Talk About Your Personal Website!

[RadioHades]

Pantsu, about your media lists (film, music, novels), I dare say they'd be much more interesting if you were to sometimes write detailed reviews about select entries. At least I would be interested.

[TheEvilShadoo]

Your website is really cool. I linked it from mine. I love the ski pics too. I love the landscape of New England, though I've never been much into winter sports. Just winter weather :D

Thanks! I linked back to your site, fellow .xyz bro. I'm probably going to adjust my web button a little bit. When I made it, I actually made a 440x155 and naïvely expected it to scale down cleanly, but the text and avatar ends up being a tad blurry. I'll share a proper 88x31 when I get around to it.

[TheEvilShadoo]

I'm probably going to adjust my web button a little bit. When I made it, I actually made a 440x155 and naïvely expected it to scale down cleanly, but the text and avatar ends up being a tad blurry. I'll share a proper 88x31 when I get around to it.

Here's a sharper 88x31 if I may request a change, Amlux.

[DrSchnautz]

I hate to doublepost but given my last post was very barebones, my website has grown substantially since then and I didn't even link it nor say much about it, I feel like another more substantial post is warranted. I hope that's fine.

When/how did you develop an interest in making a website and how long has it been online for?

I think I've wanted to develop a site for as long as I'd been on the Internet. Originally because I thought websites were cool but eventually because I felt like I had stuff to say and a way to say it. I wrote a good bit about all kinds of things but didn't publish them throughout my tweens and teens. These were only shown to my friends and family. My dad told me to put them on a website (in fact, he had his own in the 2000s), and I thought it was an interesting enough idea.

I developed my first website in 2020. It was very "internet-culture" based and charged with all of the really dumb thoughts a 16 year old me had. I don't remember many articles from there, but one was about how I felt like people who hated the NORMIES! were as bad as them and another about intellectual property and emulation where I let off a good bit of steam about how much I dislike intellectual property (that remains a constant today, one of the few views I've held consistently throughout the time). Those were the only two I have rattling around in my head at this particular moment. It underwent multiple incarnations, the most recent one being the website I have right now (linked in my signature) which is made specifically for my real life work in relation to linguistics, logic, math and science, and more laid-back work about music, vidya, anime, et cetera, but the focus is mainly on the academic side of things.

Right now, I'm considering bringing back the earlier incarnations of the website where I can write anonymously about more fun stuff, but I don't see much of a use for it right now, especially given the fact that I don't have much to say that needs it. I guess when I have less to worry about and I feel like writing more funny/satirical stuff, I might. Not fully sure right now.

What did the earliest proper version of your website look like? (I include this in part to appeal to the lurkers viewing this thread without a site; everyone starts somewhere!)

The earliest version from 2020 looked horrible. Horribly nested \<div>s, images meant to sit next to each other not put in a \<table>, horribly tiled JPEG background from the 1989 Famicom/NES game Sweet Home. The text was a medium-dark shade of blue on a black background. Looked like utter shit, but it's good. Could you believe I spent an entire day on the CSS there? Had a bit of a "learn as you go" type of deal that really didn't do much for me.

Though later on I learned HTML and CSS proper from Jon Duckett's book. Very good resource for the very basics of HTML and CSS, and it's pretty good for it. Though it is pretty limited for a lot of the stuff you do. In honesty, though, writing HTML's a fucking slog, so I do use Claude to help a bit with it even though it doesn't do everything right with the layout; that's my end of the deal. I might switch over to a static site generator sometime.

Out of all the sections of your site, what are you the most proud of? What are you least proud of?

What I'm most proud of is probably the academic parts. I wrote two code reports, one for an Akkadian noun analyzer I wrote with just regex, and another which is a sentence generator which uses a context-free grammar to generate random English sentences. I'm pretty proud of both, mainly because I discussed my architectural decisions, what I learned, et cetera. I also really like the music articles I wrote, I wrote three reviews up on there (and more on the way!) for prog albums I like, hopefully some more stuff for video games, anime, and some more kinds of music.

Least proud of? My Japan travelogue; I had more pictures and stuff to put up but I didn't put any of them up and now it's been 3 months. I might write a retrospective to fit that in...

What's a longterm idea/project for your site that you haven't yet started on but want to eventually?

Way more linguistics articles, somewhere between a research, a literature review and pop linguistics stuff. I'm honestly quite pissed about the informal representations of linguistics to people, where little, if any, mention is given to anything beyond "Look at how Internet people invented their own lingo!" and it sucks. One of the few doing any actual linguistics content catering to non-academics is Josh of NativLang, who's consistently good I think. K Klein is nice too but some of his stuff is kind of annoying. Seeing his vid on Piraha and reading the sources, he did not mention Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues (2009), which is literally what fucking steamrolls Everett's conclusions as the narrative of "Everett presents undeniable evidence and Chomsky's wrong."

Chomsky's Universal Grammar in its modern form suffers from good many problems (my main ones being Minimalism's loss of formalism despite that being the main point Chomsky made in Syntactic Structures and the problem of linear structures and non-configurationality), just not the ones Daniel Everett posits, but that's a massive digression, forgive me, I just felt it was necessary to illustrate how poor theoretical linguistics is in the public eye, going back to the point...

The problem is that in the modern day, theoretical linguistics doesn't seem to have much of anything made about it. I understand it's because a lot of it necessitates prerequisite knowledge in things like cognitive science and formal logic, but I've wanted to do 3Blue1Brown style analyses, presenting different facets of linguistic analysis. But it's where a lot of interesting things are happening.

For example, I've wanted to write some extensive articles on the linguistics of neural language models. There's some really interesting things, like how word embeddings reflect the distributional linguistic tradition (of which Zellig Harris, Chomsky's advisor, did a good bit of work in!), how LLMs might encode symbolic, hierarchical linguistic structure (and how that may be what allows it to write mathematical proofs and working code), and a lot of other stuff.

I've also wanted to write about theoretical linguistics proper. One idea I've had is on the Construction Grammar family of frameworks and their implementations, as well as different hypotheses and theories within Minimalism (despite me disagreeing with a lot of it, I believe it to be something people should know about because it's rare for a research program to get literally everything wrong), and also alternate frameworks within generative grammar.

I also wanted to talk about the relations of mathematics and logic with linguistics; relating symbolic linguistic operations with tensor-based distributional semantics, information theory and its effect on syntactic dependencies and linguistic typology. Basically, linguistics as the deeply entrenched science where there's no shortage of mysteries, hypotheses and theories that we haven't fully figured out. That's at least much more interesting than 'Where did the word "yeet" arise from?'

[vulonkaaz]

instead of talking about what i do on my website i will talk about what i don't do

- I do not load ANY external resources, no external image, no iframe, if I did all those external stuff would be able to TRACK my users
- I do not use any javascript
- i do not use any abstraction layer, those are haram and are the exact reason why computers are slow nowadays, I edit the HTML directly, I have no template apart from those i wrote myself
- I do not load 1MB+ images on web pages, the images are a low resolution low color depth preview that you can open to see in HD

thanks to that my site is always good looking and fast no matter which cpu or browser you have

as for the content its mostly links and ms paint drawings i guess, maybe a little bit of schizo ranting but not too much

[rileymross]

I think there are two types of people. People who make sites for stylistic or nostalgic purposes or people who just use them to be minimal about using the internet as a tool to eliminate all the metadata.
I was always the second type. Luke Smith made me want to, because he was always the same way.
I'm not a big fan of coding and all that, but I try to deliberately be boring about the way I designed my site. And just to not be tied to social media.

[vulonkaaz]

I think there are two types of people. People who make sites for stylistic or nostalgic purposes or people who just use them to be minimal about using the internet as a tool to eliminate all the metadata.
I was always the second type. Luke Smith made me want to, because he was always the same way.
I'm not a big fan of coding and all that, but I try to deliberately be boring about the way I designed my site. And just to not be tied to social media.

why is your website blinking

[DrSchnautz]

OK, this is strange, I edited this post out because I thought I was editing the post I made. Unintentionally made a new post. Move along, sorry.

[Maypews]

I hate to doublepost but given my last post was very barebones, my website has grown substantially since then and I didn't even link it nor say much about it, I feel like another more substantial post is warranted. I hope that's fine.

When/how did you develop an interest in making a website and how long has it been online for?

I think I've wanted to develop a site for as long as I'd been on the Internet. Originally because I thought websites were cool but eventually because I felt like I had stuff to say and a way to say it. I wrote a good bit about all kinds of things but didn't publish them throughout my tweens and teens. These were only shown to my friends and family. My dad told me to put them on a website (in fact, he had his own in the 2000s), and I thought it was an interesting enough idea.

I developed my first website in 2020. It was very "internet-culture" based and charged with all of the really dumb thoughts a 16 year old me had. I don't remember many articles from there, but one was about how I felt like people who hated the NORMIES! were as bad as them and another about intellectual property and emulation where I let off a good bit of steam about how much I dislike intellectual property (that remains a constant today, one of the few views I've held consistently throughout the time). Those were the only two I have rattling around in my head at this particular moment. It underwent multiple incarnations, the most recent one being the website I have right now (linked in my signature) which is made specifically for my real life work in relation to linguistics, logic, math and science, and more laid-back work about music, vidya, anime, et cetera, but the focus is mainly on the academic side of things.

Right now, I'm considering bringing back the earlier incarnations of the website where I can write anonymously about more fun stuff, but I don't see much of a use for it right now, especially given the fact that I don't have much to say that needs it. I guess when I have less to worry about and I feel like writing more funny/satirical stuff, I might. Not fully sure right now.

What did the earliest proper version of your website look like? (I include this in part to appeal to the lurkers viewing this thread without a site; everyone starts somewhere!)

The earliest version from 2020 looked horrible. Horribly nested \<div>s, images meant to sit next to each other not put in a \<table>, horribly tiled JPEG background from the 1989 Famicom/NES game Sweet Home. The text was a medium-dark shade of blue on a black background. Looked like utter shit, but it's good. Could you believe I spent an entire day on the CSS there? Had a bit of a "learn as you go" type of deal that really didn't do much for me.

Though later on I learned HTML and CSS proper from Jon Duckett's book. Very good resource for the very basics of HTML and CSS, and it's pretty good for it. Though it is pretty limited for a lot of the stuff you do. In honesty, though, writing HTML's a fucking slog, so I do use Claude to help a bit with it even though it doesn't do everything right with the layout; that's my end of the deal. I might switch over to a static site generator sometime.

Out of all the sections of your site, what are you the most proud of? What are you least proud of?

What I'm most proud of is probably the academic parts. I wrote two code reports, one for an Akkadian noun analyzer I wrote with just regex, and another which is a sentence generator which uses a context-free grammar to generate random English sentences. I'm pretty proud of both, mainly because I discussed my architectural decisions, what I learned, et cetera. I also really like the music articles I wrote, I wrote three reviews up on there (and more on the way!) for prog albums I like, hopefully some more stuff for video games, anime, and some more kinds of music.

Least proud of? My Japan travelogue; I had more pictures and stuff to put up but I didn't put any of them up and now it's been 3 months. I might write a retrospective to fit that in...

What's a longterm idea/project for your site that you haven't yet started on but want to eventually?

Way more linguistics articles, somewhere between a research, a literature review and pop linguistics stuff. I'm honestly quite pissed about the informal representations of linguistics to people, where little, if any, mention is given to anything beyond "Look at how Internet people invented their own lingo!" and it sucks. One of the few doing any actual linguistics content catering to non-academics is Josh of NativLang, who's consistently good I think. K Klein is nice too but some of his stuff is kind of annoying. Seeing his vid on Piraha and reading the sources, he did not mention Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues (2009), which is literally what fucking steamrolls Everett's conclusions as the narrative of "Everett presents undeniable evidence and Chomsky's wrong."

Chomsky's Universal Grammar in its modern form suffers from good many problems (my main ones being Minimalism's loss of formalism despite that being the main point Chomsky made in Syntactic Structures and the problem of linear structures and non-configurationality), just not the ones Daniel Everett posits, but that's a massive digression, forgive me, I just felt it was necessary to illustrate how poor theoretical linguistics is in the public eye, going back to the point...

The problem is that in the modern day, theoretical linguistics doesn't seem to have much of anything made about it. I understand it's because a lot of it necessitates prerequisite knowledge in things like cognitive science and formal logic, but I've wanted to do 3Blue1Brown style analyses, presenting different facets of linguistic analysis. But it's where a lot of interesting things are happening.

For example, I've wanted to write some extensive articles on the linguistics of neural language models. There's some really interesting things, like how word embeddings reflect the distributional linguistic tradition (of which Zellig Harris, Chomsky's advisor, did a good bit of work in!), how LLMs might encode symbolic, hierarchical linguistic structure (and how that may be what allows it to write mathematical proofs and working code), and a lot of other stuff.

I've also wanted to write about theoretical linguistics proper. One idea I've had is on the Construction Grammar family of frameworks and their implementations, as well as different hypotheses and theories within Minimalism (despite me disagreeing with a lot of it, I believe it to be something people should know about because it's rare for a research program to get literally everything wrong), and also alternate frameworks within generative grammar.

I also wanted to talk about the relations of mathematics and logic with linguistics; relating symbolic linguistic operations with tensor-based distributional semantics, information theory and its effect on syntactic dependencies and linguistic typology. Basically, linguistics as the deeply entrenched science where there's no shortage of mysteries, hypotheses and theories that we haven't fully figured out. That's at least much more interesting than 'Where did the word "yeet" arise from?'

Fascinating post here! I would like to see more about your Japan travelogue, checked up on it a few times for updates over the months that never came... what kind of website did your father have if it's not too personal a question? I could imagine that being highly inspirational, sadly none of my family members had a personal site to my knowledge.