Hello blogness, my old friend

…I’ve come to post to you again 🎶

Well, well, well… hello again!

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything here. When I was porting the blog over from my decrepit old Wordpress site to here (see below), it reminded me of how often I used to post stuff. For a while, I was almost treating it like a full time job, and cranking stuff out near weekly.

My lack of activity might make you think I haven’t been doing any projects (outside of work), but I’ve actually been quite the busy little bee. Let the posting commence once again, starting with the obligatory painful navelgazing “welcome back” reflection post.

Why start posting again now?

In the age of LLMs and “fast” social media, that’s a good question.

There used to be these blog posts that were like, the canonical source for certain topics. These posts were often on a somewhat niche topic where there wasn’t any good textbook for it, or maybe they just presented a hard topic in a particularly accessible way. One I still remember was a series of posts by “studywolf” on Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) that seemed to be the best resource on the internet for learning about them. And lo and behold, in the year of our lord 2025, it’s still the top google result:

and here’s a link to it, since it’s still up. My point is that although posts like this might’ve been the best resource on a topic at the time, I’m guessing your favorite LLM can explain the topic about as well, and interactively too (maybe it won’t have the nice figures yet). Yeah:

So you probably can’t compete on the straightforward information axis anymore.

And, most social media has gotten increasingly “fast”, in the sense of (lack of) depth and attention. Most people under the age of 55 don’t have the patience to watch a 22 minute TV episode, let alone read a rambling blog post on abstruse math bs. Hell, even the hallowed 3B1B has caved and started making short form content. How the mighty have fallen.

With those caveats, I think there are still good reasons.

First of all, even if most people aren’t gonna read a blog, I think blogs actually are still meaningful among certain types of people, and those are the types I’m interested in anyway. It’s encouraging that while tiktok/etc brainrot is turning a generation’s minds to sludge, substack seems to be genuinely successful. And, substack is basically a standard WYSIWYG blogging platform that’s been gussied up to make random people feel like they’re doing ~journalism~.

Second, even though LLMs are pretty good at explaining some topics, they (currently) still fall short in a few ways, like making explanatory figures. For example, following it up on the diagram offer it made above:

These are… both pretty wrong. They’re both clearly inspired by the correct diagram I know it’s going for, but even if you know nothing about DMPs you can see that the figures are nonsensical.

So we still have that on them, for now at least. And I think more generally, LLMs just aren’t doing what I want to do here, i.e., try some experiments, speculate about ideas and such.

One last reason is that, believe it or not, the blog actually has been useful a handful of times in my career. Various specific posts and having it as a general showcase of my skills/etc, has landed me a couple contracting jobs, a few interviews, some academic contacts that led to papers, and other stuff. I don’t think that should be the primary reason to post, but it’s definitely not nothing. A good technical post obviously doesn’t carry the same weight as a peer reviewed paper, but sometimes it’s good just to have something to point to while describing something you did.

Skimming through my old posts feels weird

In processing the old posts over from the WP site to this one, I had to skim scroll through most of the old posts to make sure nothing was horribly broken. So in doing that I got to see a driveby summary of a period of my life from about 2017-2021, which felt pretty weird.

Seeing the posts, it felt like looking at someone very familiar, but also a different person I used to know and lost contact with. It’s clear that the type of things I’m interested come and go, which is natural I guess, but it’s still strange to remember how into some things I was; I was very into photography, music, making guitar pedals, travel, etc, and I do those things much less now.

I was also at a pretty different time in my life. I was only employed part time for some of it, so I spent a lot of time on projects I’d consider pretty frivolous now. But I also do feel a certain wistfulness for how that guy lived, where something random would grab his attention and he’d do a project on it for a week. It was a lot more carefree and fun. I’m not saying it was better back then, but I think it’s worth remembering to sometimes just do something because I want to, without regard for whether it’s a “good” way to spend my time.

Good lord I was a little idiot

I was definitely facepalming a lot while going through those posts. My coding practices were real crappy, which makes sense because I was still learning, but still made me cringe. camelCase python functions, kwargs all over the place, horrible formatting and bad variable names, and overall just bad ways of doing things.

That’s not that bad though. I also just clearly didn’t fully understand some topics either, and should’ve spent a bit more time understanding them than producing something with them.

I think the dumbest part though was just spending lots of effort on the wrong parts of posts. I’d get really consumed with getting something to work, and burn a loooot of time. Sure, sometimes cracking something like that can be how you really learn a topic. But in many cases it’s just burning through time on a thing where it literally doesn’t matter if you get it to work or not. I think I’m a lot better now at abandoning unpromising paths and putting my effort in the right places.

…but I was an inspired little idiot

All that said, I still look back on it fondly. When I try to separate the blog from myself and imagine seeing it as if it were someone else doing them at that point, I think I’d find the collection a bit charming and think the creator was kind of all over the place in terms of interests, but curious and industrious.

Things are gonna change around here, bucko

When my posting started slowing down in the past, I’d periodically have the realization that I was slowing down because it was taking too long, and that I should just post more often, polished-ness be damned. My friend Phil has the right idea. He basically treats his blog the way I treat my personal notes, posting things that are very rough and often just trail off at the end with scattered thoughts.

I used to spend a lot of time on some posts: the writing, the figures, the formatting, all that jazz. And yeah, some of them look nice. But I’ll say, having seen how the blog sausage is made: I don’t think they were worth it. There’s definitely a pareto thing here where 90% of the quality comes from the first 10% of the time, and then the rest of quality comes from the remaining time.

(I asked GPT for a political style cartoon of the blog sausage being made.)

Aside from that, I don’t think there was actually much correlation between the time I spent on posts and how good they were. Some of my favorites (or ones that got some external attention) were things I just kind of threw together, and some of the ones I spent a looong time on turned out to be dumb and no one cared about them. That suggests that it’s more that some ideas are just good and some are lousy, and that suggests that a better strategy is probably cranking out lots of them, to have more chances of getting a good idea out there. Also, that story about the photography class that’s divided in half where one half gets graded on the best photo they can produce and the other half gets graded on their total output, blah blah.

Shorter is better

I need to brand myself with this backwards, Memento style, so I’ll see it every time I look in the mirror: you gotta keep the posts short. If you write too much, it’s boring as hell and no one will read it. If you (somehow) write too little, you can just write more if people actually want it.

I need to keep that classic taped to my monitor whenever I’m writing a post. And yeah, I appreciate the irony of how long this post is :(

Out with the old, in with the new (site)

Having two sites is stupid

Previously I had a Wordpress site at www.declanoller.com, and a Github pages site at declanoller.github.io. The GH site was kind of an afterthought where I put my “technical” posts, while the WP site was kind of a “kitchen sink” deal that had the technical posts as well as random thoughts, photos, little non-technical projects, etc.

I think my logic at the time was that I wanted to appear “professional” and “technical” with the GH page, and in my head a “professional” wouldn’t have multiple posts about boat races with garbage boats or other silly things.

Now I don’t really care anymore. I dunno, if zuck calls me up someday and tells me he wants to hire me for a bazillion bucks a year but I’m not allowed to have a personality, maybe I’ll change my tune and frantically delete a bunch of stuff with my metaphorical tail between my legs. But I guess I’ve now had enough experience in the working world to know that as long as your non-technical posts aren’t (entirely) diatribes about the reptilian shapeshifters living in your walls or whatever, it’s probably fine and no one’s gonna hold it against you. On the contrary, in my experience that type of stuff can actually be good for your career. Would you rather hire someone with a relevant technical background, or someone with the same background but they also seem fun and have a few things in common with you?

Friendship with Wordpress is over, now markdown is my best friend

The other thing is that the WP site was ultimately a huge PITA. WP is… a confused, sad creature. It’s mostly a WYSIWYG editor, but it also has “shortcode” or some nonsense, and it’s of course all just HTML and CSS under the hood. The problem is that when you want to customize anything, you quickly start blending the “layers” of abstraction, to the point where you have this terrible kludge.

It was also just painful to write in. To make posts, you log into their weird dashboard and editor, where everything is clunky and slow. When you want to do various things, you use these 3rd party plugins that were godawful and sometimes cost money. A lot of the time I’d have some problem with the site and it was basically a black hole trying to figure out why it was broken.

On top of that, I now use Obsidian for all my notes. Obsidian works with Markdown, which is kind of nice because it’s just a generic thing. Jekyll processes Markdown into HTML. Jekyll itself is kind of ugly IMO. Part of what made the GH page annoying before was that I didn’t really understand the flow of what was happening. I blindly followed directions on some Jekyll page to set it up, which involved Ruby and “gems” and other evil entities I wish to know nothing about.

So since I’d write all my posts on WP, I’d then translate them to the GH page, which was always an ugly pain. The important part is that since I’m writing my notes in Markdown anyway, this lets me just copy over the bits I want to turn into a post.

Lastly, I used GPT (o3) to help me write a python script to convert the old WP exported pages into markdown. This mostly worked and saved me a ton of time, but there are still probably some broken things on the site. Please tell me if you spot any, so I can fix them.

That’s all! Let’s hope it sticks this time, he said for the millionth time.