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
I hate this administration and everyone in it. That is all.
"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.
I had an urge to give Gnome another go, so I installed Fedora Workstation over the KDE Fedora spin. It took two hours from installation to writing this post in Emacs. I'm getting better at it.
I become equally excited about moving out of Emacs for everything as I do deciding that I like using Emacs for everything. A week ago I left Emacs after a frustrating day of broken packages and configs. What a relief! This morning, I needed something from an old Org mode file so I launched Emacs and, well, now I'm back in it. What a great feeling!
See what I mean?
"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.
I understand the sentiment, but I don't worry that I'll become a "lazy stupid blob" if I use AI to do some gruntwork for me. I have Claude write me all sorts of helpful little shell scripts. It means I don't have to care about how to write things like regular expressions for use in sed or whatever. I used to find that sort of thing fun, but now I just want to get to the thing I wanted the script for in the first place. It's like, do I really want to do the long division by hand or should I just grab the calculator? Now, if learning long division is meaningful to you, then go for it.
I understand that I can seem unreliable, specifically around apps and tools and processes. Why would you invest time with me if I'll probably change everything tomorrow? I get it.
Status: Today, I prefer Linux for everything other than photography and messaging. Those are important, so I remain conflicted.
I only write in Org mode or Orgmode or Org or org-mode or .org files.
Let me get this straight. To write a blog post, I create an outline in an Org mode file and write the post, which exports to a Markdown file, which exports to an HTML file, which I upload to a server. Got it.
I've added the /notes section back to the menu here. I also reformatted the templates for notes so that the full post content is displayed, rather than just the summary. This was more difficult than expected because the PaperMod theme was being clever. Too clever. I almost switched back to the Blowfish theme, but figured it out.
Looks like I'm out of the Leica SL system. I just sold the 70mm Macro lens and that's the last of it. I'll probably miss having a big, interchangeable-lens Leica system, but the Q2 should arrive today and that ought to help take my mind off it.
I am once again using ox-hugo for posting here. It's been a minute, but I found my old config and yasnippets, so it wasn't to onerous bringing it all back. So far I'm only doing these /notes this way, but I intend to roll it into the main blog also.
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.
