Using the words that fit

From the blogger Michael Lynch, who was writing about what changed for him when he started to use non-business school terms to describe what he makes.

When I talked about my personal blog, I just called it a blog. There was never a situation where “content” would have conveyed a richer meaning. My website visitors aren’t “traffic”; they’re readers. They don’t “generate engagement”; they send me comments or questions. When I started writing my book, I never called it an “info product.” It’s a book, and I’m its author.

He goes on to say,

I did notice an immediate change, especially with words like “traffic.” Traffic makes me feel like I’m just throwing out flypaper and measuring whatever sticks. When I describe website visitors as “readers,” it reminds me that these are real people who have literally billions of other things they could be reading that day, but they’re choosing to spend some of their limited time with me.

From the first paragraph of this dispatch from Chris Arnade’s Substack.

A friend of mine came out of her “Conquer your fear of Flying!” course even more nervous, saying “They spent hours explaining how an airplane works. Great, now I have hundreds of different details to worry about. All I wanted was for them to tell me ‘It’s magic’ and move on.” That’s me, but with the body.

Yeah. I can relate to that.

I read this post on Scripting News today that included this line.

Like a boat, a human being has integrity.

I really liked this.

It got me thinking: if a boat doesn’t have integrity, it starts to sink, and I think the same thing happens with people. If someone acts without integrity, I think it is only a matter of time before they end up in a situation where the holes in who they are and what they do start causing real problems.

Via FLUX Review No. 251 on phase shifts

An important thing to remember about catalysts is that they cannot cause change on their own. Catalysts only speed up a reaction that’s already happening. The conditions need to be in place to trigger a phase change in the first place.

Yeah!

The rest of the post is very interesting and (in my arrogant opinion) useful.

[This post on Disquiet.com on craft] (https://disquiet.com/2026/09/29/on-craft-process-and-networks/) is so good.

you have an opportunity to stand out, which is simply by doing things, and doing them regularly and publicly. Perform live. Perform online. Post videos of yourself. Post information about your process. Interact with other musicians. Express the connections inherent in your work. Slowly build a timeline. Slowly build a network of collaborators.

Yeah!

Via Casey Newton writing in Platformer

Zuckerberg says Meta plans to fund Muse by taking a cut of transactions, which means that it will soon be some team’s job to massively increase the number of transactions that take place within Muse. (I imagine ads will play a starring role here.)

Yeah.

I’d rather lock a tire than give Meta access to all my iPhone or Mac.

Via Manu’s blog

When you’re mad at a company, figure out who is actually responsible for the things you’re mad about, and be mad at them. Because people can be held accountable.

Yeah.

—-

Manu was writing about how people get mad at companies, when it might be more useful/productive to direct dissatisfaction at the decision-makers within the companies.

As I read the post, my thoughts turned to the way that some people in my life seem to be freaked out about AI, and are talking about what the frontier models are doing, or about the data centers as objects.

Talking about this is fine.

However, I would say that it is vital to remember that the models and the data centers Are things that are created by people? who control large companies, or who have been elected to legislate (regulate?) the action of said companies.

It seems to me that we would get the most bang for our buck if we held the legislators accountable. If we demand they do the things we have elected them to do. One of those things is to make sure large powerful companies can’t just do whatever they want without being held accountable for what goes wrong when they move without concern for the downstream affects of their actions.

This never gets old.

AI, democratized work with machines

In a post on his blog, Brad Barrish writes:

AI really does democratize working with machines in a way that only trained developers could do. It’s incredibly exciting and so weird. It continues to thrill me and also really freak me out. I definitely have mixed feelings about it. That said, I don’t think it’s going to kill us all. I’ve learned not to bring it up with most people, though I do wish I could have nuanced conversations about it with people in my life.

Yeah.

From Mannu’s blog

I still believe that dialogue is, by far, the best, and probably only, tool we have to make progress on a multitude of societal issues. At the same time, I’m more and more convinced that dialogue, on the internet, using the public digital spaces we have at our disposal, is almost impossible to have.

Yeah.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

“It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning.”

• Robert MacFarlean

There are so many things that I want to fold into my life, but my life is too small. So, I’ve got to make choices.

A fellow parent and blogger deathmtn shared this earlier today:

The guy has started sleeping twelve hours a night in the past week. The adjustment to school hours is gonna be really rough.

Yeah.

(Solidarity, bro.)

Via Warren Ellis’s blog:

It occurred to me the other evening that the bingewatch and the doomscroll are the same thing: a symptom of having given up control of your life.

Yeah.

Note: I realize I link back to Warren Ellis, and a few other people who produce work I enjoy. There are a few reasons for this.

1. Ellis posts often, and posts a lot of stuff I think is interesting.
2. I use this space (my blog/open notebook) as a way to capture things I want to remember.

The national mantra

From John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog

“Fuck you, make me” is, to me, the founding principle of this nation. That was our message to King George III, a tyrant descending into madness...

Then from another post

This is how you handle a bully: “Fuck you, make me.”

Yeah.

From Warren Ellis’s newsletter Orbital Oppositions:

Feeling good, doing what you like and taking pleasure in things isn’t a luxury. […] here’s the takeaway: live your life like it’s worth living. You’ll feel better. Wear your favourite clothes. Cate Winter, a wiser woman than I will ever be a man, once said to me; don’t save things for that perfect time, because that time will never come and what you’re saving will either go bad or never be used at all, so enjoy them now.

Yeah.

Via Warren Ellis’s blog:

Very quickly filling up a notebook with bad ideas. Which is the only way I know of to get at the better ideas.

Yeah.

Via Tetragrammaton:

[Bern] Porter spent much of his ninety-three years on the far margins of American life, an irascible iconoclast who insisted that art was something to be found, lived, and distributed without ever asking for permission.

Yeah.

From Chris Arnade’s Substack:

Culture has two components, thin and thick. Thin culture is the surface stuff—fashion, food, music. Thick culture is deeper: What is the Good? What makes life worth living? What should we aspire to become?"

Yeah.

From  Inventing the Future, by Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams

If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feelings of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.

Yeah.

From the film Winter in Sokcho (2024) on Mubi.

Time is so cruel. It slips through your fingers like an eel.

Yeah!

When I read these words on the screen while watching the film (with English subtitles), I paused the movie to contemplate what they conveyed.

My reverie brought up thoughts about how, nowadays, I sometimes consider starting something and decide not to because I know I won’t have time to see it through to the end.

(Recent example: Starting a long book, trying to learn a new language, & cleaning out the storage room in my basement.)

I don’t think this happened to me when I was younger, or if it did, it didn’t happen as often as it does now. The reason for this: when I was young, I could honestly tell myself I had a lot more free time and a lot more tomorrows… Saying “I’ll do X later” or “I’ll get to X tomorrow” wasn’t necessarily a lie.

Now, experience has taught me that whenever I think I’ll get to something later or tomorrow, I quickly realize that’s probably not true. I recognize that sentiment as an appealing fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. I’ve come to really experience, acknowledge, and know that time slips through my fingers like an eel.