Now

More people should get into bird watching (aka “birding”)

Why

The reasons are pretty simple:

• Low effort
• Being outside
• Relaxing
• Fun

If you don’t enjoy any of these benefits I’m not sure what to tell you, other than somehow birding isn’t for you.

Get Started

If those benefits did resonate with you, here’s how easy it is to get started:

1. Go outside
2. Look at birds

Ok ok, here’s a few more layers that make it more enjoyable.

Reference

Perhaps this should be a requirement, but a good reference helps you greater appreciate what exactly you’re looking at. This could be a classic bird field guide you can get at a bookstore, or the Merlin Bird ID app. Being able to identify birds and the calls or sounds they make is a huge part of bird watching, and necessary for the next step.

Paper and Pen

Get yourself a small notebook and a pen or pencil, then write down the birds you see. Keep the date you saw them, highlight when you saw a new bird for the first time, describe birds you couldn’t identify fully, document the weather and the mood that day, sketch birds you enjoy, the list goes on and on. Over time these become your small books of bird collections, and they’re fun to flip through in the future.

Bird Feeders

If you have the place for one, a bird feeder can be one of the best investments you can make. Placing them in easy to view locations lets you watch birds often, making it easier to get familiar with the different kinds, their migration patterns, etc. Definitely get a bird feeder if you can!

Optics

Saved for last due to how expensive they can be. Optics like binoculars are not required, but they sure do step up the game. As you start looking for harder to find birds, optics will help you catch some that stay way too high or distant for your eyes. Even at closer distances they’re fun to use as you get to enjoy birds more.

Small Things in Dark Times

It’s no secret that we’re going through a rough patch. Fear and anxiety are on the doorstep of many. We get sucked into endless news loops, people on platforms saying our jobs will be taken by AI in six months, all while bombs drop and the price of food and gas climb. Despite feeling hopeless, you know what you can do? Put down the phone, step outside, and look at a bird.

The horrible things of this world won’t disappear, your problems don’t go away, however I wouldn’t label this break as an escape either. Humans aren’t designed to bear the weight of everything happening outside of their control. You can only do so much, and at least in my opinion, you’re meant to bear some of it in the context of time in nature and with community.

You can’t solve every problem, but you can step outside, breath some fresh air, and cast your gaze upon a Yellow Rumped Warbler. When it flies away, you’re left feeling a bit lighter, ready to take another day standing tall.

Go look at a bird.

Updates from the bridge:

• Been meaning to take more photos as Spring has started, added some of them to steve.photo

• Did a lot of experimenting with keystroke dynamics as a way to authenticate human written content, but unfortunately I don’t think it will work out in the end. There were too many practical holes, like someone could just type out by hand what an AI created. Originally I was thinking it could be helpful for areas like education, to help keep the discipline of writing alive. Now I’m coming to terms that there’s not a lot we can do to stop people from using AI in these applications. Rather, time is better spent showing people why writing is a discipline that should be respected.

• Had a small hiatus from my progress in the Rust book but plan to get back into it this week. I will not give up this time lol

• Wanted to track my tea shipments, so I built something I’ve wanted for a long time: a package tracker.

• Tea I’ve been trying has been all over the place, but of course the pu’er has been probably some of my favorite. Second might be some oolong and black teas.

• Will probably do a blog post on kagi.com soon; known about them forever but just now really seeing the value they bring to the ecosystem. Great stuff.

Until next time 🫡

As fate would have it, I make a blog post about returning to Neovim, and for some reason an update to nvim-treesitter breaks my ability to see syntax highlighting for nushell. A very small annoyance, but enough for me to replace it. I remember seeing this awesome post by boltless so I knew it was possible. Turned out to be super simple!

First I needed something to install the parsers. I ended up following boltless’ recommendation of using luarocks and making a small script to automate installing necessary parsers:

def tsi [parser: string] {
  let tree = $"($env.HOME)/.local/share/nvim/site"
  luarocks --lua-version=5.1 $"--tree=($tree)" install $"tree-sitter-($parser)"
}

Installing them is simple as tsi rust or whichever language I need to grab. Next I needed to add these parsers to my packpath, so I added a new treesitter.lua to core with the following contents.

-- Native treesitter parsers installed via luarocks
local rocks_path = vim.fn.stdpath("data") .. "/site/lib/luarocks/rocks-5.1"
for _, parser_dir in ipairs(vim.fn.glob(rocks_path .. "/tree-sitter-*/*/", true, true)) do
  vim.opt.runtimepath:prepend(parser_dir)
end

One of the last steps is an autocmd to start up tree sitter with the open buffer.

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("FileType", {
    callback = function(ev)
        pcall(vim.treesitter.start, ev.buf)
    end
})

A nice small bonus: adding the following to treesitter.lua lets me use folds with za.

vim.o.foldenable = true
vim.o.foldlevel = 99
vim.o.foldmethod = "expr"
vim.o.foldexpr = "v:lua.vim.treesitter.foldexpr()"

Now everything works how I expect it to, and I’ve learned more about how treesitter works! Would also highly recommend this post that goes way deeper into the subject. Nothing beats the rush of solving a small problem to make my dev env faster and smoother!

Did a dangerous thing today and started thinking too much. Now I have an idea that I can’t get out of my head.

My friend @iammatthias shared theamdash.com with me today, and while it came out last year, this was my first time seeing it. It’s been hard to tell if the idea behind am- was a joke, an artistic expression, an attempt at a solution to a real problem, or perhaps all of the above. Regardless, it got me thinking about what a real solution to determining AI vs Human created content in a digital world.

A lot of the initial ideas that came to mind just weren’t good enough. There’s so much AI can do to imitate what a person creates, and we’ve all experienced it. Then I started to think less about the end product, and more about the process. AI will spit something out in a few seconds, while human writing takes much more time and thought. That’s when my sites turned to Keystroke Dynamics.

When a person writes, there are natural pauses, breaks, or rhythms on the keyboard. These patterns actually become a source of identification, or in the field of keystroke dynamics, authentication. What if this was applied to provenance? What if there was a standard + essential libraries that make it possible to prove someone’s identity through their content on any platform?

Down the rabbit hole we go

Some long overdue updates from the bridge:

• Just finished Piranesi by Susanna Clarke; would highly recommend.

• Started getting into loose leaf tea, specifically Chinese tea varieties thanks to a new local tea shop and YouTube. Current favorite is a Lapsang that smells like a campfire 🔥

• Lots of thoughts after publishing my last blog post on the topics of AI and programming. Might share more later.

• Got to watch a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers for about 15 mins straight this weekend and it was delightful. Crazy lookin birds.

• Displeased to see Zed’s TOC changes today, so much so I might be making a voyage back to Neovim. Feel like there’s some Zed features I could either replicate or rebuild if I need to.

• Slowly making it further through the Rust book, made it further than I have before 😅 Determined to finish it and build some projects without AI assisted coding. Trying to find that balance and keep my mind/skills sharp. Will also likely write more about that later.

Until next time 🫡

I rewrote Sipp in Rust for the following reasons:

• Memes
• Learning
• Fun

As the project went on, the rabbit hole became deeper and deeper. The result is a single binary around ~13MB that runs a web server / site, CLI, and TUI. It’s everything I’ve wanted in a code sharing tool, and perhaps more. Learned a bunch while working on this and I think I might be rust pilled now. The server only takes anywhere from 2MB to 10MB of ram to run, which is much more minimal than the previous Bun version that was around 60MB. The tooling and DX building this was insane, and I’m definitely interested to see what else I can build with it.

Check out the repo here, and after installing it you can try running the TUI with the hosted instance:

sipp -r https://sipp.so

Over the past few months I’ve been toying with what I should spend my free time on. My family always comes first, and then my day job. After that I generally have some left over curiosity and a desire to solve problems, hence my numerous side projects. Lately I’ve felt the weight of needing to solve bigger issues that have larger impact. I think a lot of my work on blogs, rss, and publishing on ATProto have some small value towards maintaining free speech and becoming less chronically online, but my sights are now turning towards cryptography.

The right to privacy has come under attack more than ever these days, and I feel compelled to put up a fight. I’m certainly not qualified to be a researcher, but I do enjoy piecing together preexisting parts of a system. Even if I don’t end up contributing anything, I enjoy learning about it, and I’ve got nothing else to do ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Will of course write about anything I end up working on as time goes on.

I’ve been really into stationary lately, and my latest exploration is pencils. Current battle is between the Palomino Blackwing 602 and the Musgrave Pencil Company Tennessee Red.

The Blackwings are pretty well known and you can find a bunch of stuff online about them, so I won’t linger on them too long. With my testing so far they definitely live up to the hype (at least in my opinion).

The Tennessee Reds on the other hand seem to fly under the radar. The company is based out of Shelbyville TN (not too far from where I live) and they’re made out of Tennessee Red Cedar. The result is a pretty sturdy pencil that smells amazing when you sharpen it. The graphite looks similar to the Blackwings but I’m not sure I would say they write as well.

There is something wonderful about the tactile feel of the graphite on some good paper, the sound, and the motion of sharpening it as it dulls. I can’t say it will replace my daily writing pens, but I do plan to use them at my desk for meetings and perhaps for sketching if I get back into it.

Thanks for coming to my pencil talk 🤓

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern

Not one of you should live an agèd man,

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes Would feed on one another. […] Say now the king,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,

To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,

Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,

Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements

Were not all appropriate to your comforts,

But chartered unto them, what would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;

And this your mountainish inhumanity.

– William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More

Ian McKellen Recital

Behold, the Bar-tailed Godwit

This may look like a funny bird, but in reality it stands on business. Every year, the Bar-tailed Godwit makes a migration from New Zealand to the northern coast of ALASKA.

Yes, that’s right

7000 miles

8-9 days

No

Stops

That just blows my mind. This bird just flies with no food or water for over a week to fly from one side of the planet to the other. It just knows how to do that. Instinct guides it, pure will and determination keeps it in flight, just to bring about another generation of insane Bar-tailed Godwits.

I think about the challenges I’ve faced in my own life, the temptation to give up when it gets really, really hard, yet I kept going. In those moments I thought I had it bad, but that was before I knew about this bird. Holy crap.

Perspective is a powerful teacher, and my new favorite bird is the Bar-tailed Godwit.