Philosophy
The purpose of this website is to collate my works and ideas in an independent, open, and future-proof manner. Below, I outline each of these design philosophies.
Independent
Distributing my work independently offers three major benefits: redundancy, control, and openness. Redundancy ensures that my work will remain accessible should libraries, repositories, or journals containing my work become inaccessible in the future. This is less of a worry for prominent journals. However, will conference abstract booklets be available a decade from now?
Additionally, independent distribution allows me to control how my work is displayed. For example, journal websites often do not link to the corresponding arXiv preprint. Here, I can ensure that previous versions of articles (including preprints) are easily accessible alongside the final version. Further, I have more control here over blog posts and other content than I would with third-party blogging software.
Finally, I can share works here that might otherwise have been locked behind a paywall.
Open
Open access to my work allows anyone to read and use it, regardless of background. Further, building this website on an open-source software stack offers several benefits. It will enable anyone to create a similar website with ease, learn the software techniques employed, ensure their privacy is respected, and report bugs or security concerns. Finally, open access, open-source software, and open formats help to future-proof this website, unlike their closed counterparts, which can be lost (e.g., when a company closes down).
Future-proof
In our current society, websites are the easiest way to share content. However, the internet is in constant flux. Thus, there is no guarantee a website I write today will work in the future—let alone a third-party website. Fortunately, independent distribution gives redundancy against third parties ceasing to distribute my work. Further, open access, open-source software, and open formats mean anyone can build this website.
Additionally, websites may no longer be the medium of choice in the future. Therefore, I aim to construct the website so that its content can be read, albeit in a less pleasant form, without building the website or having an internet connection.
Use of artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving technology; naturally, my views on it evolve rapidly as well, and I expect this section will change. Changes can be found in the website’s git history by clicking the ‘’ at the top of the page or ‘’ in the navigation panel.
Currently, I use AI in my work where I can verify the important outcome. “Important” is a vital word in the last sentence: For example, some of this website’s source code is written by large language models (LLMs), and I do verify the “important” outcome—does the loaded webpage operate as expected—not every line of code. The importance of an outcome depends on the goal in mind; if I were trying to learn more about web development, then verifying each line of code would be important. Thus, I use it with more scrutiny in my research. If I use it to prove something, I read the proof carefully, understand it, verify it. Unlike programming, writing is not something that comes naturally to me; thus, for articles and this webpage I typically write first and then use AI for proofreading afterwards. That is because one of the important outcomes is I become a better writer, which requires practice.
Where I use AI I declare it, in line with the Leiden declaration on artificial intelligence and mathematics [1] I signed. I believe that, while this declaration is tailored to mathematicians, the sentiment carries over to theoretical physics. In light of this, various Claude models have been used to write and modify this website’s source code and proofread the text. Additional AI usage declarations can be found for individual works throughout this website.
Implementation
The following design choices aim to implement these philosophies:
- The content of this website is written in Obsidian [2] and GitHub [3] flavoured Markdown [4]—an open format that is human-readable with any program that displays Unicode files. The website does not need to be built to read these Markdown files. Indeed, the Markdown for each page on this website can be viewed and downloaded from the website repository or by pressing the ‘’ icon at the top of each page.
- Git tracks all the changes on the website, and so any prior version of the website can be built.
- Git history for each page can be viewed by clicking ‘’ at the top of any page.
- By clicking on the commit ID in the history page you can view a snapshot of the website at that commit.
- A list of snapshots can be found by clicking ‘’ in the navigation panel.
- The Internet Archive is used, when relevant,1 to preserve referenced websites.
- Article PDFs, slide decks, posters, datasets, and where applicable source code for these are all stored in the website repository so that the website can be built locally and viewed locally without internet access. The one exception is the journal’s PDF of “Almost sure minimality of the set of experiments with classical Kirkwood-Dirac representations”, which the American Physical Society lets me post on this website but not in a public repository. The accepted version of that article is in the repository.
- Software repositories are included as git submodules within the website’s git repository. This adds redundancy to these software repositories.
Software stack
This website is built with a modified version of Quartz [5] under the MIT License. The git repository for this website has two branches:
maincontains both the website content and the modifications to Quartz.modificationsdoes not contain the website content, but only the modifications to Quartz.
While both branches are committed to, modifications is merged into main but never the other way around. This allows developers to take my modified version of Quartz along with its git history and use it to build their own website, without having any of my website contents in their git history. Importantly, modifications specific to this website, such as adding personal links to the footer, are contained in main, not in modifications. Some of the modifications are taken from https://dansgarden.eu/technology/quartz [6] under CC BY 4.0.
Additional components in the software stack:
- The colour scheme is taken from https://www.ssp.sh/brain/ [7], by Simon Späti. Its dark mode is in turn based on the Kanagawa colour scheme [8], by Tommaso Laurenzi, which is under the MIT License.
- The citation style is a modified version of the American Physics Society CSL. The modifications were made under CC BY-SA 3.0.
- The icons on the website are from Font Awesome under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (icon fonts) and the MIT License (stylesheets).
- Formulae are typeset with KaTeX [9] under the MIT License (stylesheets and scripts) and the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (math fonts).
- The text fonts are
- Schibsted Grotesk, by Bakken Bæck and Henrik Kongsvoll, for the headers, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 [10]
- Source Sans Pro, by Paul D. Hunt, for the text body, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 [11]
- IBM Plex Mono, by Mike Abbink and Bold Monday, for inline code and code blocks, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 [12]
RSS feed
Add this website’s RSS feed to your reader with https://Christopher-K-Long.ac/index.xml. The feed contains the ten most recently modified pages.
Legal
The following pages set out the terms under which this website is offered:
- The Privacy policy explains what happens to information about you when you visit this website.
- can be found in the footer.
- The Security policy explains how to report a vulnerability in this website.
- The licences page lists the copyright holders and licences of everything in the website’s repository.
References
Footnotes
-
Some external links are included because they are useful while they exist, but would cease to be useful after they are no longer available. For example, the link above to https://fontawesome.com is helpful for a reader who is considering using Font Awesome. However, if Font Awesome’s website went down, then a link to an archive of their home page would no longer serve a reader value. I do not include Internet Archive links for such webpages. ↩