The reason we give for "Why I switched from System A to System B" is usually a derivative of "I was bored and wanted something new to play with.", but this doesn't stop us from writing 5,000-word explainer posts in which we invent all sorts of other reasons. Jack Baty, Rudimentary Lathe, Aug. 19, 2021
’Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die. David Foster Wallace
People seem to compare the hype around AI/LLM use to that of Blockchain/NFT from a couple of years ago. The difference for me is that I don’t personally know anyone who cared at all about blockchain, whereas everyone I know is using and is amazed by AI tools. Including me. Sure it’s still over-hyped, but at least it deserves some of it.
This kind of thing drives me bonkers. Is it really not possible to make packaging both secure and openable?
If you’re reading this, my new shell script for creating notes here in Hugo is working. (See post).
The difference between what I imagine that people think of me and what people actually think of me is a terrifying and humbling gap.
I’m beginning to feel like automated cross-posting is a mistake. For example, I might want to write this on the blog, but not have it propagated everywhere, automatically. Sometimes these notes are just for me, ya know? Still noodling on it.
Can you imagine what things would be like for me if I’d have just stuck with one or two approaches to everything. Given any task, I probably have 3 or 4 ways of doing it, each of them wildly different, but fully formed. This means I have a decision to make for everything all the time. It also means that I second guess every decision. Every time. It’s kind of exhausting.
“The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on”
I sometimes tire of hitting C-x C-c C-this C-that all day in Emacs. When that happens, I think about Evil mode. When that happens, I think about Doom Emacs. I installed Doom this morning and started merging it with my config. It lasted a few minutes. Doom is fancy and refreshing and ultimately frustrating. Back to vanilla.
A nice little thing: The light in my toaster oven comes on automatically when there’s 30 seconds left on the timer. It makes me smile every time, for some reason. It’s as “smart” as an appliance needs to be.
Yesterday, I exported all of the content from the wiki and converted it into an Obsidian vault. Why? I’m not sure. Just to see if I could, I guess. I kind of wanted to see how it “felt” having all 4000 of my wiki notes in Obsidian. It’s different.
“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.” Musonius Rufus
I keep seeing comments like, “I don’t use community plugins in Obsidian because I don’t want to be dependent on something one guy works on in his spare time.” Then they go about the rest of their day using a dozen other things made by one guy in his spare time.
After years using various “Read Later” apps and services, I recently decided to go simple and just use Safari’s Reading List feature. It works as well as the others…in that I never read anything later there either.
I’m in a weird mood today, so Wet Leg is appropriate. #NowPlaying
Before I went out of town yesterday, I mentioned that I might be moving back to Hugo from Ghost (again). I wasn’t sure I’d actually do it, come the light of day, but I did it.
I swore off Evil-mode in Emacs a while ago. It often feels like a kludge and some packages I use, namely Howm, don’t work with it at all. But I still spend time in a terminal, terminal apps, and Vim, and bouncing between Vim and Emacs bindings is crazy-making and I’m not enjoying it.
So my little essay about the computer, why I’m not going to buy a computer, was just a part of my strategy to try to keep myself whole as a human being. I don’t want my life to be lived for me by a machine." – Wendell Berry, referring to his 1987 essay, “Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer”
I just want to choose a service without feeling like I’m also committing to an ideology.