Nathan Laundry's Blog


Hi, I'm Nathan. I write on:


Why is your website so plain???

I'm glad you asked.

I tried making it pretty before. I think I even succeeded. But, I spent so much time messing with CSS and making this fragile mess of code that I never actually wrote anything. So, I'm going to keep it ugly and actually write stuff this time ... I Hope.

The Point of Dance

I can dance if I want to I don’t dance. Never have. And i’m adamant that I can’t. To no fault of my loving and accepting parents, I grew up a little repressed. Some people refer to it as “Gifted Kid” syndrome. Personally, I was never given the title but I over-achieved and felt that paralyzing need to be correct - more than any authority figure could ever place on me. Read more...

Execute shell commands from inside Vim

CLI Vim
Vim has some really useful but lesser known features that can be really useful when creating temporary shell scripts. In this tech quickie post, I use Vim :'<,'>! syntax to help me quickly define an entire project in Taskwarrior - a CLI for task and project management. Visually Select a Set of Lines In my case, I was setting a series of tasks to port my docker server from Ubuntu to Debian - a subset of the task are listed below. Read more...

ABScribe: Rapid Exploration of Multiple Writing Variations in Human-AI Co-Writing Tasks using Large Language Models

Accepted at CHI 2024 Pre-Print Github: ABScribe Abstract Exploring alternative ideas by rewriting text is integral to the writing process. State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) can simplify writing variation generation. However, current interfaces pose challenges for simultaneous consideration of multiple variations: creating new versions without overwriting text can be difficult, and pasting them sequentially can clutter documents, increasing workload and disrupting writers’ flow. To tackle this, we present ABScribe, an interface that supports rapid, yet visually structured, exploration of writing variations in human-AI co-writing tasks. Read more...

Clockwork and Clay

Clockwork and Clay THRONE We sired life in bronze and steam and lured in our clockwork Eve When this the child of man claims its patricidal throne we’ll wonder how we failed to learn from the Gods that came before us ORCHARDS Who of us will learn to breathe the smoke and steam that rises form the orchards of Turing’s Eden OLYMPUS the flame for us the bolt for you Read more...

It's the Comforts That Make us Feel Numb.

Time Management My Life Philosophy
I heard once, “It’s the comforts that make us feel numb” - Hozier And you know what? I think he’s right. I think the ways in which we save time, the little eases and comforts, the ergonomics of our lives numb us and erode our sense of meaning. Now, does that mean I churn my own butter and sew my own clothes? Of course not, but it does make me think about the little moments that make up my life and how they make up my sense of meaning. Read more...

Stop Trying to Remember Everything you Read.

Stop Trying to Remember Everything you Read. The Having vs Being fallacy of digital second brains and remembering everything you read I was seduced by the Capture Everything, Remember Everything you read, Digital Brain, trend for 2 years. You know what it got me? A Notion AND Roam Research so full I’m terrified of looking through them and a long list of books I’ve speed read but can barely recall. Read more...

Turn GPT-4 Into your Personal Literature Review Bot

Academia GenAI Literature Review
👋 Hey Friends, Getting into a new field of research requires reading dozens of landmark and seminal papers to understand that field’s foundations. This usually involves the manual process of searching key-words on google scholar, finding papers, polling friends, advisors, colleagues, and other experts for the most important papers. It’s an ad-hoc process that can take months. Even more time intensive is conducting a proper, methodical, literature review. Establishing a method, identifying the correct keywords, finding the right databases - it’s difficult but vital work. Read more...

Turn GPT-4 Into your Personal Literature Review Bot

Academia GenAI Literature Review
👋 Hey Friends, Getting into a new field of research requires reading dozens of landmark and seminal papers to understand that field’s foundations. This usually involves the manual process of searching key-words on google scholar, finding papers, polling friends, advisors, colleagues, and other experts for the most important papers. It’s an ad-hoc process that can take months. Even more time intensive is conducting a proper, methodical, literature review. Establishing a method, identifying the correct keywords, finding the right databases - it’s difficult but vital work. Read more...

ChatGPT is my Writing Coach and Editor: Here's How

Writing Generative-AI
💡 Truly great writing, the kind that moves us, comes from lived human experiences. This will always be the domain of Sapiens. — A trust me bro statement by Nathan Laundry ChatGPT doesn’t have its own stories to share, but it excels at finding mistakes in the ways I write about mine! That’s why ChatGPT and I make a great team. I bring real stories and ChatGPT helps me convey them effectively. Read more...

Prime then Immerse: How I Learn Difficult Things Quickly

Learning My-Life-Philosophy
💡If you want to learn French, move to France. 🧑‍💻 How I Learned Terminal Driven Linux This is my mantra and it all started in 2016, my first year as a Computer Science Undergrad at the University of Guelph. I had been looped in by SOCIS — the Society of Computing and Information Sciences — which sounds a lot more official than it really was. At the time, it was a small community of fellow geeks, nerds, and tech enthusiasts (it’s grown to be much larger than that these days) and the cool thing was Linux. Read more...
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