I moved to downtown Chicago last summer and one of the main sources of stress was dealing with the U-Haul U-Box moving container I purchased to move all of my stuff. This same advisory applies to PODS pod containers as well.

Note: This essay was originally included in my newsletter. If this interests you, subscribe below! This monstrous essay started as a letter, then I decided it was better as a newsletter, then I decided to make it a full-on essay. A newsletter probably isn’t the best form for this but by the time I realized that, I was already committed1. On Thursday, I started wanting to write about my love of musical theatre, since that would be a productive way to procrastinate on packing for Chicago (duh). After starting, I realized I was actually writing about the importance of play and how it relates to the sorry state of the built environment in the US (eventually tying it back to musicals). Hang with me here for a minute, I promise they all go together.

I am very proud to announce that esbuild-svelte has over 1,000 projects depending on it to tie Svelte and esbuild together! This translates to over 28k downloads each month from npm. This is a huge personal achievement for me and I am very proud to be able to help people write better code in this way!

I’ve been wanting to create a more intermediate blogging system for a while now. Something where I could post a combination of random thoughts, poems, short-form content and other things that might not be of interest to my primary blog or newsletter audience. I already use Neat (what I call my link collection service) for super short content like links, so I figured I might as well extend it to support slightly longer form content. You can now head to https://neat.ethohampton.com/shorts (also accessible under the “Projects” menu on my main site) to view the collection of short-form content that I have posted. More shorts will be posted semi-regularly.

Years ago when I was helping my Grandma with her computer, she would always ask me “Ethan, how do you know how to do this? You’ve never done it before!” and at one point I responded with “I have a computer in my brain, so I try it there first, then I can do it with you”. That wasn’t (and still isn’t) true, but at the time it was the easiest way to explain something that felt so natural to me.

After the recent developments in the world of machine learning, I’ve decided that I need to do a better job of policing the reuse of my content. This generally isn’t a problem for people with an ultra-small following like myself but given the existence of sites like Common Crawl, I need to be more careful. The footer of my website now contains “No content under this domain (ethohampton.com) may be used for the teaching, testing, or verification of any machine learning algorithm without the written consent of Ethan Hampton.” which I will likely update as time goes on into a full terms of use/license. I don’t want my data to be used to create machine learning models like ChatGPT unless I understand what that means. This is even more of a problem in image models where art creation is someone’s livelihood and they often have unique styles that they effectively own.

I spent my autumn break exploring London, Geneva, Zermatt, Bern, Lucerne, and Zurich. It was a lot of fun and I know that I learned a lot on my adventures. The following pictures are some of the highlights of the trip and document some of the experiences I had.

Update (21-Jun-2022): A fix has been released by the Ubuntu team. This should no longer be needed. I recently updated to Pop!_OS 20.04 and was unable to connect to the wifi networks at my university. The root cause was the upgrade to OpenSSL 3 (which was long overdue). The below information demonstrates how I was able to fix the issue.

NOTE: It has come to my attention that this isn’t technically the process for FOIA requests, but rather how OSU/Oregon handles public records requests. This sort of approach is certainly worth a shot, but may require more work for different organizations/states. This all started when a peer on the unofficial Oregon State University Computer Science Discord server requested grades from every single class offered at OSU from 2019-2021. I created osuclassdata.ethohampton.com and then once the new term rolled around, I figured that it might be a good idea to get the latest data. This is a brief overview of how I went about my first FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) request. Hopefully this will be a helpful reference, and show just how easy it is to complete.

These are a few photos I took at William L. Finley Nation Wildlife Refuge on the 16th of October 2021. It was a great opportunity to explore nature, though I wish I had gone a little earlier in the day because there was a beautiful fog lifting just as I was driving towards it.