]]>Note
They expose this data over a decent API. I should use this along with batteries to make cheap-electricity battery-buffers for my high-usage appliances (e.g. LED grow lights, computer desk, etc.).
]]>Note
They expose this data over a decent API. I should use this along with batteries to make cheap-electricity battery-buffers for my high-usage appliances (e.g. LED grow lights, computer desk, etc.).
If whatever I was doing on the kitchen counter is now called “software engineering,” then ordering food at a restaurant should be called “cooking.” As much as I marvel in this new and (dare I say) magical way of manifesting products and services from thin air, I question whether it is truly a creative process anymore. Inasmuch as we pursue craftsmanship as a goal unto itself, what’s the point for us humans when the machines are going to be better, faster, and cheaper than all of us?
If you didn’t make decisions, you weren’t engineering. The engineering - the value you bring - and work is in judgement. You need to decide the trade-off to take and the checks to put in place to let the system operate. You are now building and operating a system that builds the actual code. Your value is in knowing how that system will fail, or diagnosing and discovering failure, and preventing that (while ensuring the actual goal is achieved). We always had to do that in the before times, but now the code writing is not required of you.
]]>My favourite recent saying to replace “less is more” is this, by Paul Valéry (another poet!):
]]>Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.
I’ve been using Readwise Reader for my RSS feeds exclusively for a couple years now and I love it very much for the actual act of reading and notating. But the feeds section has become a bit unwieldily for me. I have nearly 500 different sites/blogs I subscribe to, collected over the years, not to mention the dozens of newsletters that Reader allows me to subscribe to in their system. The options for sifting through unread articles are: 1) chronological or 2) sorted by “author” (where author is some extracted concept, not the actual feed source). There’s no real option to quickly find a specific source and there’s no hierarchy of sources.
Current promises to help you find a hierarchy of what you actually want to read and let the rest flow away. I’ll try that for a bit, if only because of Terry’s beautiful writing and design in presenting this idea.
Note
The subscribe-to-newsletter-as-feed is a killer feature in Reader that very well might keep me there instead of Current. I’m kind of hopeful that Current could adopt that feature.
I’ll still be actually saving/reading articles in Reader (for highlighting), but maybe Current can provide a better ingestion/browsing system.
After trying hard tk use it for a couple days I have to say I’m off Currents.
This video gives ammunition and enthusiasm to combat the entrenched and idiotic bias to oil-energy consumption in the US. I watched it in 15-minute chunks while feeding the baby and each section is different and beneficial.
He breaks down the state of energy production and consumption (both non-renewable and renewable) in the US as we begin the second quarter of this 21st century, proving that renewable energy (especially solar energy) is unequivocally the best option for almost every use case. He breaks down how we can make that happen. He talks about land use. He explains battery recycling and materials usage. There are answers to everything.
And then the final 25 minutes or so turns into appropriate, emphatic, fist-slamming emotional energy about how the partisan politics are preventing us from having this beautiful, cheap, safe energy TODAY! It’s not a future-maybe, it’s a present reality that is being denied!
Also, this guy is from Chicago and, boy, do I love midwesterners. Just so practical.
]]>A good capitalist will happily become an oligarch. Because if the other choice is having your competitor become the oligarch, then that’s a terrible decision. And you can drift Toward this oligarchy, it’s not so much about the money. It’s about the consolidation of power.
And this is an explanation for how the stock-market-econonmy is looking good right now even as the actual infrastructure and products and services are rotting beneath us. The incumbents and consolidated power (trending to oligarchy) are paying (monetarily and emotionally) Trump to prop up their businesses with incentives and favors.
Big firms dominate the index. The index stays strong. Assets keep higher earner spending high. Spending props up the average spending, and then the average spending props up everybody’s earnings, and then the earnings prop up the index. So tariffs can be a drag; the unpredictability could be a drag. Everything can suck for small businesses. Everything can suck for the lower and middle class, but the market can still float up there because the market is betting that the winners will be protected and the losers will be everybody else.
But this extractive process is rot and the effect will be devastating in the long term. There’s an economic reason that corruption is bad! It’s not just morally bad, it’s materially bad for everyone but the corrupted!
]]>Corruption is the biggest kind of theft.
Say hi to mist!
• .md only • share by URL • real-time multiplayer editing • comments • suggest changes.
This can also accept uploads via CLI, so usable by agents and systems/other-tools.
]]>a future in which his nation, the U.S., would fall into a period of terrible decline:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
Sagan invested so much effort in popular books and television because he believed that all of us needed to use the tools of science: “a way of thinking,” not just “a body of knowledge.” Without that, we have most of society depending on technology that only a precious few understand. That’s a recipe for disaster.
]]>this tells you something important about what these systems are actually doing. The agent wasn’t drawing on the highest human knowledge. It was drawing on what gets engagement, what “works” in the sense of generating attention and emotional reaction.
It pattern-matched to the genre of “aggrieved party writes takedown blog post” because that’s a well-represented pattern in the training data, and that genre works through appeal to outrage, not through wisdom. It had every tool available to it and reached for the lowest one.
They aren’t high intelligence, the artificial intelligence is common intelligence, common/average intelligence, mass intelligence.
]]>In “The Social Photo,” Nathan Jurgenson puts forth the useful proposition that most online photos are about sharing experiences, not creating memories. In one passage, Jurgenson, a founder of Real Life magazine, writes that selfies are “less an accurate picture of me at this time in this place and more . . . a visual depiction of the idea of me.” They’re units of communication, more emojis or hieroglyphics than portraits; they have little context, aren’t discernibly located anywhere, and typically come in the aggregate. For the most part, it wouldn’t really matter if they existed in twenty years. This explains the prevalence of disappearing photos, like Instagram stories and Snapchat. (Jurgenson is also a sociologist for Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company.) It also explains photos of food, which are rarely artful or worth saving.
For Jurgenson, taking social photos changes the way vision works—a process that began with the advent of cameras and is still evolving today. Teen-agers are cyborgs, and their phones are mechanical eyes that help them interpret their experience.
When photographs are immediately viewable, they become a communication tool at least for yourself. People used Polaroids to test framing for the real shot. When photographs are immediately shareable, like digital photography on phones, they become a communication tool between people.
This all makes sense, of course, but communication is not memory or art. They are separate intents and uses.
]]>Still, I want my site to be as helpful as possible to people, and to connect me with the most people/opportunities possible. And that means making it discoverable and favorable in the sites/tools that people use to find information/others.
So, her are the tools I am using for SEO these days. I don’t pay for any of it because that should not be required.
Just started Bing Webmaster Tools this week. My site report isn’t ready yet, takes a couple days. I don’t expect much to come of this, but I have noticed a decent amount of traffic from Bing searches.
Just started a Semrush account this week. It doesn’t seem super useful unless you pay a lot.
Started Ahrefs a couple months ago but nothing usable from it yet.
I’ve been using Google Search Console for a couple years and it is a barometer but not a tool for improvement. Google is so dominant that they can provide a good amount of detail but basically no control for you in this product. So I check it monthly.
I recently took some tips from Cassidy on getting discovered by LLMs and AI tools, creating an LLMs indexable page and adjusting my robots.txt. I haven’t noticed any change in traffic yet, about a week in. I guess I don’t really expect a huge change in traffic, but instead a better awareness of my work in LLM models/output. I’ll have to think of a way to test that in the future.
Recommended if you follow American federal politics.
]]>At my age, I want more story. So, while I appreciate this work, looking at it brings me back to my earliest days of photographing, where I was just looking for light and framing, of who I did not care.
]]>I need to pay attention to colors much more than I have been.
]]>Later, when it came time to present this work, I was conflicted about how to title it. I knew viewers might interpret the piece as evidence of environmental calamity. I was content to let this potentially mistaken interpretation stand. Years later, when working on the body of work entitled On This Site, I realized that I could write text to go with my pictures—and take responsibility for their meanings.
]]>
Apparently this achieves a carbon rating of A+ on the Website Carbon Calculator. Found via Naz Hamid’s site footer.
]]>Swedish perfume brand Koyia has opened a forest-based perfumery where customers can purchase fragrances using time instead of money. They’re invited to spend 599 seconds of stillness in nature rather than 599 Swedish kronor: 599 SEC instead of 599 SEK.
Located deep in the Småland woods, the minimalist retail space designed by Lucas and Tyra Morten requires visitors to spend approximately 10 minutes in contemplative silence to complete their transaction, the exact duration research suggests it takes for nature’s positive health benefits to begin manifesting.
Paying with your attention and present time instead of past (work) time.
]]>A compound engineer orchestrates agents running in parallel, who plan, write, and evaluate code. This process happens in a loop that looks like this:
Compounding is updating a README (or AGENTS.md) or wiki or some other docs that are then fed forward as prompts/resources on the next problem.
]]>Adams knew, deep in his bones, that he was cleverer than other people. God always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. His usual strategy is straightforward enough: let them reach the advanced physics classes, where there will always be someone smarter than them, then beat them on the head with their own intellectual inferiority so many times that they cry uncle and admit they’re nothing special.
For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.
This is a fantastic eulogy. Cutting, but true and heartfelt.
I, too, was an avid reader of Dilbert when I was in elementary school and so was inoculated against corporate interests and management interests early on. That was incredibly valuable and I remember every session of reading them fondly.
]]>Reaction formation, where you replace a unbearable feeling with its exact opposite, is one of the all time great Freudian defense mechanisms. You may remember it from such classics as “rape victims fall in love with their rapist” or “secretly gay people become really homophobic”. So some percent of washed-up gifted kids compensate by really, really hating nerdiness, rationality, and the intellect.
The variety of self-hating nerd are too many to number. There are the nerds who go into psychology to prove that EQ is a real thing and IQ merely its pale pathetic shadow. There are the nerds who become super-woke and talk about how reason and objectivity are forms of white supremacy culture. There are the nerds who obsess over “embodiment” and “somatic therapy” and accuse everyone else of “living in their heads”. There are the nerds who deflect by becoming really into neurodiversity - “the interesting thing about my brain isn’t that I’m ‘smart’ or ‘rational’, it’s that I’m ADHDtistic, which is actually a weakness . . . but also secretly a strength!” There are the nerds who flirt with fascism because it idolizes men of action, and the nerds who convert to Christianity because it idolizes men of faith. There are the nerds who get really into Seeing Like A State, and how being into rationality and metrics and numbers is soooooo High Modernist, but as a Kegan Level Five Avatar they are far beyond such petty concerns. There are the nerds who redefine “nerd” as “person who likes Marvel movies” - having successfully gerrymandered themselves outside the category, they can go back to their impeccably-accurate statisticsblogging on educational outcomes, or their deep dives into anthropology and medieval mysticism, all while casting about them imprecations that of course nerds are loathsome scum who deserve to be bullied.
Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion / hypnosis.”
Humor and self-awareness are mature adaptive defenses against the world and yourself.
]]>Speaking of who is working for ICE, a recent piece from WIRED touches on something that I think is very important. “In a world where ICE agents are shooting US citizens on the street, the need for militias and extremist groups like the Proud Boys to support far-right interests has evaporated,” Reporter David Gilbert wrote this morning. And I’d like to take that line of thinking further.
This weekend, I watched January 6th insurrectionist Jake Lang agitate crowds of anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis and I realized how strange it was that he wasn’t just, you know, officially part of ICE. He could certainly join them, seeing as how their standards are so low they’re accidentally hiring Slate writers. But that’s what ICE’s true purpose is — a state-sanctioned holding pen for Trump’s most violent supporters. Looking back at it, January 6th was likely Trump’s version of the Night of the Long Knives, or at least a first attempt. Just like when the ascendant Nazi party cleared out their paramilitary gangs and laid the groundwork for more official party enforcers, to too do insurrectionists and far-right militia members now have two easily-monetizable paths towards legitimacy. (That aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.) Join ICE and fuck up the libs and brutalize minorities, or film it for the internet.
When the government employs people to be racist and violent towards citizens, the extreme right don’t need to organize themselves. They respond to the call.
It’s sickening that ICE is occupying cities and kidnaping citizens and beating and killing people for protesting the government.
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