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My New Agentic Campaign Finance Sidekick

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-12-19-ai-agent-fec/

Published: December 19, 2025 06:00

Claude Agent Skills are pretty neat. They remind me of OpenAI’s function calling. Both are a way to tell the model to run some external process, often with the goal of seeding the context window with deterministic data from outside the LLM system. Function…

Claude in a Game Theory Tournament

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-12-14-claude-axelrod-prisoners-dilemma/

Published: December 14, 2025 06:00

I’ve been playing around with Claude Code, and I wanted to see what happens when you give it something genuinely open-ended. Not “implement this feature” or “fix this bug” but something that would typically require actual creativity from a human. Something…

Dad

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-11-02-dad/

Published: November 2, 2025 05:00

On October 22, 2025 we got the call from Kelsey’s OBGYN that we were going to the hospital that night. The due date wasn’t until November 17, but it was time to go. We checked in to Labor and Delivery at 10:00 pm CT. On October 24, 2025 at 9:08 am CT, our…

The Privacy Theater of Hashed PII

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-10-19-privacy-theater-pii-phone-numbers/

Published: October 19, 2025 05:00

About once a year, I’m reminded of the fact that a lot of marketing SaaS and ad tech dresses up cryptographic hashes as a sort of privacy theater. This shows up frequently in product features for suppression lists with the general idea of uploading hashed…

Tracking Five Years Of Health Data

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-10-12-five-years-of-health-data/

Published: October 12, 2025 05:00

This week I hit three small but satisfying milestones: I logged my 1,000th Peloton ride, I achieved my target body weight (again), and I completed five years of tracking my diet and exercise data. I didn’t set out to make this some big quantified…

Scraping the Federal Reserve with VisiData

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-30-visidata/

Published: September 30, 2025 05:00

I’ve been loving VisiData for years now. It’s my favorite way to poke around tabular data without the overhead of spreadsheets. In 2020 I posted a short video demonstrating some quick data exploration you can do with it: Today I appreciated another snappy…

ChatGPT Got Me Reading Plato

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-09-23-chatgpt-plato-republic/

Published: September 23, 2025 05:00

Two weeks ago, the YouTube algorithmic gods suggested to me The Gist Of Western Philosophy. It’s a great 15-minute video with the ambition of summarizing all of Western philosophy. But what’s more impressive is what the creator claims preceded the video:…

Music to Break Models By

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-26-music-to-break-models-by/

Published: August 26, 2025 05:00

He had just bought his first record player, and being somewhat gullible, believed every word the salesman had told him about it-in particular, that it was capable of reproducing any and all sounds. In short, he was convinced that it was a perfect…

I Donated to Sherrod Brown via ChatGPT

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-20-chatgpt-agent-political-donation/

Published: August 20, 2025 05:00

Last month OpenAI announced ChatGPT Agent which, among many other things, acts like rubbing LLM onto Selenium. Since the announcement, I wanted to try making a political donation right there in the chat without building any of my own API or MCP or custom…

Using LLM Embeddings to Normalize User Data

https://matthodges.com/posts/2025-08-02-language-model-embeddings-campaign-donors/

Published: August 2, 2025 05:00

A common challenge in working with operational or CRM-style data is that you often find yourself dealing with user-entered free text. A recurrent example comes when users fill out forms that ask for their job title and employer. This data might seem…