Notes

This is a collection of short notes and photos. They are not included in the main RSS feed, but are cross-posted to my Mastodon account. If you prefer RSS, there’s a dedicated feed.

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?

To publish this note, I had to:

Share my ~/sites directory from the Mac via Syncthing
Install Go
Install Hugo
Install just
Install Node
Tweak some paths in my init-hugo.el
Authenticate with Github

It took me about 15 minutes. Linux, and especially Omarchy, continues to impress. If you’re reading this, it all worked.

...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

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.