Alys Brooks

GPT-4 is a Risky Dependency for FOSS Projects

Saturday, April 15, 2023 By Alys S.Brooks

Alongside the surge of interest in Copilot, ChatGPT, and now GPT-4, there’s been a corresponding surge in free and open source projects¹ that use them. I totally understand the curiosity about what large language models (LLMs) can do, the creative itch to experiment with them, and the …
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The Job Market is Tight Again

Wednesday, June 22, 2022 By Alys S.Brooks

Data from FRED, Federal Reserve of St. Louis

In August 2020, I wrote about the perhaps obvious fact that the economic issue of the early pandemic was a job shortage. This problem has mostly disappeared—there are now more openings than unemployed people and there have been for months.

The …
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Review: A Short Hike (2019)

Friday, January 01, 2021 By Alys S.Brooks

Many games promise a world, and some even deliver¹. A Short Hike definitely delivers, but its world is the size of a single (marvelous, gorgeous, detailed) island.

You play as Claire, a bird who’s visiting her Aunt May, a park ranger. Claire’s expecting an important call but …
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Job Shortages are the Norm

Monday, August 24, 2020 By Alys S.Brooks

Data from FRED, Federal Reserve of St. Louis

Since the pandemic began, there aren’t enough jobs to go around. You might be thinking that this is obvious, but many people either forget this fact or leave it out of their analysis. The graph above of the ratio of unemployed …
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2019 Year of Freelancing in Review

Tuesday, February 11, 2020 By Alys S.Brooks

In 2019, I covered far-right extremists, spoke to LGBT activists in Puerto Rico, sold my first piece of fiction, and looked at states that actually added abortion clinics in the 2010s. The previous year of freelancing involved a lot of dusting off my reporting skills; 2019 was much more about …
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Analyzing Wisconsin’s Record Midterm Turnout

Friday, May 10, 2019 By Alys S.Brooks

2018 was a high water mark for midterm voter turnout in Wisconsin—almost 60 percent turned out. While that’s still lower than most presidential elections, it’s the highest midterm since at least 1948.

There’s a fairly big range between the highest turnout counties and the lowest ones …
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Using Graal on a Small-But-Real Clojure Application

Monday, December 31, 2018 By Alys S.Brooks

Start up delays are a drag, so I’ve been excited about Graal’s ability to compile JVM bytecode since I heard about it eightish months ago. It hasn’t helped that my language wanderlust has been pulling me toward Common Lisp and Rust, two very different languages that both …
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Disappointed

Sunday, November 13, 2016 By Alys S.Brooks

Reflecting on the outcome of the election, one emotion stands out.

I’m disappointed.

I’m disappointed that my country is even more divided than before.

I’m disappointed that, apparently, the best candidate the Republicans could nominate was nakedly bigoted, dishonest, and the least popular candidate for president on …
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What I dislike about Python

Sunday, May 22, 2016 By Alys S.Brooks

try: assert Python == great

Python is my favorite programming language. It’s easy for beginners without limiting experts, it’s fun to use, and there’s a great community of people working on it. However, no language is perfect, and occasionally I get frustrated by its limits.

Quite a few …
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Todoist: The Unexplained Parts

Monday, December 14, 2015 By Alys S.Brooks

I keep track of tasks using Todoist, a cross-platform to-do list tool. It’s flexible without making simple things hard, which I appreciate¹. For example, adding a task with a deadline and a tag is as simple as clicking the plus button and typing “Call landlord @telephone today”.

Since …
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