My continuous glucose monitor works with an app. The app is mostly cool: Good historical data, great for developing day-to-day awareness, and it’s hooked into other stuff so I can make connections between sleep, exercise, and blood sugar.

It also has a meal diary. When I first started using the app, you could choose between a photo entry or a detailed entry for each meal. If you chose a photo entry, it’d just let you take a picture of your meal and timestamp it. If you felt like going back and filling in what you ate, it would provide a link to a database on kinds of food and their potential metabolic impacts. If you chose a detailed entry, the picture became optional and you could fill in more detail on the spot.

I preferred photo entries. I know what’s in a given meal so it was fine to look at a week of historical data and check in on photos of the meals that seemed to be connected to spikes or dips.

Recently the app succumbed to the AI fad, so the photo log UI changed: Now the app tries to guess what you’re eating by analyzing the photo. I don’t think, in over a month of meals, it has had a better than 10 percent success rate. Some of its guesses are simply wild. It isn’t learning from me specifically, because I have a very consistent breakfast choice and no amount of correcting the same basic picture taken almost daily has swayed the app.

There’s no way to turn the AI assistant off, though. They wedged it into the workflow and your choices are “correct it” or “ignore it.”

I tried to correct it for about a week then snapped out of it: There is no way the damn thing made it out of beta without everyone realizing it is infuriatingly bad at what it does. I’m sure they intentionally released this half-baked thing counting on people to train it by correcting it for the sake of accurate records.

So I just accept whatever it proposes. You think that bowl of lentil soup is a chocolate sundae? Sure. Yes, now that you mention, I thought I was eating a tasty omelette, but I can see now that it was a ham.

I’m happy to send them an invoice if they’d prefer different behavior on my part.

Years and years ago, before it was what it is today, which is horrible, Electronic Arts did some interesting marketing things that would lead you to believe that it was less a software company than some sort of rural artist colony that happened to make software but otherwise spent its time in rustic pursuits. They had a “Construction Set” product line that let you make your own stuff: music, racing games, pinball games, and adventure games.

I had the Adventure Game and Racing Destruction Construction Sets and they were really fun. The Adventure Game set gave you all you needed to make a world with regions, rooms, things, and creatures. Things could do magical stuff, and creatures had a very simple set of behavioral rules.

That was my first experience with a software tool that let me make things inside a computer.

Jump forward a few years, and Borland came out with Sprint, an extensible word processor with a modifiable UI that let you pick from several basic keybinding profiles (WordStar and Emacs, at least) and then add your own customizations if you wanted.

I was reminded of Sprint this morning as I sat down to extend Doom’s menus for use with Denote, which I wrote about yesterday. It’s just very clean and easy to do:

(map! :leader
      :nv "n d" nil ;; Doom has deft here, so we have to nil it out first
      (:prefix-map ("n" . "notes")
      (:prefix ("d" . "Denote")
         :desc "ripgrep" "/" #'mph/denote-rg-search
         :desc "Backlinks" "b" #'denote-link-backlinks
         :desc "Move subtree" "c" #'mph/denote-org-copy-subtree
         :desc "add keywords" "k" #'denote-keywords-add
         :desc "remove keywords" "K" #'denote-keywords-remove
         :desc "Move subtree" "m" #'mph/denote-org-move-subtree
         :desc "New note" "n" #'denote
         :desc "Rename with frontmatter" "r" #'denote-rename-file-using-front-matter)))

It took me a few minutes to find my way back to how to deal with a keybinding collision in Doom’s mappings – it has Deft bound to d under the notes (org) section. I don’t use Deft and didn’t want to skirt around the binding with D for denote so I had to nil d out before I could use it.

Otherwise – five minutes of work to build out a submenu for Denote with a mix of things I’ll use all the time (making new notes, doing a ripgrep search of my Denote directory, showing backlinks) plus a few things that are useful in the short term, such as renaming a file on the disk after changing its metadata (since Denote uses file naming as metadata) or removing provisional keywords I used to move a bunch of notes in and operate on them in steps.

It’s simple, mnemonic, but also offers visual prompts to help with learning. After a while you’re not even going to look at the menu because the simple three-key sequences sink in after enough repetition.

It has made learning how to do new things much, much easier than it used to be. I’ve just taken to opening a scratch buffer, copying over an existing menu config and clearing it out, then I start trying to do things with a new tool, figuring out over the course of a few hours what things I’d like to be able to get to with a few keystrokes instead of remembering the function name or native keybindings. As I figure one of those things out, I add it to the menu, evaluate, and keep going. That is so much better than all the chord memorization I used to do.

A little more on Denote

I also spent some time this morning figuring out how to do things “the Denote Way,” which means leveraging existing tools in Emacs instead of learning a bunch of functions that significantly duplicate functionality you already have.

“Part of the reason Denote does not reinvent existing functionality is to encourage you to learn more about Emacs,” says Denote’s creator, Prot. Like, just bookmark your Denote directory and use the built-in find-file command in (SPC . to narrow by tags in dired in Doom), because tags are embedded in filenames, and lead with _. If you need fulltext search, ripgrep is there for you, and you’ve probably already used it somewhere else.

I appreciate the approach. I think it will lead to learning how to do more by using fewer things across different use cases, instead of learning shallow functionality across a plethora of hyper-specialized tools.

I also learned that Denote leverages org dynamic blocks, so you can create dynamic backlinks blocks with live links:

#+BEGIN: denote-links :regexp "_management"

#+END:

C-c C-c in the block and it dynamically updates all the items tagged with management. All that stuff is just atomized interview prep notes from my job search, which I broke down and stuck in org-roam and spent a little time converting to Denote’s format to try things out.

Fully equipped

I took my Townie down to Foster Rd. for lunch today, then stopped off at one of the local bike shops in the Mt. Scott neighborhood. At some point early in my ownership I stuck hybrid pedals on it. Years ago Shimano came out with the Click’r pedal, which offered some of the stability and torque advantages of a clipless pedal with a little more ease of use. The hybrid pedals were supposed to make it easier to just hop on and ride with street shoes on if you didn’t want to change, or to snap in with cleats if you wanted to do a longer ride (or ride in the rain).

In practice, I don’t think it was a great idea. I very seldom wanted to wear the cleats, and don’t use the Townie for more than a few miles at a time. The right side of the pedals never seemed to be facing up. And they were small under normal street shoes.

So I just got some decent pedals with good traction today, and also added a cup holder, which seemed to tickle the counter guy.

“It’s complete now,” he said.

I’ve got a six mile ride for lunch on Thursday … that’s a little farther than I usually consider, but new pedals and a cup holder seem to demand a celebratory cruise.

Fences

I need to do some reading on fences. The one around our property is in bad shape. The way our house is built and situated, the east and west sides don’t need one for privacy at all. The north side sort of demands it during the summer months – our neighbors on that side are as avid about their back yard time as we are.

But also, fences are sort of weird to me. Whoever built our house took the initiative to put one in. Our neighbors to the east sort of built off of it to fence in the south side of their lot. Our neighbors to the west don’t care because their garage is our west property line. My thought is just “there is a total of one east window in this house, and it is a high window that doesn’t line up with the neighbors’ west window, and there are no west windows at all, so why even have fences on those sides?”

I’m wondering if there’s a way to handle the north side … the longest part of our lot that shares a boundary with a neighbor … without a fence fence. Or if the answer is something relatively high back there, but not as high (and hence more durable?) on the other two sides.

But mostly I just don’t understand anything about fences at all.

When I look at them, sometimes they seem to be for privacy – they’re high and block people on the street seeing in – and other times they seem to be kind of for security? Like, you’d have to make an effort to vault a waist-high one made out of chain link, or they wall off access to the back yard, or they (more rarely) seal in the driveway (though good lord do I get annoyed with all the old chain link driveway gates that just sort of loll around blocking the sidewalk). Sometimes they just seem to be there to demark the property line, which would suggest something less elaborate would do, and serve mainly as lawn mower guidance.

They weren’t a common feature in the small town where I lived in Indiana. They weren’t common in the Virginia neighborhood I lived in, or else they were low, chain link things. They were unheard of out in the Pennsylvania coal and dairy country I lived in except for one place that was half house, half mechanic’s garage there in the hamlet. I remember low, chain link fences around every yard in Houston, TX as a child. The only childhood home I can remember having tall fences was when my family lived in a townhouse in suburban Pittsburgh, and everyone had a tiny patch of back patio. They’re very common in this neighborhood, more tall than not for newer construction, more likely to be low chain link things for all the smaller postwar houses.

Anyhow, I need to learn more about them. There’s the part of me trying to engage with the whole topic by observation – a mode I get into that Al tolerates, but barely – and the part of me that has a vague inkling that fences around yards might be one of those things that are common but also not thought through in detail, which means there are lots of opportunities to step on norms people didn’t even know they had.

I woke up curious about what Linux desktops are like these days. I haven’t felt that sort of curiosity in a while.

I’ve got that Mac Studio sitting upstairs that today is mostly just a Zoom machine – I live out of my MacBook. So it’d be a reasonable experiment to stick Parallels on it and give the VM a ton of resources.

Why? Just curious. When I think about my golden age of Linux use, I don’t feel a ton of nostalgia for the Peak Desktop era toward the end of that time: I had made the mistake of monetizing my hobby by working in Linux media, and had come to feel such a withering irritation with the people I had to interact with every day that I spent a chunk of my time going out of my way to irritate them. Most of the people who irritated me the worst spent much of their time screwing around with GNOME or KDE or whatever, writing impassioned treatises about humanity will never colonize space if we all settle on one desktop standard.

So my peak period was after I’d found Blackbox.

I suspect any attempt to use Linux as a desktop machine today would probably result in mounting fury over attempts to have as minimal a UI experience as possible without having to put up with the bizarre and self-defeating primitivism of most other minimalists, who want to live in a world with no affordances, or the brittle and baroque dependency chains of the maximalist distributions.

Oh, I think I do know what got me thinking about it this morning: Nyxt looks mildly bananas and there’s no official Mac build.

I think my increased Emacs use has stimulated a part of my personality that got a lot of exercise when I was running Linux as my desktop machine. Like, the big desktop projects and mainline personal productivity stuff were all just sort of tedious recapitulations of existing software. Underneath, though, there was a lot of ferment. Weirdness. Curious little passion projects from some person at MIT or somewhere who read Vannevar Bush and combined their middling C++ skills and their love of psychedelics with a willful misreading of a key paragraph.

Running Emacs, you get some cultural leakage. It’s an older, stranger computing culture than most, and it still startles me when I realize how vibrant it is. I mentioned to someone this morning that, if anything, its online community only seems more robust than it did a decade ago. It’s so much easier to get help than it used to be because there’s a proliferation of online content, and there’s a sense of engagement with the rest of the world that used to go missing.

That’s not to say that mainline Mac culture isn’t somewhat permeable to novel things. For instance, you get some interesting little UI enhancers like Superkey that suggest Mac’s UX team doesn’t have all the answers, often delivered at a level of high polish. It’s just to say that macOS is not where fun, mutant things spawn or proliferate.

I can see that diagram being very alienating. The “practicality” part in particular is probably going to bug some people. In my mind, “practicality” means “sit down to do work that people who first used home computers in the 1980s think of as ’normal computer things’ without having to do a bunch of weird stuff, recompile your kernel, or perform the task perfectly adequately but with your thumbs.”

I am really just trying to hold out the possibility that “Populist Linux” may be the objectively superior operating system for people who both like doing stupid stuff on their computers and getting things done.

Longboard dancing

Of the assorted longboarding tribes, longboard dancers are the ones that feel the most beyond me. I have an inkling of what it would take to be good at downhill, or long-distance pumping, but I watch people like Lotfi Lamaali and it makes my head spin.

(Inspired by a MeFi thread)

re: the downhill tribe, there’s the pure joy of Longboard Girls Crew:

… the utter lunacy of Cooper Darquea:

… and there’s Lillian Barou, doing what I’d be doing if I could back up my consciousness to my orbital’s local Mind, or at least count on painless 3d printing of a new femur:

It’s a human problem

This confused and reactionary post about digital de-aging is a good on-ramp to generative AI discourse. Its assertions include:

• Digital de-aging doesn’t work.
• Except when it does.
• You can tell it doesn’t work because you have to use it selectively for it to work.

And quoted in full:

“De-aging effects in Hollywood still need to be fine-tuned, and Hollywood should only use them once we can perfect the technique.”

Nothing in the human world works this way. Nothing. It didn’t work that way when we were making bricks out of mud, or machines out of iron. It will not work this way when we can iterate at digital speeds.

It might feel like the correctly humanitarian impulse to go straight to the thing abetting all the implications we’re worried about: displacement of workers, job loss, debasement of quality, the feedback loops that will accelerate all of the above. It might feel like the temperate response is “the technology isn’t ready so don’t worry about it,” or “this isn’t living up to the hype, so quit panicking.”

I disagree. We should be thinking upstream.

The temperate and humanitarian response is to ask how well we’re equipped to deal with these things that are going to happen. The thought that neoliberal governments are going to sit and have a think about what to do about the technology is just … absurd. They should be thinking about the effects of the technology, how our economy is organized, and whether they exist to do anything but facilitate the transfer of wealth to a smaller and smaller class of extractors and rentiers.

Actually, we should be asking that last question. The answer right now is that they self-evidently do not.