Note

Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark? …our tools observe us, creating forensic sensors recording behavioural anomalies without consent or awareness. They are a generative layer that projects state authority into everyday life. Every home becomes a node in a datafied evidentiary web, a site of ambient accountability. The technology of today shapes how the authority of tomorrow perceives and prosecutes you. Cade Diehm

War Machine (2026) All grit, dumb as shit. Letterboxd

I hate this administration and everyone in it. That is all.

The Ordinary Sacred “We must not admire those who own great possessions, but those who have the strength to do without them. For it is not he who has little, but he who desires more, that is poor. The man who is not in need is not the one who has much, but the one who can go without much.” I sure wish I was that person.

Sontag said she learned that “10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction Kurn Vonnegut quoting Susan Sontag

I wrote this on Feb 5, 2019: I spend hours and hours getting some workflow or app or whatever JUST RIGHT, then stop using it the next day. Never change, Jack.

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” — Oscar Wilde Well that stings a little.

Thoughts about coding with AI - 82MHz: Using AI can lead to impressive results in no time at all, but it leaves me feeling hollow and discontent. Satisfaction and happiness comes from doing something myself, even if it may be difficult and uncomfortable in the moment. But if I avoid doing everything that’s hard and outsource all the thinking to AI, then I will pretty soon turn into a lazy and stupid blob who isn’t capable of thinking for himself anymore, and that’s a fate I want to avoid at all cost. ...

Greg Storey, Slop doesn’t slop itself: If people genuinely put forth the effort to avoid digital distractions and actually create and make—not as a lifestyle hack, but simple decision making—then we’d have a much better place to live and work. Slop is deliberate, not inevitable. Well if what we need is for people to “put forth the effort” then I guess slop is inevitable.

I went to my regular gas station yesterday. I was happy to see that they’d upgraded their pumps and now take Apple Pay. They also added giant screens that show me ads and play elevator jazz while I’m pumping gas. That’s the last time I’m going to that gas station. I’ll drive 20 miles out of town to find one that doesn’t talk to me.

One of my resolutions for 2026 is to never even launch Obsidian. It’s a red herring and a distraction.

In a newsletter I just read, the author wrote: “If reading a book isn’t on the radar, here’s a video…” I say, if reading a book isn’t on your radar, fix your radar!

If you want to feel like a failure when it comes to keeping a journal, check out this 700+ page chunk of Michael Palin’s diary entries from between 1969 and 1979. It’s Volume One! Not only is there a /lot/ of it, but it’s fun to read. Excuse me while I go fill one of my pens.

I wanted to see if my my/hugo-new-note function still worked. It does. 👋

I’ve been posting over on baty.blog instead, so these notes have sort of stopped happening. How long until I’m back, do you suppose? (This one not included).

I’m not clear what I’m supposed to put in these Notes vs what I might just drop into a daily post. At one point I was syndicating them to Mastodon, but once I stopped doing that, these notes have become less useful. Still noodlin'.

Stop expecting the bare minimum: Apple’s waited a long time to do this. Apple is known for rarely being first, but coming in and doing it right when they do enter the fray. Why do we think they’ll phone this one in when it finally does happen? I think it’s because that Apple isn’t this Apple. I think it’s because they phoned in AI and as far as I can tell they phoned in Liquid Glass. Why do we think they won’t?

Color is a coating applied _later on_ to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph. For me, color is an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses). Roland Barthes, Camera Obscura

You know what’s weird? I’ve installed dozens of apps on this laptop and not once have I had to go to a website and do the download->.dmg->extract->drag->delete dance or anything. And no App Store. I guess I didn’t expect that but I’m quite happy about it.

I have a shell script that creates a new Hugo post in the right place, with the right name, and all the right front matter. I thought I’d try it on this linux machine, since Omarchy really pushes NeoVim, and I need to get used to NeoVim. Except after running the script, it opened the file in Typora. I’m still learning, I guess. 😊