MidWits-Anonymous
Where confident ignorance meets the beginning of wisdom
“Welcome to the front page of my brain”
This is a personal site. The opinions expressed in it are mine, but it would be simply ridiculous to say that I came to them entirely on my own.
Who am I.
I’m The MidWit, a person who’s trying to use technology (in particular python, quarto, and most recently rust) to make my life better. But, I’m trying to do so in a way that improves my own skills while contributing to an ever advancing civilization. Over the years, there have been lots of times when I’ve been sure that there must have been an easier way to do a task, and thus have spent 3x the time it would have taken me to just do the thing working out the easier way. What this has driven home to me is that there often is an easier way, and we are justified in seeking it out, but also that:
Easy isn’t the same as Trivial.
That ‘easy’ approach often requires a significant investment in time, learning, and frustration which may or may not be worth it. Smarter people than me probably knew that, but it took me a few years of trying to make my own life run more smoothly, and then being asked to make other people’s lives run more smoothly for it to click with me.
This site is a place for me to learn out loud about building skills and to reflect on the process to help me retain what I learn as I’m thinking. Like a cross between a journal and a portfolio.
LLM Disclaimer
I don’t love LLMs1, but I’m also not under the illusion that they are going anywhere. I give my word that anything posted here was written by me, and that I won’t post anything that I don’t feel I could stand over. But I have been trying to use LLMs to help me with parsing tracebacks, and with quizzing myself on things I’ve been trying to learn. We’re all trying to learn about these things, and this is partly where I’ll experiment with that. Any solutions I post are based on my thinking unless I state that otherwise. Which means I wasn’t able to figure it out myself… so that’ll be fun won’t it.
Site set up
My day job is in the social science research space. As such I’m pretty familiar with quarto and so this was the choice I made for publishing this site. It’s fast and easy and it gets out of my way.
I’m hosting the site on a Hetzner VPS and while I am using Plausible (also hosted on the VPS) to track the number of visitors, I’m not tracking any individual users, or storing any data.
No government organisation has ever requested data from this site.
No reasonable person has come here for information either.