I have a new executive assistant. He updates me on the most important emails in my inbox, my loved ones’ upcoming birthdays, calendar events, holidays, package tracking updates and more. His name is Mr. McGillicuddy, and he lives inside my typewriter. Mr. McGillicuddy is a deceptively simple concept that took me a comically long time…

I’ve spent the past month recreating my dad’s old law office (which was basically a second home, a babysitter, an afterschool program and a playground for my entire childhood) in miniature. This is my second miniature, after assembling a kit as a gift for my sister over the holidays. As I was building that one…

You can now write a letter to Joshbot and pop it in the mail, and a couple of weeks later you’ll get a handwritten reply in your mailbox. As I was working on automating sending generated letters via postal mail for my recent Save Midwood Station campaign, it got me thinking about other ways to…

Our local post office here in central Brooklyn is set to close in a few months, because the building was sold out from under the USPS. In its infinite wisdom, the USPS has decided to relocate the post office a mile and a half away, outside of the ZIP code it serves. The USPS is…

A few years ago, I was over at my partner’s house for Thanksgiving when her mother mentioned a chest full of old photos. We dug in, amazed by the relics that she hadn’t seen in decades — or, in many cases, ever. This year, inspired by my nostalgic digitizing and generative AI projects, I decided…

A few weeks ago I posted about Joshbot, the custom fine-tuned instance of GPT-3.5 I trained on 100k iMessage question/answer pairs. It’s seen some iteration since then and I wanted to share that progress. Ever since first launching Joshbot I felt like it was missing something. It was an incredible vibes-based simulation of chatting with…

I’ve posted a bunch about working with retro media and hardware, especially since cleaning out my parents’ basement after recent fall flooding in NYC. That project yielded the Brother EP-44 word processor, a vintage 1984 typewriter with a serial port that I posted about here, but that just scratches the surface of the stuff I’ve…

I really, really like reporting potholes. It’s an odd pastime, sure, but it turns out it’s really empowering and satisfying to be able to make a difference in the cityscape. There are so many maddening problems that seem unsolvable in a city this big — but somehow, miraculously, potholes are low-hanging fruit. Once you complain,…

I built a tool that sends me sweet memories sourced from 25 years of incoming emails, using gpt-4 and Pinecone. Read on! While I was adapting my text message corpus to train Joshbot, I started thinking about how my email archive is just as robust as my text message corpus — and equally under-utilized. I’ve…

I’ve wanted to go to Burning Man since I was in 7th grade, in the spring of 1998. I remember how I first heard about it: this article about tracking strange pay phones, in the dearly-missed Circuits section of the New York Times. It made passing mention of a guy named Godfrey Daniels who had…