I read that you can tighten up prose by avoiding the word “just” and thought, sure, let’s try that.

I found 43 offenders on my blog. (I only went back to 2020 or so—anything older is beyond redemption.) The worst instances are those where “just” is used as a synonym of “only,” but that modifier is already implied by the sentence structure:

A student who wishes to apply to a top university needs more than just confidence in her academic talent.

Another tic of mine is to use “just” just to mean “simply,” when it’s really up to the reader to decide whether what follows is simple:

To figure this out, we just need to solve our $x^*$ equation for $c$.

I opted to let “just” stand in cases where it makes a sentence more precise:

it takes just under two minutes

I also think “just” pulls its weight when used to mean “exactly”:

it’s just the opposite

I have been learning about investments lately and encountered a concept called rebalancing. Rebalancing means exchanging assets to achieve a target allocation. For instance, suppose you resolve to hold 80% of your investments in stock and 20% in bonds. If you buy assets in those proportions and let them grow, the stock is likely to outperform the bonds. Your mix might drift to something like 90/10, and you need to rebalance.

In a typical investment portfolio, it’s not hard to figure out how to do this: In the example above, you would exchange 1/9th of the stocks for bonds. But the complexity escalates if your target allocation has more than two categories, or you hold a large number of mutual funds which themselves span multiple categories (consider a catalog of retirement strategy funds that contain different mixes of stocks and bonds).

For this post, let’s overthink things a bit and consider the general case of portfolio rebalancing with $n$ funds and $m$ asset categories. What’s the “cheapest” way to rebalance—how can you do it in the fewest transactions? And can we make “AI” (note: not actually AI) find the answer for us instead of eyeballing it?

If you’re reading this, I finally updated the backend of the site to use a new framework—from Jekyll to Hugo. I also took the opportunity to redo the homepage a bit. I don’t have as many blog-post-shaped thoughts as I used to, so I reduced the post previews to just links to create room for more freeform content.

The Hugo migration was a bit of work because I took my time and did it the fun way. The old version of the site used Jekyll and had accrued a lot of Jekyll’s “isms,” along with weird conventions of my own. I wrote a custom content migration script to transform Jekyll tags automatically where possible and flag for manual attention where needed.

I think/hope it worked. Old post links will redirect you to the new URLs. For RSS subscribers, depending on how your reader is configured, you may pick up a new copy of every post; you can mark as read everything before today’s date.

I read a comment stating that git (a tool programmers use to collaborate on code, sort of like Word’s Track Changes) is not a version control system but a “system for creating a version control system.”

That got me thinking about other such “metasystems” I use, and the frustration that arises when one expects a mere system and instead gets the meta thing.

I recently learned about PageRank, the original Google algorithm for ranking webpages. It works by constructing a Markov chain on links between pages and computing the stationary distribution. The stationary probability of a given page measures the page’s centrality in the web, an index of popularity.

I wanted to try implementing the algorithm myself and fiddle with a few Rust libraries, so I wrote a script that runs PageRank on interviews from the People and Blogs series. P&B interviews are a tidy dataset for the algorithm, because Manu always asks interviewees to recommend other blogs, then he uses these recommendations to pick subsequent interviewees. This means the graph is well connected despite its small size.

I was going to share the results here, but ranking blogs by popularity seems against the spirit of the indie web ethos, so you’ll have to run the program yourself. (But to make it clear I’m not covering anything up, let me acknowledge that my interview is in a 61-way tie for last place, with all the other blogs that had no links to them.)

A few observations from this exercise below.