205 lines
9.7 KiB
Markdown
205 lines
9.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Colophon
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date: 2026-03-21
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modified: 2026-03-21
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status: "Draft"
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tags: [meta]
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abstract: On the design, tools, and philosophy of this site — and by extension, its author.
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---
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::: dropcap
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A personal website is not a publication. It is a position. A publication presents work
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in a finalized, immutable state, and carries with it some sort of declaration - "this is my most polished and prized work!";
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a position is something you inhabit, argue from, and occasionally
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revise in public. Every design decision on this site — the typeface, the build system,
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the absence of tracking, the presence of confidence scores — encodes a value. This page
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explains those values, and why they took the form they did.
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What follows is a colophon in the grand old sense: a printer's note at the end of the book,
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recording how it was made, who made it, etc. The difference: here, the
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printer and the author are the same person, and the process of making is itself not only *a* form
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of argument, but *the only* form of argument permitted.
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:::
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---
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## Typography
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::: dropcap
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You are reading this sentence in SPECTRAL, which is not only a font with particular personal importance to me, but also an exceedingly pleasing font to read.
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:::
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[TODO: The [OpenType]{.smallcaps} features — `smcp`, `onum`, `liga`, `calt` — and why
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self-hosting is required to use them.]^[Google Fonts strips OpenType features during
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subsetting for bandwidth. Self-hosting with `pyftsubset` preserves `smcp` (small
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capitals), `onum` (old-style figures), `liga` (common ligatures), and the full optical
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size range. The difference is visible: old-style figures sit on the baseline rather
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than hanging above it, small capitals are drawn to match the x-height rather than being
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shrunken full caps, and ligatures prevent collisions in letter pairs like *fi* and *fl*.]
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[TODO: Fira Sans for [UI]{.smallcaps} and headers. What humanist warmth means in a
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sans-serif and why it pairs well with Spectral. JetBrains Mono for code — code should
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look like code.]
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The monochrome palette is a discipline. Color is often used to do work that typography
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should do: distinguishing hierarchy, marking emphasis, signaling state. When those
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functions are handled by weight, size, and spacing instead, color becomes available
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for the things it cannot be substituted for — and on a site with no data visualizations
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requiring color encoding, those things turn out to be very few.^[The one exception is
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the heatmap on the statistics page, which uses a four-step greyscale scale. Even there,
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the encoding is luminance rather than hue.]
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---
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## The Build
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::: dropcap
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[TODO: Hakyll and Pandoc. Why Haskell. The compile step as philosophy — this site is
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a program and the content is the source code. The analogy to compiled software: readers
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receive a deterministic artifact, not a runtime rendering decision.]
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:::
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[TODO: What Pandoc [AST]{.smallcaps} filters do. The filter chain: wikilinks →
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preprocessor, then sidenotes, smallcaps, dropcaps, links, images, math. All
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transformation before the reader arrives.]^[The full pipeline: Markdown source →
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Pandoc [AST]{.smallcaps} → citeproc → filter chain (sidenotes, smallcaps, dropcaps,
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wikilinks, external link classification, responsive images) → HTML. Complex math goes
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through a second pass: KaTeX renders server-side at build time, producing static
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[HTML]{.smallcaps}+MathML. No math rendering happens in the browser.]
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[TODO: The semantic search model — self-hosted [ONNX]{.smallcaps} weights served
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same-origin, no external [API]{.smallcaps} calls. Why this matters for the site's
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privacy posture.]
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[TODO: Build telemetry — pointer to `/build/` and `/stats/` for the empirical picture.
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This section covers intent; those pages cover state.]
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---
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## The Computing Environment
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::: dropcap
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[TODO: The organizing principle for this section: configuration is code, privacy is
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a first principle, tools should be earned rather than merely used. These are not
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preferences but positions, and this site is downstream of them.]
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:::
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### Desktop
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[TODO: Gentoo Linux, Hyprland, Levshell (custom shell via Quickshell). Why Gentoo:
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compilation for performance, fine-grained [USE]{.smallcaps} flag control, the
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community. Why Hyprland: tiling window management as a productivity commitment.
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[AMD]{.smallcaps} hardware throughout.]^[The personal computing setup is documented
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in greater depth on the [[Me]] page. This section focuses on what is directly
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relevant to how this site is built and maintained.]
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### Laptop
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[TODO: Arch Linux on ThinkPad P-series. Why Arch rather than Gentoo on battery-
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constrained hardware. The continuity of the Hyprland environment across machines —
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the same keybindings, the same visual language, the same muscle memory.]
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### Editor
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[TODO: Emacs. Everything written and coded in Emacs. The relationship between the
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editor and the content — writing Markdown in Emacs with a Hakyll watcher running is
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as close to a [WYSIWYG]{.smallcaps} experience as the workflow gets.]
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### Privacy-First Computing
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[TODO: Self-hosted email and [VPN]{.smallcaps}. LibreWolf over Firefox (the Chromium
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monopoly and Mozilla's drift). GrapheneOS. The principle: privacy as a first principle
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means building the infrastructure first, not bolting on settings after. The same
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principle applies to this site — no tracking is not a policy decision, it is an
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architectural one.]
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---
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## [AI]{.smallcaps} and This Site
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::: dropcap
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This site was built in collaboration with Claude. The Pandoc filters, the [CSS]{.smallcaps},
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the JavaScript, the Hakyll build system — much of the infrastructure emerged from an
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iterative dialogue between author and model. This is worth stating plainly, because
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the site's content argues for a specific position on [AI]{.smallcaps} use, and that
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position is most legible when the colophon is honest about where it was and was not applied.
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:::
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[TODO: The augmentation/automation distinction made concrete. Building the
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infrastructure that hosts original thought is different from generating the thought.
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The Pandoc filter that transforms footnotes into sidenotes was written with Claude;
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the footnotes themselves were not. The CSS that sets the typeface was written with
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Claude; the prose set in that typeface was not. The distinction is the point.]
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[TODO: What this means for the site's claims to originality. The content — the essays,
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the compositions, the poetry, the research — is entirely Levi's. The medium was built
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collaboratively. This is the same relationship a writer has with an editor, a compositor,
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or a press operator: the vehicle is shared work; the voice is not.]^[The model used
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throughout is Claude (Anthropic). The full git history is publicly available and
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records what was changed when, which is a more honest account than any prose summary.]
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---
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## Design Decisions
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### Sidenotes
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[TODO: The Tufte influence — *Envisioning Information*, the three-column layout, the
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argument that footnotes interrupt reading in a way that marginalia does not. The
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sidenote as a first-class typographic element rather than a concession to citation
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convention. Credit: Said Achmiz for the sidenote positioning [JS]{.smallcaps} (the
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implementation used here is a simplified fork).]
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### No Tracking
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The site has no analytics, no visit counters, no fingerprinting, and no third-party
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scripts.^[This is enforced at the nginx level via [CSP]{.smallcaps} headers, not just
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by omission. The Content Security Policy prevents any script not explicitly whitelisted
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from executing. The whitelist is short.] The reason is not only privacy, though privacy
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is sufficient. The deeper reason is that knowing your readership changes what you write
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for it — gradually, invisibly, in the direction of whatever the metrics reward. A site
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without metrics cannot optimize for them. This is a feature.
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### Living Documents
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[TODO: The epistemic metadata system — `status`, `confidence`, `modified`, `importance`.
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What each field means. Why marking `status: Ongoing` on a document matters: it is an
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honest claim about the document's relationship to the author's current thinking, rather
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than the implicit permanence that publication usually signals. The modified date is
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not decorative; it is the reader's primary signal for whether to treat a document as
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settled or in flux.]
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---
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## Influences
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[TODO: gwern.net — the primary architectural and philosophical ancestor. What was
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taken (sidenotes, living documents, epistemic metadata, semantic zoom, the long-form
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personal essay as the primary unit). What was changed (visual register — gwern's
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monochrome is denser; this site is more spacious — and scope).]
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[TODO: Tufte — *Envisioning Information* and *The Visual Display of Quantitative
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Information*. The three-column layout, the sidenote tradition, the principle that
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good typography is invisible.]
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[TODO: The personal website tradition more broadly — the early web's culture of
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idiosyncratic personal pages before social media collapsed everyone into the same
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templates. This site is partly an argument that that culture was worth having.]
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---
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## The Future
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This site is unfinished. Several portals have no content yet. The annotated bibliography
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is sparse. Some pages are marked `status: Stub` for good reason. This is acknowledged
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rather than concealed, because a site that presents itself as complete when it is not
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is making a false claim about the relationship between the author and the work.
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[TODO: Specific things that are in progress — content migration, the library portal,
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the fiction and research portals as the corpus grows. The Recently section on the
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homepage, deferred until the corpus supports it.]
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The colophon itself is a living document. When the site changes substantially, this
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page will change with it. The git history is the authoritative record; this page is
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the annotated summary.
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