Then again: I read a nonzero amount of DFW in high school (Consider the Lobster most notably) so it’s entirely possible I picked it up from DFW independently.

Why are the footnotes floating off to the side?

Those are Tufte-style sidenotes and they are more-or-less the objectively correct way to display footnotes. See also Gwern’s notes.

Who is this “Rooibos” I keep hearing about?

Here’s my dog! A cute little Chihuahua mix I got at the SFSPCA shortly before the pandemic. And yes, he’s named after the herbal tea.

What’s your photography workflow?

I’ve always been “photography curious”, but I never really got into photography as a hobby, on which more in this newsletter issue. So, while I have a hand-me-down DSLR from high school that I play with once every five years, most of my photography is just shot on iPhone, usually in RAW, in the stock Camera app or Halide, then touched up very lightly in Photomator. Some of my more-favorite shots are in the gallery.