My brother Spencer works as an artist in Asheville. He's also into nature conservation, leading a nature journaling class and regularly weaving ecology and local wildlife into his work. When UNC Asheville announced plans to turn a local urban forest into a soccer stadium, he pushed back, in part by raising awareness through birding sessions to show off a Great Horned Owl family and their three owlets living in the forest. Spencer set up a 24/7 camera filming their nest but wanted to livestream that footage and couldn't figure out how — enter me, stage right! While it wasn't easy here's how I eventually made it work (though unfortunately by the time you're reading this they've flown away and the livestream has ended).
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I am doing a series of blog posts diving into 400 Divisadero Street, a defunct car wash and gas station in San Francisco that they're trying to turn into apartments — and have been for over a decade without breaking ground. The reasons for the lack of (visual) progress is multifaceted, but to properly dive into it and explain the timeline I wanted to dig into the raw planning documents. They're widely available as part of SF’s PIM (Property Information Map), but I wanted to download them all locally for OCR, manually review them all, and process them with Claude.
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I am unfortunately spending more and more of my time interacting with LLMs through terminal interfaces. While the sentient silicon churns through thousands of tokens I find myself scrolling short-form videos contemplating next steps, freeing my time up for deeper mental pursuits, and much more importantly (and realistically) getting entranced by the blinking cursors. But how do they work?
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As you may have noticed by my propensity for footnotes sidenotes I love asides. Likewise there are a lot of small things I come across that either aren't meaty enough for a full post, or trend so narrowly technical that I feel hesitant about broadcasting (a reticence my college self didn't share based on my post setting up my router). I still want them to be searchable as a reference for myself and potentially others, but I want them to take up less presence on the blog (and not be sent out in email blasts). The solution? Snippets!
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