Journal

Firing up a new daily note every morning used to be a regular thing for me. Lately, it just gives me blank page anxiety. It's possible that an "I don't feel much like blogging" phase is starting. I know this because I don't feel much like blogging.

I have a doctor's appointment today. Just a scheduled follow-up, but there's a lot of pre-appointment guilt happening. My blood pressure is a little higher than we'd like, so in our last meeting I suggested that instead of upping my meds, that I eat healthier and exercise more. I've done neither of those, so my BP will still be too high and he'll have to tsk-tsk me and prescribe something stronger. I hate having to take medications, but it's my own damn fault.

Update: BP was 130/80, which is an improvement, so no pressing concerns about changing my meds. I told him to pick something for me to focus on and he just said, "Walk a bit every day. 30-40 minutes is fine." I can do that.

Film Roll: 2025 Roll 035 (Rolleiflex 2.8D), a Series by Jack Baty. (See post about using Glass for this)

Blogging with Ghost and using Ghost's ActivityPub features is a fine setup, but I can't seem to get comfortable with it. There's this feeling that it's not "mine" that I can't shake. Also, the ActivityPub stuff is functional, but not nearly finished. Blogging with a static site generator (e.g. Hugo) can be frustrating, but it's what feels right. And "real" Mastodon is still a much more consistent and complete experience. So, I'm back in Hugo for baty.net and my @jbaty@social.lol identity for socials. You all knew it would happen, though, right? I gave it a month this time, at least.

Just seeing if this thing still works.

Daily notes. What are they for? I guess it's like having a legal pad open on my desk, where I can write whatever I'm thinking about at any time. The problem for you, dear reader, is that you're subjected to all of it. I feel a little guilty about that. Not guilty enough to stop doing it, of course.

I am a different person every day. Too different.

If there are "Notes" listed under this post, it means the thing I've been working on here is...working, I guess.

(Update, they're missing from the RSS feed. I'll work on that later.)

Trusting your own judgement on 'AI' is a huge risk:

Something seemingly working is not evidence of it working.

(Long, but worth reading).

I dunno, seems to me that if it's working, it's working, but I suppose that's his point. One can argue that AI is bad for the environment, or bad for artists, or stealing, and you'd have a point. But when you argue that "Well, it doesn't actually work. It can't think!" then that's where we part company. Even though I agree with a lot of the article, it's the kind of thing someone writes when they really really don't wan't something to be true. I swear I'm going to stop commenting on all this nonsense and go back to the super-cool homeopathic software I co-wrote (aka "vibe-coded") today. You know, the one that's working. I don't need to prove anything to you.

Between AI and Liquid Glass, it's been an exhausting, take-filled nightmare around these parts lately.

Maybe I'd blog better if I was a more gooder writer.

While visiting my grandson this morning, I finished a roll of expired Portra 400 in the Rolleiflex. When I got home, I didn't feel like developing the roll. C-41 processing is a whole thing. It's not hard, but I don't love it. Still, I'm usually excited to at least see what's on the roll. Today, I wasn't. Not a great sign.

There are things I want to talk about, but I don't feel like writing any of it.

Mike Hall: There's an addressable market of 1.

What finally made it "work," if our definition of "work" is "make code that does what I want with about as many obvious bugs or issues as if I'd devoted months to this project starting from scratch..."

You see, that's what LLMs are good for. They may not be smart enough to write production-level, professional code, but goddamn if they're not great for helping normal people whip up things that would have been next to impossible for them just a year ago. I do it all the time.

LLMs today are like desktop publishing software in the late 1980s. Using Claude feels like when I first got hold of an Apple LaserWriter and PageMaker. Suddenly, I could make things, all by myself. Didn't matter whether I was "qualified" or not.

I've been going through my Lightroom library and noticed a couple things. First, I used to just walk around with a camera and take pictures of things. Some of them are pretty good. Second, my Lightroom catalog has everything and I'm wondering if abandoning it was a good idea.

My mates at lunch today are all in with AI. One works at a startup, the other for a large manufacturer. Both manage development and product teams. Both claim to be "10 times more productive since using AI." One said, "I get things done now that I'd never even attempted before AI."

A counterpoint to all the "AI is useless and stupid!" discourse out there, I guess.

Now that I've added a /notes section to the blog, where does that leave these daily notes? I think I'll keep them. It gives me a place to record some notes throughout the day, but without spewing everything out to social media seventeen times. Just the once :). Then again, isn't that what the wiki is for?

Greg Storey:

We've turned each consumer interaction into a moral audit. An app download requires community consensus. Every platform choice needs ethical clearance.

...

I’m exhausted. I'm tired of everything being a moral decision. Tactical retreat has turned into a life strategy, and the world won't improve based on the number of doors I close.

I think we're all exhausted.

Today will involve more yard work.

Most of the day was spent outdoors, working on stuff. I rarely choose that option, but am always glad when I have.

I wrote recently that I'm tempted to "move the entire enterprise onto paper" and I'm more than half serious. Playing with text on the computer has become a way to never actually do anything useful. It's fun and easy and gets me nowhere.

I fired up my Micro.blog subscription again yesterday. This was probably not the right move, but I'm experimenting with my social media "identity" and Micro.blog is one option.

Hello again. See this post for why I'm back to posting daily notes here.

No one with privilege is going to simply stop taking advantage of it on their own. That's why it's called "privilege". When it comes to helping them to better understand and use their privilege for good, it might be more effective if you didn't constantly scold them for even having it.

So I have a couple of static blogs and two kind-of-static blogs. This is fine, I suppose, because I consider both blogging and software to be hobbies. But man, what a mess I'm making. I'm sensing the urge to recoil from all of it.

I'm feeling like the whole Linux thing is a rabbit hole leading nowhere. Also, trying to shoehorn everything into Emacs is not yielding the benefits I read about in the brochure.

Yeah, I've been distracted by a couple of new static blogging tools. I think both are interesting and worth a serious look by anyone looking for simple, local-first, Markdown-based blogging. I'll try to write a bit more detail about them, but for now, check them out yourself. BSSG is a complete static site generator written in Bash. The only dependency is a markdown processor. Cmark is recommended and simple. I use Pandoc. It's simple, fast enough, and has a refreshingly easy to use theming system with a ton of built-in themes. Then there's LMNO.lol, which is even easier. Create a single Markdown file with all your posts, then just drag and drop the file into lmno.lol and boom! you have a blog. This one is a hosted service. Check them out! I did: linux.baty.net and baty.blog are BSSG blogs and lmno.lol/jbaty is at lmno.lol.

I posted the same thing on three different blogs today, just for fun.

1. here on baty.net
2. on lmno.lol
3. on baty.blog (BSSG)

All three of them were fun to do, which is why I keep so many blogs going at once.

Merlin knows:

The bummer is we miss so many great little things because it doesn't conform to the implastic version of ourselves that lives in some blindingly lit menagerie where everything is just so. Where we store the notional version of ourselves that's never existed.

And who do we imagine all that certainty is impressing? Eventually, you can make up someone plausible, I suppose. But, more basic bitches like me and you are stuck trying to puzzle it all out in a world full of people who've decided we're misunderstanding the world wrong.

Merlin Mann - It takes a worried man.

I did yardwork today instead of blogging. I'd prefer not to do that.

I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend. I did, at least up until I tried setting up a new(ish) iPhone for my mom. She got a hand-me-down iPhone 12 to replace her, surprisingly still working, iPhone 6. Between Find My/anti-theft issues and forgotten passwords, it was much more frustrating than I'd hoped. Still, she has a new phone and that's good.

I'm typing this on the ThinkPad, even though my Mac is /right there/. It's probably the novelty, but at least it's happening. This is a first for me. here's the latest.

Today, I want to be the guy who only has a paper notebook, a beat up Linux laptop, and a film camera...and is happy with it.

Sometimes I create this daily entry without having anything to write about in mind. It seems necessary, but is it? Probably not, yet I keep doing it, anyway.