Welcome to my blog about everything.
If they had fed the language machines a diet of cupcake recipes, history might have gone another way.
"Moonbound", Robin Sloan.
My Applications folder is a toybox, but it should be a toolbox.
I posted a little over on daily.baty.net today. I shouldn't do that, because it undermines my dream of having One True Blogā¢. Some days, though, I find it impossible to resist.
The tools remind me that story is king.
I see a lot of criticism of Tesla's new taxi design. Specifically, everyone seems confused that it's a 2-seater. Ridiculous! Now, while I'm critical of everything Tesla, I haven't seen anyone asking how many passengers the typical cab ride accommodates. Is it 2, maybe? It could be that Tesla did the research. Anyway If I need more room on a specific trip, I can alway call an UberX.
The latest Lightroom update includes Smart Albums, finally. I keep giving up on Lightroom and going back to Capture One, but C1 can be very laggy and it's driving me nuts. Lightroom is fast, and the library/sync is really nice, and improving all the time. I'm so confused.
But I wish Generative Remove was never invented. It's too easy and too tempting.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the entire FOSS movement is crumbling?
I often analyze tools before I actually need them. That's silly, and a waste of energy. It leads to a pile of software that I don't need, but also a bunch of opinions about them that aren't really valid.
It would be nice if I could hold a thought for more than 30 seconds. My brain is so scattered and unpredictable that it makes it difficult to get anything done. So far this morning I must've opened every app, note, and website that I know of. I don't know what I'm hoping to find, but so far I've failed and wasted way too much time.
Here's an example. I was about to write something about watching The Substance last night, so I went to Letterboxd to grab a link to my review. By the time I switched back to this document, I'd forgotten what I was going to write. Not a clue, so I wrote this instead.
I'm trying that thing again where I mark a region of text in each entry. The idea is to emphasize the important bits so that it's easier to scan the page. I'm not convinced it helps, which is why I waffle about it.
While I was unloading the party supplies at the rental place, a woman came out and said, "I just wanted to meet the guy with the cool name." I asked her what she thought was cool about it. She stood straight, lowered her voice, and said, "Jack Baty! It just sounds cool. It sounds like you're either a cool fisherman who lives by himself on an island, or a movie star." I thanked her and left without telling her which one I am.
I'm all for people ragging on DHH, because DHH has revealed himself to be kind of an awful person. Didn't anyone ever tell Matt that one should never wrestle with a pig?
I've added a search page here. Some notes: Searching baty.net
We celebrated my grandson's 1st birthday yesterday. He's so great.
There were 75 people there to help celebrate. Everyone had fun. We ate, played games, and watched Lincoln open gifts (with mom's help). The weather was beautiful, but then it started to thunder, so we took down the tent and put everything away. Shortly after that, it began to pour, so that was a wrap. Perfect timing, actually.
I don't know anyone who thought that LLMs do "formal reasoning", so snickering about the new research is something you can do, but you shouldn't expect responses other than, "Duh!"
I left my desk yesterday with all my favorite, long-term apps running: Tinderbox, TheBrain, Emacs, DEVONthink, etc.. This morning, I did my weekly computer cleanup, rebooted, and now I'm only running a terminal, Emacs, and Safari. It won't last, because I love software too much, but this is how I wish I worked.
My advice, to those using WordPress or other Automattic tools, is to let the current drama play out for a while. Everyone jumping ship now might end up regretting it if things work themselves out. If you feel you must jump in and hate on Matt, though, go for it I guess. We'll probably end up feeling like the whole thing was a tempest in a teacup in six months, anyway.
I've added a search page. It uses Pagefind. It turns out I'd already begun work on this with the original site. The clue was a commented-out line in my Makefile:
Baty.net
index:
npx -y pagefind --site ${SITE_DIR}All I needed to do was create a search page and add a snippet:
---
layout: layouts/base.njk
title: Search
slug: /search
---
<link href="/pagefind/pagefind-ui.css" rel="stylesheet">
<script src="/pagefind/pagefind-ui.js"></script>
<div id="search"></div>
<script>
window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', (event) => {
new PagefindUI({ element: "#search", showSubResults: true, pageSize: 10, autofocus: true });
});
</script>To manually build the index, I render the site and then index it. using npx -y pagefind --site _site. I do this as part of the deploy recipe in the Makefile.
That was easy enough. I'll fart around with the indexing a bit, but otherwise it works really well right out of the box.
I just realized that there's no way to search this blog. I wonder if I can use the same tooling as the Hugo blog. This doesn't seem like fun.
An admission: I've been using TheBrain again/still, Like I did late last year. Its value increases over time. Whenever I put something in it, I can always find it later, and quickly. It may be weird and expensive and proprietary and have limited export options, but it's still the app I've found most effective for things that benefit from context and long-term linking.
I'll be spending the afternoon getting things set up for my grandson's 1st birthday party tomorrow. There are tents and tables and chairs and decorations and food and who knows what else.
My problem is that I love different software for different reasons. I love Tinderbox, Emacs, and TiddlyWiki equally for taking notes. Today I've been testing The Archive again, because it does certain things really well. Sometimes I use all of them in a single day. It's not an effective or efficient way of working, but my love of wonderful software makes it difficult for me to avoid the behavior.
"Megalopolis" and "Joker: Folie Ć Deux"; or, The Virtue of Burning Money
If youāre going to blow a massive sum on one huge thing, why not a thing that people who donāt know you personally can experience and evaluate and maybe even enjoy? Better āMegalopolisā than a yacht, or a Vermeer locked away in a New York townhouse.
Right!
I thought that as soon as I sat my butt down at this computer after four days away that I would have all sorts of things lined up to talk about, but nothing much comes to mind. It's 11:30 AM, so maybe later?
The whole WordPress thing is boring as f*ck.
The best way I've found of preventing photos from looking too digital is to make them with film.
Sometimes I defend people from pile-ons, even when they deserve the pile-on. I feel like too many people wake up and think, "Who can I decide is bad, today?" and that's just no way to be. So, if you point out that someone did something horrible (and by "horrible", you usually mean "something I don't agree with") and I say "But maybe they just...", it's not always because I agree with what they've supposedly done, but rather to point out that there might be more to it. We're complicated. Situations are complicated. You don't know everything about it, so maybe back off a smidge and consider that.
I used to look forward to "advances" in the technology I use. Those days are gone. Sometimes I think this is because I'm older now. I don't think that's it, though. The changes that happen now are not meant to make my life better. They're meant to make someone else's life better. Maybe they always were, but I doubt it.
When I started this blog in 2000, I mostly posted links to articles I enjoyed. In recent years I've stopped linking to things and I don't know why. Maybe I should include a section in these daily posts with links to things I found interesting that day. Noodlin' on it.
How about we collectively stop apologizing for how often we write on our blogs or what we write about on our blogs. Newsletters, too, while we're at it.
I like the new message/alert summaries on my Apple devices. I just used ChatGPT to help me write some emacs lisp for my blogging workflow. DEVONthink can now use AI to intelligently rename files. I use that all the time. Complaints about social and environmental impact of AI use are justified, but it's probably time to stop suggesting that LLMs aren't useful.
Never apologize or make excuses for not commenting on a topic or event or anything. You don't owe "the world" your opinion.
346 more posts can be found in the archive.