Please see post below

This site continues to evolve as I work on my self-hosting project at home with gateway. I have transitioned most of the notetaking that I did here into Obsidian because of multiple reasons including quality, markdown linking support, graph view, and more.

One important note that I want to make is to check out math animations for some fun animations that aren’t public facing.

This blog was a technical project that I am moving to my private server in order to have more control over the hosting and build process of the static pages.

Thank you! Jack

An Ode to Free Software

There is a reason why I love free and open-source software. I love open-source because the code is auditable, security can be reviewed just by looking at the source, the software isn’t an opaque black box, and it creates a community around a piece of software.

Each one of these has side-effects that are, for the most part, beneficial to everyone.

• Privacy that is verifiable and trackable
• Security through bug reports and whatever patching process the project has
• The power of anyone being able to propose changes to ensure a piece of software is working as intended for whatever use case
• Support through others on forums, community wikis, and project documentation

The ‘Free’ in free and open-source software does not primarily represent the price (although all free software does not cost money). The ‘Free’ stands for freedom. That is, the freedom to use, distribute, modify software as you please. This is a beautiful thing. There is no such thing as ‘sunsetting’ a free and open-source software project, the community of those who use the software have the freedom to maintain it. You are protected from feature regression of features that you need. Paywalls for features shouldn’t be a thing, and if a project is truly free and open-source, you can modify it and redistribute as you wish.

In a sense, free and open-source software is like writing software where the code that gets put in is democratically accepted by a project community. If a project maintainer goes haywire and starts accepting questionably contributions and changes to their project, the community can make a fork. If the fork is truly better than the original, there is no reason why it can’t become the dominant and most widely-used version.

I like machines, tools, and ideas that last forever. People buy lathes from the 1960s because they are reasonably accurate but will last forever. Free and open-source software are the software tools that will last me forever. Because of that I am willing to put in the time now to find, learn, and configure said software for a lifetime of utility.

• Jack

Slow roll of changes

Watching a lot of George Hotz recently. I am deeply inspired by his skills and his constant focus on his work. comma.ai and his new streams about the cherry computer are deeply interesting to me and I find that his content in general relates very well with my studies in statistics, mathematics, data science, machine learning, deep learning, and general computer science.

I started my REU (TRIPODS @ University of Massachusetts, Amherst) on Monday the 7th and since then have trained multiple models on my computer (actually my laptop because it has cuda cores). I am working on implementing a g-convolution into a new network to try and improve my preformance on a rotated and mirrored MNIST dataset. I haven’t quite figured out how each of the dimensions to my convolution is going to fit into the training but progress is coming along.

In other news, I am not so sure I want to stay with hugo. The popularity of jekyll really helps with finding themes and general documentation for me.

Been a while

• Jack

This past week

I am going to be honest, last week was such a blur. On monday, I got home after a weekend with my mom and now its already Saturday afternoon. A lot of this has to do with how I’ve been spending my time, the workload at the end of the week due to exams, and also taking care of my family’s puppy Ivy.

I have two ideas of things that I want to do programming wise:

1. Continue working on the youtube bot.
2. Create a minecraft package manager (??)

I would love to keep my minecraft configurations up to date effortlessly. Litematica is very cool and useful.

I’m not sure what I should write here today but I am sure I will have more stuff to write about after this weekend.

Canning tomatoes

And we are back in Duxbury! After finishing up classes this morning, Lillian and I headed back to Duxbury to take Ivy to her first vet visit (Today!). Hailey and my father stayed home today and they instead took her which took some time pressure off of me. Once I got home, me and Lillian sat down on the couch and promptly took a 20 minute power nap (a really good one too might I add!)

This weekend was fantastic, lots of activities, canning, good food, and tons of laughs. Lillian and I left on Friday (9/18) at around 3ish so that we could make it in time for dinner to my moms. We made an italian style dinner with spaghetti and used the bread from brothers for olive oil dipping goodness. The meatballs in the tomato sauce were perfectly cooked and balanced everything out quite well.

The following day, we had a slow morning followed by a busy afternoon of going to farm stands to get ingredients (corn, tomatoes, and such) for tomorrow. We got back up to the lake and took the four wheeler out for a bit (which is in great shape!)… the dirt bike unfortunately did not want to start. We went to Norte, a mexican style restaurant in Stephentown, NY and the food was extremely delicious. Next time I go, I know I can fall back on a chicken chimichanga, the tortilla outside was perfection. We socialized with Mark Prescott, Ben, and Martha towards the end of our evening there and headed back to the camp where I gave Lillian a grueling Calc II lesson on integration, derivatives, and the definition of an integral (which she understood quite well). Zonk

On Sunday, we woke up, had some breakfast and starting doing homework almost right away. It was a busy day and also I got to see for the first time how much more homework Lillian had this semester over me (1st semester was equal, 2nd semester was busy for me, this one was busy for her). We then drove up the mountain to Dyken pond to do some chores, canning and also making of horseradish. Ron showed Mark, Ben, Me, my mom, Chris, and Lillian how to make horseradish from the roots. My mom gave me a brief walkthrough reminding me the steps of tomato canning.

1. Sanitize the cans (don’t want to get botulism)
2. Score the skin of the tomatoes
3. Boil for 30 seconds for skin to peel back
4. Core and remove all skin
5. Cut into eights or sizable pieces and put into mason jars.
6. Put 1 tbsp of salt with the tomatoes in the mason jar.
7. Properly seal lids finger tight
8. Place jars into warm water and bring to boil. Once boiling, let boil for 25 minutes.
9. Let cool slowly to avoid cracking and check seals.

It is very messy but that is what makes it fun. Lillian and I had homework to do so we went back down the hill to get the rest of her math quiz done. I had taught her a lot of concepts and heplful things to know when she is doing integration. She really hooked on to the integration with e^x in the integrand which was cool to see. Then from there, she really understood what u substitution was doing (reverse chain rule). Doing reverse product rule (integration by parts) was a little more difficult as getting across the theory is hard to do intuitively for me. I gave her the mnemonic LIATE which really helped and lots of reminders about u = and dv = integrations. Always always always don’t forget your dx’s! The integral is equal to 0 without them.

We had a prime beef roast which was yummy and later that night we also made a delicious batch of pretzels. Incredibly, I was able to figure out how to do a four way braid without ever doing one before, and putting it into a pretzel form! Nice and salty.

After getting the coffee jitters out before bed, I slept almost completely uninterrupted in the cold until my 8am bio class.

Five guys was the play on the drive home, Bye bye for now!

An anniversary

On the couch with Lillian. In center Berlin and feeling sleepy.

Youtube Downloader 2

Today marks the first day of actual development on the youtube downloader version 2. For this version, I plan on adding a few useful features and changing the underlying workings and dependencies. Here are some ideas:

• Make dependencies lightweight by looking at dependency source code
• Remove shelve and replace by json file reading and writing

Feature additions:

• Download playlist
• Single video downloader

Possible additions:

• Channel name search?
• Continuous integration?

For one, I don’t think shelve is necessary for saving simple strings of urls. The multithreading is very nice in the previous version and I am very proud of it. I would like to organize this by making issues and refactoring the code so that it is more readable.

Boston Visit

I haven’t seen my mom since Dyken Pond with my friends and it has been too long! My mom invited me and Lillian to say in Boston two night ago for the night of the 14th. We drove into the city and had dinner at Artu in the north end. The fettucini alfredo had an awesome spicy kick to it and my tagliatelle with proscuitto was nice and heavy. Just what I wanted. The burratta and country bread was delicious and I enjoyed eating there. The hotel was quite nice and since me and Lillian finished Scooby Doo Mystery incorporated this past Sunday (9/13/2020), we did a few crosswords and played Among Us.

Mystery Incorporated was an excellent show. The overarching plot alongside the classic scooby-doo mystery solving formula is very entertaining and gives something for everyone to enjoy. There were many twists and turns and lots of clever plot points and the character development and stories were interesting. I did enjoy this show and it was a solid 10/10 would watch again.

Today I have started to teach Ivy to lay down. She is doing well and has a very consistent sit and we are working on her come and heel. I am very proud of her, even though she still bites a lot!, she is understanding more and more everyday.

Tootles lmao

Site Update 1

I have been thinking what I want to do with my online presence recently. The idea of create passive income sources has inspired me to create a bit of a business for myself online. I’m not really sure what I would do yet and have not found the time or headspace but I do think it is coming. I think this blog will be pushed to either a subdomain or under /blog/ or something like that.

I have a couple of ideas right now of things that I have always wanted to create or do. I love the intersection between technology, math, and computer science but I find the space is quite saturated with channels and information. There is not a ton of channels that combine easy surface level explanations of concepts with many following videos. I would love to create something that is very me and highly accessible to anyone looking to make or do something.

Probably will elaborate on this later or will be creating links to examples/products of mine to explain what I am talking about.