I began learning FPGA development in pursuit of gaining a better understanding of how computers work beneath the abstraction layer provided by software. Knowing how computers use transistors and electricity to make the magic happen has long been something I’ve wanted to really understand. My goal is to understand more about how to assemble parts of computers out of these fundamental components, and doing this with FPGAs is helping me learn faster.

I’m using a DE10-Nano as my development board, along with Intel Quartus as the development environment to build and run my projects. These tools aren’t great, but they’re getting the job done, and they let me build and deploy code I’ve written with Verilog, the HDL I’m starting with. I have a bunch of project ideas to try learning on it, but for now it is not a means to an end, but a platform to learn on.

Here I plan on cataloguing this journey as much as I can.

Large language models (LLMs) evoke polarizing opinions, often hailed as revolutionary tools for transforming labor or dismissed as unethical systems that exploit creators and harm the environment. The truth lies somewhere in between. LLMs are undeniably capable, offering utility in brainstorming, summarizing, coding, and other applications. Yet, they also have clear limitations in accuracy, significant energy demands, and significant and well-founded ethical concerns stemming from the theft of IP needed to fuel their creation.

Rather than adopting extreme views, I believe we should approach LLMs with skepticism and honesty, understanding both their utility and risks. These models, despite their problematic origins, are here to stay and have real-world applications. My goal is to explore and share insights on using LLMs effectively while inviting thoughtful critique and contributions from others who wish to engage critically with this emerging technology.

This website is itself one of my projects, one that has been evolving for over 15 years. It started off as static HTML files written by hand, before eventually moving over to a WordPress site in the mid-2000s. Seeing the rise of Tumblr and wanting the ability to have my own posts that were image or link posts, I switched the site over to Chyrp, which was a really nice lightweight blogging platform but one that hasn’t been well maintained in the last few years, unfortunately.

After years of neglect and posting to my now-dead side blog called Informal Protocol and posting to Medium, I decided to get my blog back into a good place that would be easy for me to hack on, maintain, and deploy. I originally thought to switch back to WordPress, and prototyped with that for awhile, before settling on Gatsby, a static site generator built around React that aims to be incredibly fast to get pages to load. Since it’s built in React, which I’m very comfortable with, getting the site together was quite easy. This means that for the first time in the history of my site, the entire theme was built completely from scratch.