Note

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. 😊

A fast, good-looking and well-configured tiling window manager is a wonderful thing. It’s how I want to use a computer. In my case right now that’s Arch Linux and Hyprland via Omarchy.

The Arch forums after Omarchy feel a lot like Mastodon did after a Twitter exodus: YOU’RE NOT USING IT RIGHT!

photographing in black and white is not an afterthought. Andre Wagner

I don’t know where anything is in Linux. Omarchy does a decent job of abstracting things, but once I move outside of that, I’m lost. This is going to be a long road, isn’t it?

...the dream became reality when she finally completed her perfect note-taking system comprised of Zettelkasten-styled interlinked markdown files stored in Org-mode format with two-way conversion on the fly with syncronization across devices through a p2p network with E2E-encryption and backups stored in IPFS, with both native and PWA apps for all major platforms as well as command-line interface with a rich set of zsh autocompletions and keyboard shortcuts. Matthew Solenya, The Olognion