Update for the week ending on Friday, May 2, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Started working on April retrospective
• Started writing up notes on Andrej Karpathy’s “How I Use LLMs” video

Refactoring English

• Worked on chapter “You’re Qualified to Write a Blog Post”
• Built a nix build process to build PDF, epub3, and HTML formats
• Added a hot reloading script
• Set up automatic builds in CI

HN Observer

HN Observer is a tool I’m working on to predict the outcome of submissions to Hacker News based on past historical data.

• Fixed behavior for displaying historical aggregate scores
• Got chart.js to render times smoothly
  • Previously, it was just rendering time as an opaque value and wasn’t generating ticks at sensible places
  • It was surprisingly hard to get working because I’m supposed to pull in a time library, then an adapter library for Chartjs
  • What ended up working was just having an LLM generate an adapter from scratch

Dusty VCR

• Fixed RSS feeds
  • Spotify was still claiming to hold the authoritative feed for our podcast after we moved to Libsyn
  • I also realized that if I don’t change the canonical tag to point to our CDN, podcast players will bypass it and go to Libsyn
  • Apple Podcasts also removed us for some reason, so I had to restore it

Misc

• Did monthly bookkeeping
• Automated beancount-chase-bank’s version number to happen on tagged releases rather than having to bump the version manually
• Added support for fee reversal transactions to beancount-chase-bank
• Continued debugging checksum errors on my TrueNAS server
  • The thing that finally fixed it was re-seating the disks
• Ordered an HBA, cables, and three recertified 8 TB HDDs to expand the server
  • I’m at 82% capacity right now, so this will roughly double my capacity
• Tested out a flow where I can migrate a RAIDZ1 vdev to RAIDZ2 while minimizing additional disk purchases
• Reached out to another technical author
• Subscribed to The Onion
  • Doesn’t really do anything I don’t think but just wanted to financially support them
• Upgraded my subscription to the Search Engine podcast