Notes

This site that regenerates am the headlines of NYTimes articles to communicate facts,, as opposed to click-bait, is really cool.

This dad pack from Arterra is something that I really would like to buy.

The ability to easily carry the things that I need/want to have access to when I’m out and about with kids is a real luxury.

I know this is very old-news-dot-com, but for years I’ve started my day by looking at email and mainstream news. Recently, I’ve changed things up. I’m starting the day by opening Net News Wire, an app I really like, and reading the RSS feeds I follow.

The effects are interesting (at least to me).

1. I am generally out of touch with whatever is in the current news cycle. People often ask me about something happening, and when I tell them I’m not aware of what they are talking about, they are surprised. (I think it isimportant tosay that they are surprised but not frustrated, angry, or incredulous. Their reaction is usually something like, “You have not heard? Really? Oh wow, ok I’ll fill you in.")
2. I still don’t feel like I’m in touch with where I live my life locally. But I do feel like I’m more in touch with things/ideas that I find personally interesting and relevant to me.
3. I’ve emailed people whose work I follow more often, and they usually email me back. So, I think I’m making new acquaintances.
4. I’ve been taking out RSS feeds that I subscribed to at one point for some reason, but nowadays I don’t really care for them.
5. I’ve discovered a few new RSS feeds (via the RSS feeds I follow linking to them).

This morning, I was thinking this kind of feels like the internet did around 2005-2010.

I llike it.

Fellow micro.bloger @bapsi, posted this.

So obvious, but I sure didn’t think of it!

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.)

Consistency matters far more than progression.

Portishead’s albums never seem played out, regardless of how many times I listen to them.

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.

Rabbit. Rabbit. Rabbit.

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.

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 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.

Always good to re-read this from time to time.

An attempt to make a short comic.

I took a picture using the Indigo app on my iPhone 17 Pro Max. Then I used the built-in AI to turn the image into a comic-bookish image. I opened that image in Preview on my Mac and added the text.

Some more publications that I want to take a closer look at.

1. Bikepacking
2. Sidetracked

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.

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

I don’t see it that way. I wonder where other people would land on this issue…

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.

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.

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.