---
title: "Miscellanea for 2025-05-13"
date: 2025-05-13T23:59:00-07:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2025/05/13/miscellanea/
author: Les Orchard
tags: [miscellanea]
---

# Miscellanea for 2025-05-13

- Hello world!
- I'm in a weird place with this current AI wave in the tech industry. Drafting up some thoughts, maybe they'll turn into a post? I started just riffing here, but the riffing kept expanding, so I think I should give it some time to cook.
- And, indeed, I went ahead and posted a separate entry on [what I'm thinking about AI and LLMs](https://blog.lmorchard.com/2025/05/13/thinking-about-llms/)! Maybe too many words that no one will read, but I wanted to get it out of my head for future noodling.
- None of what I wrote there about AI & LLMs is particularly novel - in fact, the post is probably about 2 years behind the times. It's just that I think I needed to get it written down to get my own head straight. And maybe to refer to it later?
- Also, this AI stuff [makes me self-conscious about my love of em dashes](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/chatgpt-hypen-em-dash-ai-writing-1235314945/), which predates the popularity of LLMs for generating text? This shell command says I've used at least 172 of them around here: `find . -type f -name "*.md" -print0 | xargs -0 grep -o "—" 2>/dev/null | wc -l`
- I can tell you exactly where I picked up my love of em dashes: Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_, sophomore year of high school. It was a conscious decision to adopt them. My opinions on that book have changed, but my use of em dashes remains insufferable.
- [feedsmith](https://github.com/macieklamberski/feedsmith): "Robust and fast parser and generator for RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, and RDF feeds, with support for Podcast, iTunes, Dublin Core, and OPML files."
	- Well, that's relevant to my interests. Might be worth replacing my half-baked RSS template on this blog with that, at least.