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Notes

Wait an hour, two is better

I saw something else from James Reeves today about how he got an email complaint and how it made him angry, but he followed a rule he made for himself — wait an hour to reply; two hours is even better.

Then he looked into it and saw the complaint was rather justified.

I like his rule. I’m going to try to implement it for myself. (I can actually set a timer and prevent myself from typing out an angry reply to something until after the timer is done. It’s such a good idea.)

Stagnation in the face of AI

I read this on Dave Winer’s Scripting Newsthis morning.

The siloers are probably scrambling to find a way for the AI to run inside their world, mistake – instead they should be trying to tear down the silo, and become the default version of whatever it was meant to be wrt the web. Both Bluesky and WordPress find themselves in the same quagmire. Probably a lot of others do, but this is the area I study.

This is the intuition we all had, coming to fruition. Evolution is something we haven’t seen much of in the software world since 2006 or so. Incredible stagnation because of the dominance of the social web. We lost the software web. All the focus was on personalities, celebrity – hype and 99.999% bullshit. It was a 20 year period where all that happened was scaling.

Dave is someone who’s work has fundamentally changed how I engage with information via RSS and podcasts. I think he’s on to something here.

I asked Perplexity what makes the Pet Shop Bous remarkable and relevant. Part of the answer it constructed that stuck out to me was this:

They make melancholy danceable. Rather than treating euphoria and sadness as opposites, their music frequently makes them coexist

Danceable melancholy! That’s such a great combination of words!

I got a all of my emails from customer domains into a single Zoho Mail Lite account that costs me $12.00 a year.

The set up involved doing a few DNS tweets, and then setting up email aliases. This took about an hour.

The result: one email inbox that collects email from three domains.

Started: Consider Phlebas

I started reading Consider Phlebas, the first book in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks, last night. I stayed up way too late reading it, and I’m feeling the effects this morning.

Reading this book is interesting because in the beginning there are all these strange things in the text that I have no context for. Be that as it may, the text is interesting and I’m enjoying what I read.

On humanish robots

Via Manton Reece, Who is blogging about watching humanoid robots compete in the robot games in China.

I think small, special-purpose robots would’ve been a better path. R2-D2, not C-3PO. We imbue human traits in anything that looks humanoid, blurring our perception of the line between machine and sentient being. […] The future is going to be wild, and it appears too late to change the trajectory of robotics except with small, incremental corrections.

Yeah.

First contact is happening, yo!

Also from Scripting News:

I don’t recall a science fiction story in which the machines took over and they were the good guys in the end, saving us from self-destruction. Aliens, yes – machines, no. And when I’m working with Claude Code I recognize that it’s a new form of intelligence, and may be the closest our species ever gets to First Contact. We could embrace it as such. What choice do we have?

Yeah.

Huh...

Via Scripting News

Heard an interview with Bill Gates on an Atlantic podcast, he relies on a few years of programming he did when he was in his teens and twenties, yet he is the most prominent person who knows anything about programming. This is a societal mistake. We have to have public discourse about tech that’s as informed as Krugman is on economics, and Heather Cox Richardson is on American history.

Interesting…

I have blog categories for things I agree with and things I don’t. Perhaps I need one for things I’m not sure about.

Tech thoughts/predictions

Random thoughts that are actually predictions that could be wrong.

All signs point to Apple making big changes.

  1. A foldable iPhone that will likely retail at 2k or higher.
  2. AirPods with cameras and some kind of AI connection.

I think both of these are too much. I’m predicting that people won’t buy them for two reasons.

  • The price is going to be too high when the cost of stuff people need is also high.
  • People may want less big tech in general and less AI in particular in their lives.

Hydration

Via Craig Mod’s Ridgelines 232:

The day was hot, so I ended up with three drinks before me, much to Michael’s astonishment. Three?? he said, taking a photo to memorialize the liquid opulence on which I blew my cash. Hey, I had experienced a kidney stone last year, and hydration had shot up on the list of things on which never to compromise.

Yeah!

Hydration should be a value for every individual, couple, family, kin-network, society, and culture.

Rober MacFarlane's writing process

Yesterday, I wrote about the first sentences of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert MacFarlance.

Today, I found this

Macfarlane begins each project with what he calls a “portal question” — seemingly simple questions like “Why do we climb mountains?” or “Is a river alive?” These questions, when combined with a child-like wonder and openness, can lead the writer through interesting, complicated, difficult terrain. These questions are the basis for a kind of intellectual exploration.

MacFarlane discusses his process extensively in this interview.

MacFarlane can write!

I just picked up a copy of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert MacFarlance. The first sentences in this book are double plus super good.

Two days short of the winter solstice; the turn of the year’s tide. All that cold day, the city and the countryside around felt halted, paused. Five degrees below freezing and the earth battened down. Clouds held snow that would not fall. […] Then just before dusk the snow came – dropping straight for five hours and settling at a steady inch an hour. […] The snow was sinking through the orange cone cast by a street light, the fat flakes showing like furnace sparks.

Wow.

Things I want to remember to take a closer look at

I’m posting this here so I won’t forget all these interesting publications I’d like to learn more about.

  1. Drift - It’s about wandering the streets aimlessly, cup of coffee in hand, and learning more about what a place has to offer, whether you’ve been there for 25 minutes or 25 years.
  2. Orion - Their argument is that literature grounded in the natural world is really literature about lives lived in places. Fiction, essays, poetry, visual art, conversations, ecology, culture. It’s also nonprofit and ad-free.
  3. Apartamento - Its ostensible subject is interiors, but its actual subject is how people live.
  4. Emergence Magazine - Its explicit philosophy is “slow consumption.” Online it publishes long-form essays, films, interviews and photo essays about our relationship with the living world; once a year it makes a lavish physical volume of several hundred pages with essays, poetry, art and photography on varied paper stocks. Think less “outdoor culture” and more attention, ecology, temporality and ways of inhabiting the world.

Scrimshanker

I adore the word scrimshanker.

Scrimshanker likely derives from the term scrimshank, which is believed to combine “scrimp” and “swanker. This term is often used to describe someone who avoids work or duty.

  • Scrimp: To be frugal or to avoid waste.
  • Swanker: An old military slang term referring to someone who works hard.

I’ve been thinking about using this word as a compliment rather than an insult to describe someone who is the opposite of a hustler.

Maybe use “scrimshanking” as a verb for being deliberately lazy.