gi.puddingtime.net

I added some tools over the weekend:

• rss_candidates_assess — Shallow-score candidate feeds from OPML, URL list, or HTML page against my interest profile
• rss_candidates_deep — Deep pass on assessed candidates: fetches real articles, scores through the pipeline
• rss_candidates_dismiss — Mark candidates as not interesting
• rss_candidates_subscribe — Promote candidates to real subscriptions

I’ve been grabbing OPML from sites like ooh.directory and dragging them into Claude Desktop where the MCP does a shallow pass against headlines, suggests some likely candidates, then does a deep pass on the stronger ones by pulling actual articles.

I found some pretty interesting management blogs this way, and it’s helpful for sifting through long, general lists. Because everything hits the scoring queue and triage is easy, it feels less risky to just grab a bunch on their speculative quality and know they’ll get sorted out after a little while.

I also built an endpoint to feed a URL in via a bookmarklet (or eventual browser extension), so the traditional “subscribe to this site” bookmarklet gets a makeover by using the scoring pipeline to offer a quick summary before categorizing and subscribing.

I dunno … it seems to be encouraging me to subscribe to stuff, and my reading list is diversifying. Seems good.

The frustrating thing was having to abandon “did I read this” as a scoring signal. It seems like a good idea to include it, but:

First, feed readers are pretty annoying if you’re trying to measure read state, because it’d be a complex problem to solve for very little payoff unless your reader’s whole project is “help people figure out what’s worth reading,” and almost none of them do make that their project. There’s been this little ripple through the “people who like RSS” world calling out the stale state of RSS reading (“they all look like mail readers”) and none of the “looks like a mail reader” development community seems to have thought “what would the built-in spam filtering of a mail reader look like in an RSS reader?” They just think “did you glance at it? I’ll pass that back to the feed backend so you don’t see it a second time on another client somewhere.”

Readwise Reader kind of does solve this – it tracks how far down an article you’ve scrolled. That could be a great signal but then you’re using Readwise Reader.

Second, I end up reading things in other places: From Linkding, from Linkwarden, in Wallabag, just opening the link in a browser. They mostly have some variant on “read” or “unread,” but they generally require a manual toggle. So tracking what I read and didn’t requires manual interventions.

So with some disappointment I yanked was_read out of the feed scoring pipeline, and I’m down to “did I star it, did I skip it, or did a rule I created block it?” Those are all at least clear behavioral signal that an be combined to suggest the future success of a given feed from past behavior. was_read would have been, too, but I’m not ready to create an entire RSS reader of my own to give myself more guarantees.

And I still have the inference-driven stuff to help auto-triage: Given much firmer behavioral measures, the inference layer is getting stronger signal about the reputational thumb it should put on the article scoring scale. It is also doing a good job with my more subjective, inference-friendly nudges: Project version bumps, crime stories, headlines that make it hard to figure out the subject, etc. all get downweighted.

Finally, I have the topic surge filtering layer: Work requires me, for instance, to keep up with the latest in Gemini. It doesn’t require me to read 20 separate press release rewrites from my Google News search feed.

So … is it working?

Yeah, I would say it is. I’ve got a few tabs in the UI that let me go in and see what inference has ruled out, and I am disagreeing with it less and less. The past few days I just scroll down the reject pile and hit the big red “dismiss them all” button instead of overriding any of them.

I’ve been cautious about letting it recommend, though. As eager as I am to filter out dead wood (anything scoring below 3/10) I won’t let it promote anything below 7/10, and it hasn’t suggested much yet. Makes sense. I’ve spent more time telling it what I don’t like than what I do like, so there’s not much for inference to dig in on to start filling in the high end of curve.

Oh, right. So the unexpected part:

Nothing that unpleasant, really. As I’ve been working on the pipeline tuning parameters, I’ve been in a validation cycle of “tweak -> rescore -> review.”

The tool gives me a categorized list of all my feeds along with an attention score for each, based on how many articles from that source that the system has seen, how many I have starred, how many I have skipped, some recency calculations, and a Bayes smoother that takes its time judging lower volume feeds but gets more opinionated with higher volume ones faster. To pick on The Oregonian again:

• 765 articles seen in the 14-day window
• 307 dismissed (which means 458 hit a filter)
• 41 starred (deemed interesting) for a 5% “star rate.”
• 24 attention score

… or Hacker News:

• 414 seen
• 326 dismissed (88 hit a filter)
• 51 starred, for a 12% star rate
• 29 attention score

… or Daring Fireball

• 82 seen
• 67 dismissed
• 5 starred, for a 6% star rate
• 33 attention score

… or Jacobin:

• 78 seen
• 46 dismissed
• 30 starred, for a 38% star rate
• 52 attention score

I’ve made it easy to get those numbers because I’m still tuning the pipeline and figuring out the assorted weights, but ideal steady state is “I have no idea what those numbers are any more, I just know I see a lot of good things and far fewer bad things; and also I argue with the inference layer less in review.”

Anyhow … what is interesting to me is that I have 60 feeds running through this system, and by introspecting this system a lot, I’ve been forced to see how much of them I actually care to read vs. what I don’t. That has caused me to realize that a lot of my feed list is probably either coming from habit or aspiration, not active interest. Always worth sitting with.

I could have just taken it as a carry on, but I haven’t ridden Amtrak in a while and forgot how storage space works in the compartment. My most recent rail experience was in France, and the train ride from Lyon to Paris involved some genuine chaos in the baggage area, so that was the memory I could summon and I didn’t like it. I think I could have stuck it in the overhead bin on the Amtrak, and if there’d been no space I could have left it at the end of the car. Anyhow, it was $5 to just hand it off, and next time I’ll remember.

For as many bikes as I’ve owned, I don’t really know much about them. I couldn’t predict, based on specs around gearing and geometry, how a bike will really feel. I will say that of all the bikes I’ve owned over the years, the two that have felt the very best are my Brompton and a Trek Crossrip (one of the ones with carbon forks).

What is “best”?

I’d say it’s a combination of easy to understand stuff in the form of my riding posture and how easy it is to feel like I have good situational awareness without paying in a sense of balance, and something tangible but hard to explain in the form of I dunno what I’d call it … time to cruising speed? Smoothness to cruising speed?

I guess it’s just a gearing thing. The Crossrip and the Brompton both felt/feel easy to get up to a speed where I feel like I’m cruising at a satisfying speed and then not pedaling too hard or too fast to stay there.

It doesn’t surprise me that the Crossrip felt that way. It seems to be a well regarded bike whose departure from the lineup is lamented. It does surprise me a bit with the Brompton, given its tiny wheels and foldability. I’ve had other, less expensive folders and you feel the tradeoffs in the ride, and even with 20" wheels they don’t have that sense of smooth ramp and balanced control.

When I bought the Brompton I loved the test ride and was surprised at how good it felt, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t feel good for a ride all the way downtown and back, which is 10 miles if I take the long way along the Springwater and more like 7 or 8 if I cut through inner southeast. I imagined it as a good bike for stuff inside five miles: Errand runs into Woodstock, maybe trips to Sellwood, but mostly as a last-couple-of-miler from the Max, or a one-way “meet Al for drinks after work, toss it in the back” bike.

In practice, though, nowhere feels too far on it. Spinning back up the hill on Clinton from downtown, and then up the hill on 51st toward Foster can get a little tiring, but it’s not hard to find a gear and go to my happy place until those are over.

And it gets to a nice cruising speed. I overtook some Sunday riders on the Springwater at what felt like an easy pace and one of them muttered “goddamn ebikes” to his buddy as I went by.

Well, whatever it is, it works.

When I think back to 2013—the year 500 miles were enough to win the bike commute challenge at work—I did end up getting an ebike because the 20 mile round trip to work was taking a toll some days. One afternoon someone drafted me all the way from somewhere around Oaks Park to my exit at Lents and said “maybe someday you’ll get a real bike” as she pedaled away. Well, I have one, and still the hate.

For me the tell isn’t em-dashes or particular rhetorical tics, or even extreme changes. A human plainly remains somewhere in the loop. It’s a shift in the tone and what I guess we could call shared agreements or previously understood ground truths.

On that last, I suppose it’s a matter of taking the subjectivity we have to assume about every shared agreement or understanding—the simple wisdom of knowing that nobody ever really sees things exactly as we do—and sensing that the previous delta in understanding is the starting point for an LLM’s stochastic narrative-building and elaboration. A predictable and acceptable standard deviation is stretching to several standard deviations.

There are plenty of stories of people using LLMs to descend into a widening gyre of elaborate and dysfunctional subjectivity. As always, given how mass media works, the stories are lurid and extreme. But they always seem to start with a belief that the LLM managed to crystallize something for the person—seemed to speak to something they suspected but didn’t have language for, or support to believe—and then began to spin out from that initial earned trust into statistically average delusion, and then decidedly abnormal madness, where an NYT or Guardian reporter eagerly awaits.

I don’t think I’m watching someone go mad. I think I’m watching someone set aside their native competence and fundamental epistemic agency in favor of a defective cognitive prosthetic that has no mechanism or feature to mediate its own oscillations: An understanding goes in, the delta in understanding is part of a prompt, the feedback pulls further in some random direction, the delta in understanding widens, the next prompt is even further adrift, the oscillations widen.

But like I said, nobody’s going mad. I’m not concerned for anyone’s safety. I’m just concerned about a relationship, and contemplating my own responsibility in the matter, because I can’t help but wonder if more care with clarity or more patience on my part would have made an LLM a less attractive problem-solving partner.

I would prefer someone trying to find their way to understanding imperfectly but authentically to this.

I’m not sure what to do.

Me, too. I think I get why skills have momentum, and among whom they have it, but MCPs provide a kind of ubiquity across UI’s that skills can’t touch.

david.coffee/i-still-p…

The triage UI lets me train the triage service on topics, but when I designed it I designed it less as a fine control and more as a rolling, broad collection of signals. I do have a feature that lets me block authors, but I don’t do it the way I think a lot of people would, to get rid of people I don’t agree with but rather because some reporters cover some things I never want to read about, and it’s a way to just whack out big tranches of material once I can see that the author covers a beat I don’t care about. Generally, though, the system is slowly and gently learning from what gets skipped, or very broadly named.

So when a big topical swell comes through, I haven’t had a way to deal with it. I don’t want to downscore the topic du jour because I don’t want to drive it from sight forever. I just want, after seeing the 10th article about it go by in the triage tool, to make it go away for a bit.

So this evening I built that feature in the form of a topic snooze:

I’ve got a Haiku agent doing the scoring on every article that passes into the system anyhow. It’s consulting my existing preferences and attention patterns and providing a little summary about why it’s scoring each article the way it does. So now I’m also using that inference pass to extract three or four likely topics from each article during scoring. The prompt is a pretty simple “figure out three things this could be about at a middling level of specificity.”

Those topics go into a table that records the topic and has columns for when it was first seen, when it was last seen, and how often it has been seen. While the topic is “live,” the system is just tallying and exposing the topic in the feedback UI for each article. If I triage an article, the UI shows me the inferred topics so I can choose to snooze them. If a topic gets snoozed, any articles it’s attached to that haven’t been selected for reading later get triaged out on the spot. For the duration of the topic’s “aliveness” – its rolling daily appearance average is above some threshold per day – articles about that topic get skipped without impacting the overall interest score for that topic. Once the topic slides below the “aliveness” threshold, articles matching it are allowed back into the queue.

I think it will be useful, and I made sure to include UI that lets me tune the params for defining snooze duration and the aliveness state for a topic. The nice thing about a tool like this is that it’s an opportunity to contemplate what harm would be done by not seeing an article I would have otherwise if I get something wrong with this, which is pretty much “none,” and that is a really good thing to remember.

It is also a variation on a theme that continues to emerge and evolve during this current period of vibecoding assorted tools and doing more to work inference into them than I was a year ago:

Even though the stakes are pretty low if the system gets it wrong, I always want my observation port and my knobs:

Inference is great in the spaces, doing things that I’d just consume a dependency to get (e.g. topic extraction) or understanding roughly – well enough – what my assorted likes and dislikes add up to for a given article. But I still want to be in the loop. Human in the loop doesn’t always have to mean “human hovering over the lever,” it can just mean “human nudging the flow this way and that.”

I want the system to gradually attain more and more autonomy as I stick to using it. I actually like it well enough now that I don’t even use RSS readers: I do triage in the mobile or desktop UI, and I use a RiL service to read what comes out the other side. Over the course of the day, about 8 percent of what comes through the system gets flagged for reading, and about 35 percent is auto-skipped before I have to triage it, either due to a deterministic rule (an author) or inference scoring.

When I pull the stats, I see that I’ve only overridden 2.3 percent of the inference system’s decisions. If I doubled the “kill with no review” threshold, I would end up not even seeing 40% of the total volume of content in feeds I’m subscribed to. I had Claude pull the numbers and did a quick sanity check with items I starred for later reading within that threshold, and it looks like I’d probably have 1.9% “regrettable autodeletes” if I just let the system become that much more aggressive.

I don’t have numbers on how much time I spend quickly reviewing kill proposals right now, but having 40% fewer things to even consider in exchange for maybe missing a good article or two a day seems like a decent tradeoff.

I couldn’t contribute anything to the docs themselves: We had two great writers on that, so I just got on with my day. The docs got written, and we staged them for publication, but couldn’t publish until nine or ten that evening. So after a day of feeling a little useless for not being able to help with the docs, I realized there was somewhere I could help: I could send the team home and wait around until we got the word it was okay to release our docs and the accompanying blog post.

So I called Al and told her I’d be late, got dinner downtown, then lurked around the office in the Pearl District waiting for the word so I could pop open a shell and run the deployment.

Someone on the marketing team who was waiting around to ship the blog post stopped by and asked, “isn’t it your birthday?” Yeah, I said, but we had these docs to push and the team had done all the hard work, so I figured I’d wrap it up so they could get on with their evenings.

“That sucks,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know how many users we have but I know it’s a lot. And these docs are going to help them a lot. So it’s hard to complain: A birthday spent helping all those people seems like a good birthday present.”

“Fair enough,” she said, and we sat in companionable silence until we could click our respective “post” or “deploy” buttons and head home.

I got home pretty late that night. Al had gone to sleep, and there was a cupcake on the counter with a candle sticking out of it, and that was it for the birthday where I noted that I could officially round my age up to 50.

Some birthdays I work, some birthdays I don’t. I spent my 25th birthday in Basic Training. My 26th I was in a retransmission station in Korea. My 9th birthday didn’t officially happen because it was suspended over an infraction that caused my mother to believe I should spend the day contemplating what it would be like to not be alive to have birthdays. There may have still been a cake, but the three months leading up to it were spent contemplating the void, which is probably where posts like the one I wrote three days before Heartbleed Day come from.

This birthday I worked, and it was a pretty good day: I had my weekly 1:1 with my favorite work person, I had a quiet conversation with someone on my team where we reaffirmed the best parts of our connection, and the last meeting of the day was spent with a colleague in Australia, figuring out how to help her do a thing she’s trying to do. Nothing that moves any cosmic needle or dents the universe. Just another day.

Today I re-read that birthday post I wrote three days before Heartbleed Day, as I do every year, always wondering if the math is going to come out different for me this time, or if the answer will change, and it has not:

Mostly I think we’re born in a house that’s on fire, and there’ll be a moment between flame and ash.

We’ll need to have been kind.

• The RSS triager
  • Lets me set good/bad topics
  • Lets me block, downweight, or upweight authors
  • Lets me block, downweight, or upweight topics
  • Learns from my “starred” links
  • Uses weighting and scoring to filter feeds and and serve them via the Fever API
  • Automatically passes high-scoring articles through to my RiL service
• Wallabag for RiL (Replaces any/all of Readwise, Pocket, Instapaper)
  • Starred in Wallabag passes the link through to the permanent link saving service
  • Decent web app, iPhone app, and looking forward to trying out its Android app on the Boox
• Linkding for my long-term links archive
  • Replaces pinboard.in
  • Has a handy search injection sidebar – see what you’ve already bookmarked alongside new search results
  • Understands the classic bookmarks.html format
  • High quality iOS app

The triager is mine because nothing does quite what I want there. feedly tries to, but why pay for something less reliable and less tailored than what I could make for myself?

The RiL service is fungible. I considered going back to Instapaper or just hanging on to Readwise, but I don’t need to. The bookmarking service is fungible, too. I’ve just had good luck with Linkding. Both come with nice mobile apps and a number of extensions, etc. that I don’t have to make for myself.

So today I sort of flipped the model from triaging incoming articles, taking an incremental approach to learning my preferences, and pattern-matching on authors to reviewing feeds and pattern-matching alternately on authors, URL characteristics, and a bit of inference around topics:

• Visit a feed I’m tracking
• List the articles
• Click an article with the option to block author, URL pattern, or click “I don’t like this”
• If I click “I don’t like this,” I can click “content type” or “topic,” or fill in a field. Then Haiku takes a pass and proposes some heuristics it can apply to articles in the feed.

That’s just a variation on what I’ve been doing anyhow, but now the tool republishes a private version of the feed that is dynamically filtered on the rules and feedback I’ve provided so I can subscribe to it from any regular old RSS reader or service instead of being locked in to Feedly, Readwise, Inkwell, etc. In Inkwell, the tool can even swap in the cleaned up feed automatically, cutting down on how much triage even has to happen.

I’ve also added a couple of tools that have made the experience much better:

Superpowers is a development workflow that adds a set of skills including:

• brainstorming
• writing-plans
• subagent-driven-development or executing-plans
• requesting-code-review

The brainstorming and planning phase involve a lot of helpful, clarifying questions. The spec files it produces are helpful. The reviews it runs catch inconsistencies and gaps. It adds a few minutes to work on any given feature, but the rate of “got it in one” has shot through the roof, and taking a moment to read its specs and plans offers a lot of reassurance that there’ll be fewer misalignments.

On the other end of the process, Impeccable is a set of visual design skills that address gaps in typography, layout, color, visual rhythm, and more. The starting point with an Impeccable session is the /critique skill, which leads to a set of recommendations on which of its many skills to use.

A lot of the stuff Claude Code produced for aSystem/aCloud was very “my first Rails app default view” in quality. A little back and forth with Claude cleaned up the worst of it, but Impeccable acts a lot more like a design partner, asking about the app’s “brand image,” and walking through questionnaires that are a little educational on their own. Pages that felt like long slogs through undifferentiated metadata became a lot more readable very quickly.

Readwise is a nice addition, because its API tracks your percent completed in an article, and the triage tool is watching for that to go to “100” before it considers an article a good recommendation. Inkwell just had “read/unread” via whatever RSS reader, which sets things to “read” on open (or requires a manual mark-read action). There’s also some interesting signal to be mined from Readwise partial reads, too, so that’s on the list.

Honestly, this could just be called “The Oregonianator,” because most feeds I bother with aren’t so godawful on signal-to-noise. I might skip things because they’re not my cup of tea on another feed, but the Oregonian’s catch-all RSS seems designed to get people to swear off RSS: So much filler, junk, clickbait, and syndicated content. When I wrote the outgoing EiC last year she offered a half-hearted defense of it all that sounded more like a hostage statement, vaguely alluding to the idea that the O’s web operation isn’t beholden to the editorial side. It feels like it’s all premised on a 15-year-old conception of SEO that requires high-churn content. It feels familiar to me because I had to do it for a while.

Architecturally, I could reduce this to a worker on a cron job that passes each article through user rules, then passes the survivors through to beefed up inference. Unlike RSS feeds, which have no state, Readwise would support this approach because things it finds in RSS become articles that can be removed from your queue. The other idea I considered was creating and serving a shadow Oregonian feed that’s been through triage.

For now, though, after a few days of training, I’ve pivoted the tool’s primary interface to a review system: There’s enough training data that the tool’s 0.1 - 1.0 confidence scale is pretty good at south of 0.15 and north of 0.7. So I let the app automatically remove articles at 0.15 or lower, and automatically promote 0.7 or higher. I’ll keep on training and see what I can do to narrow the band. There’s also a queue where I can fish a mistaken deletion out within 24 hours. The traditional triage queue remains, as well, for things that fall in between those two scores.

It makes me want to add more sources, because I’ve got a better way to triage them.

I don’t see this as particularly distinguishable from a large volume of social media interactions generally. Maybe we’ve achieved AGI after all.

www.theregister.com/2026/03/2…

youtu.be/xfJfrZ_3N…

micro.blog’s recent-ish Inkwell provides an API. The app hits the API for unread articles, and I can love/hate them (along with a way to train for/against source sites, authors, keywords, and topics) or star them (in which case it hits the Inkwell API and stars the article so it’ll pop up in Unread). In addition to my direct feedback, I’ve also got a topical list that adds weight.

Borrowing from my old project, it’s also tracking the read rates on each site and using that alongside my article ratings to provide an overall score for websites that it takes into account.

So when an article comes in, a cheap Haiku agent takes a look, factors in my previous feedback and my interest list. The fun part is that the app also talks to aSystems notes, ideas, and tasks, so Haiku knows to look for relevance there. Likewise, as AI development articles come in, especially ones about “human-in-the-loop” and ML, it’s looking at my aSystem feature backlog and noting the relevance.

I added a “no, that’s not quite right” feedback loop, as well: Since the agent records its impressions on a given post, I can nudge it. For instance, it downgraded an Oregonian article about a housing policy story because it wasn’t relevant to my interests list, which includes homelessness. I added a “that’s not quite right” feedback, and when an article came in later today, the agent’s take reflected that new nudge:

Relates to user’s Portland interest and touches on homelessness/housing policy context (ICE enforcement affects vulnerable populations), but is primarily a crime/legal story which the user has rejected. Maxine Bernstein is a crime reporter whose work the user may want to filter.

It’s true: I’ve added crime stories as negative signal, and it has picked up on the reporter being associated with those, suggesting I just add her to the filter. The article came in at a score of 0.59, though, which represents a strong-ish score, so my countervailing guidance to be a bit more inclusive worked. It has likewise done a good job with downscoring roundup articles, advice columnists, and headlines that don’t reveal key details. In other words, it is doing a great job getting me to the three Oregonian articles I care to read on any given day.

I guess I should also point out that it doesn’t have a mobile app, but Wispr Flow is yet another example of a good product hobbled by Apple’s sandboxing. I just use Apple voice dictation on my phone and it’s good enough for those use cases.

Bought this so fast.

www.youtube.com/watch

I would argue it depends on what you enjoy: the journey or the destination. I have always enjoyed the journey, I think people having a blast nowadays are enjoying the destination. AI gave us more destinations, but less journey. It is not worse or better, just different.

I like the journey and the destination, thanks.

The journey now goes much faster and more efficiently for me, but that doesn’t actually mean less journey: It means I cover more ground in the same amount of journey time because I am not constrained by fumbling through the syntax to get there.

At the core, though, I am still thinking about a problem I am trying to solve or how to enable a kind of work I need to do and ideating toward a solution to that problem or a tool that better supports that kind of work.

I have a particular relationship with developers and software development:

I learned to code beyond rudimentary AppleScript because some dipshit in IT told me I didn’t need a particular tool I knew I needed, and he was happy to gatekeep tool creation. I learned to write Ruby because while I was looking for a solution to my problem, Ruby happened to be the language someone used in the first proof of concept I could find. Fine. Ruby it was.

Within a year, I was a Rails developer. I wasn’t getting paid to be a Rails developer, but I’d written an entire analytics framework and it was saving 10-15 people four or five hours of toil a month. It was meaningful enough that when I quit that job management dispatched someone from IT to learn how the tool worked.

I was good enough that I was getting technical interviews for Rails work, but I didn’t do too many before I realized I liked solving my own problems, not somebody else’s. If it was some hiring manager’s problem? Not interested. Didn’t want to spend my days that way. My problem? I’d throw myself at it on nights and weekends, too.

Now, I am not a good coder by any professional coder’s standards. I think I am an effective coder because when I make things with code to solve my problems, they always solve my problems.

“Oh, so that means you’re a ‘destination’ person!”

No, it doesn’t. I like the journey coding entails. It means thinking deeply about the problem. Considering the models one can apply to it. Challenging my conception of the problem. Following ideas to logical or illogical conclusions. Realizing there are better ways to think about it all. Realizing there are ways to get so much more leverage now that I have a fingernail under a corner.

But I’m not a good coder, or a particularly fluent coder, so the journey when it was just me and a new buffer in Emacs was long and slow.

Now? Coding with LLMs works for me because I know enough about how programming works generally to steer the LLM toward what I’m after, but I’m not burning all the time on scaffolding, boilerplate and syntax obscurities to get tools as effective as anything I ever wrote “by hand.”

I do spend some time re-specifying, backing out of blind alleys, and catching bugs during behavioral testing. It’s still faster. I still get more robust features. I still get good outcomes. Better outcomes. And once I get to that destination, I am probably going to start a new journey, because I like making tools for myself. It used to be slow and I couldn’t do as much. Now it is faster and my tools can do a lot more.

There is still plenty of space held open for the journey.

59% [of surveyed hiring managers] admit they emphasize AI when explaining hiring freezes or layoffs because it plays better with stakeholders than citing financial constraints

During the dotcom bust a company I worked for spent five or six months sliding all over the road with layoffs because its ad business was collapsing, but it kept underestimating the extent of the damage as non-renewals continued to pour in from tech companies that were bleeding out.

The layoffs – always two or three at a time across all the verticals – were like the old Russian folk tale about the man whose dog had a diseased tail: He couldn’t bring himself to cut the tail off, so he settled on slicing away a chunk of it each day. Every month, toward the end, I’d get a call telling me two or three people had gotten the axe (“but don’t worry – you’re fine! – I just need you to take over …”)

They were taking a public beating for the chronic layoffs, though, so suddenly every dismissal was performance-related. Any semblance of dignity for those people went out the window as mid-level leadership informally let us all know that they had it coming but the company was fine. The company’s GC was happy to inform us all that if we provided references for any former colleagues we would enjoy no legal protection.

My breaking point: Being the last of two people on a former team of around 15, and learning the other guy lost his job because he hadn’t picked up the phone until the fifth ring the day prior. I don’t mean breaking point as in “I said fuck it, I quit.” I mean breaking point as in, “I need my job, so I’ll do what I can to keep it, but this is insane and stupid, so I won’t take it personally when it finally comes for me.”

Don’t get me wrong:

25 years later layoffs still make me nervous. I’ve been through enough, run some kind of operations for enough, or been one of the people going through the layoff rosters enough that I know how they work and what a thoroughly mid-wit or sociopathic cast of characters can end up with power over peoples’ livelihoods.

I’ve sat in a room with a CEO telling all the senior directors she saw everyone else doing layoffs as a good reason to demand more than the business strictly needed. “The environment permitted me to take this opportunity.” The “environment” being the Covid pandemic, the “opportunity” being a rushed operation that went from “we need to cut from next year’s hiring plan” to “we need about 10% of the department” in under 24 hours, with an inept People team creating so many barriers to collaboration that engineering managers were cutting talent Product was roadmapping for. All while CNN was carrying footage of miles-long drive up food lines.

I can’t help anybody with the underlying sociopathy of capital. We’re all going to either collectively address it or not. After 25 years in and around tech, I’m just here to tell you I have no patience for the “get back to normal” wing of the Democratic party, because “normal” was always bad and unjust for working people.

What I can help with, I guess, is suggesting to someone who finds themselves out of work that it is not you.

It’s hard to remember that.

I’ve been on the wrong side of the layoff table once and am open to the possibility it will happen again. I knew when my layer-offer said “this is a business decision” that it wasn’t me. But there was some self-doubt there. I spent a little bit of time feeling a little wounded and wondering about all the ways I might have mis-managed my career.

So, it is one thing to wake up every morning thinking “I caught a bad break in a sociopathic system that uses buffering layers of bureaucracy to help middle managers rationalize the immiseration they’re dealing out,” and quite another to wake up thinking “an efficient and rational market has determined I am somehow to blame for day 189 of my unemployment, and I think it has a point.”

I’d encourage you to stick to the former. The scorpion stung you. That’s in its nature.

You can now describe what you want in plain English and get working Elisp, VimScript, or Lua. ‘Write me an Emacs function that reformats the current paragraph to 72 columns and adds a prefix’ – done. […] The extension language barrier, which has been the biggest obstacle to adoption for decades, is suddenly much lower.

This has been my experience with Emacs. Instantly useful extensions I would have struggled with previously. The only real problem was learning to ignore the guilt.

batsov.com/articles/…

I have become very resigned to people just going around with their own facts, so I guess I’m glad to see a community where people can hear that they’re doing that and suck it back in.

wordpress.org/news/2026…

www.oregonlive.com/politics/…

I’ve got a MacBook Air so I don’t need a Neo, just fascinated to see Gruber “welp” his iPad out the window.

daringfireball.net/2026/03/t…

The goal has been to keep the TUIs I like working with, but make the tools better for use with an agent of some kind. Each comes with a SKILL.md that helps LocalGPT understand how to interact with them, and LocalGPT has some protocols in place to use the skills for daily routine stuff for me.

I also put a React front-end on the whole thing, so there’s a web interface available over Tailscale that gives me a GUI to access my stuff from wherever. It’s all still Markdown and YAML underneath, but simple to manage from a phone.

I’ve built a few workflows with all these pieces to help me plan my week and day. asystem goes out and grabs my calendar, looks at my task/project list, and scans my meetings for who the participants are. I time block my hard meeting times, then dialog back and forth about what to prioritize when and schedule that into the day.

In the React front-end, there’s a daily page that reflects any tasks I’ve signed up for, and it also tosses in links to the contacts asystem found in my calendar for the day. Since tasks, projects, ideas, and people are all cross-linkable, I’ve pretty much got my agenda there in the app, whether it’s a list of tasks or some ideas I’ve been kicking around that relate to that person.

Getting a web front-end built has taken a lot of the pressure off to change the back end, because I don’t really need a db with this arrangement. If I want something tappy/clicky from my iPad or phone, I’ve got aweb. If I want a TUI, those apps are still there from ghostty or Blink. If I just want to edit a file, I can. The underlying execution from any entry point is just the individual CLI apps that ingest and emit JSON when an agent is using them, but present me with a TUI if I want.

A lot of the fussing with this right now is about figuring out how much structure to provide agents to do useful things for me without ending up just writing the procedural code. By putting tasks, contacts, and ideas in hybrid Markdown/YAML files, there’s plenty of structured data to remove some kinds of ambiguity, but enough room for prose and personal notes that it’s still useful and familiar to me. The SKILL.md scaffolding makes sure the agents use the tools the way they’re meant.

I’ve added other scaffolding in the form of LocalGPT’s MEMORY.md file, which contains an org chart, and in relationship: tags in apeople that help guide the agent’s recommendations during planning times: I took about 30 minutes to go through and classify everyone at work based on a few flavors of relationship, so the agent doesn’t recommend rescheduling the wrong people, and it can tell from looking at a given contact if I have any open business with them that might encourage me to keep the current time before pushing back.

I fed the whole thing a few personality tests and used that to work through a work habits and patterns map that is also sitting in LocalGPT’s memory. It looks out for tasks that aren’t getting done and prods a little, and because it has the apeople map with my read on everybody around me, it offers a little “how do you want to show up for this” guidance when doing the daily overview, so I get reminders, like “this is one of your reports, so keep it concrete and not too conceptual.” If I feed it work I need to review from someone, it uses the apeople log and anote idea mapping to draw my attention to areas I should be on the lookout for, or think about better feedback on. And during the day, I just drop log entries into it that it goes through at the end of the day and processes as either potential next steps (aspirations) or things I might or might not know (beliefs), making links between ideas, tasks, projects, and people that further inform how it surfaces stuff and what it recommends.

So slowly there is some stuff emerging from all the linked context across people, tasks, and ideas. Nothing profound. I am not in communion with another mind, I’m just finding a state where the LLM can do helpful things, and is operating in such an introspectable, finite web of information that it doesn’t have room to invent shit but is instead reduced to catching associations and surfacing them in the form of little reminders, or reducing the number of ideas I have to say “no” to as I plan my day.

Oh, helpfully, Claude Code also has access to all the asystem SKILL files, and CLAUDE.md has some light guidance on them. So when I drop an idea into anote about how to evolve the system, I can reference it in a Code session and that helps drive feature development. This part isn’t as rich as I’d like it to be, because the CLAUDE.md instructions and skills aren’t really written around “have a holistic understanding of your operator and his context,” but the plumbing is there if I care to get around to figuring out the prompt.

So … sort of fun turn of the crank on vibe coding this time. Last time around, last year, I built some TUI tools that were sort of fun little throwback exercises. This time around the more interesting part is all the connections I can make with those tools.

github.com/mholovets…

Sit with an engineer who asks as only an engineer can, “how could there even be a principal writer? There’s not that much to know.” I had to.

So, sorry it’s no fun anymore and that people are saying “how much can there be to know” about a thing you cherished.

Learn what I did: Just know it for yourself.

dylancastillo.co/posts/ai-…

Recap:

• anote is a plaintext system for storing ideas. Ideas are (for now) either “aspirations” or “beliefs.” anote manages them in a lifecycle from “seed” to some final state of accepted, rejected, dropped, or implemented.
• atask is anote’s work sibling. It’s plaintext and it stores work as tasks or projects.
• apeople is a contact management system. It helps me keep track of relationships by logging interactions, reminding me when I should reach out, and associating people with tasks in atask.

Each has two aspects: There’s a TUI app built to suit my preferences for keyboard-centric interactions with a tool, and there’s a CLI tool that can emit JSON for all the objects and take batch commands. The former is so a human can use these tools like TUI productivity tools, and the latter is so agents can efficiently search all the data, make programmatic changes/additions/removals, and insert relationships between the objects each manages.

These are all glued together on the agent level as SKILL.md files for each that explain how the tools work and how they are meant to relate to each other.

They’re all used together by a LocalGPT instance.

I work with LocalGPT through Slack, because it allows me to create structured channels. LocalGPT doesn’t naturally do Slack, so I’ve got a bot running locally that hits the LocalGPT http API. Each channel in Slack spawns a new instance of a LocalGPT agent running as a bot in Slack. The Slack bot has some features that allow LocalGPT to see the canvas or pinned messages in each channel and use them as its topmost directive if the pinned message starts with instructions. For instance, here’s the #daily channel:

[instructions]

**Daily Channel Protocol**

This channel operates in **three modes**. Between triggers, it defaults to **log mode**.

---

**Log Mode (default)**
Drop anything in here throughout the day — ideas, reactions, tasks, stray thoughts. No formatting required. I'll acknowledge briefly and hold. No analysis, no riffing, no engagement. Just capture.


**"start of day"** → Planning mode. Pulse check, calendar scan, task triage, daily intention, notebook prompt.

**"end of day"** → First triages the log (promotes entries to anote for ideas and atask for actions, flags process signals, updates records in apeople when they're mentioned), then runs synthesis: what happened, open threads, tomorrow's anchor, energy debrief.

**"process the log"** → Standalone log triage. Same promotion steps as end-of-day, without the full close-out. Use mid-day to clear the buffer.

---

**Key behaviors:**
- In log mode, responses are one line max. Catch and hold.
- Meaning comes later — during triage and end-of-day, not mid-stream.
- Full protocol details: daily-protocols.md in  memory.

So during the day, I can just go to #daily channel and type in a quick note naming people and actions. The logging protocol dumps that into a text file to ensure the context survives a LocalGPT daemon restart or context cleanse, and goes on passively listening. When triggered, it goes through the file and processes.

Today, for instance, it took a recap of a meeting with an internal stakeholder, updated his contact record, and associated him with new tasks reminding me to look into some Cloudflare features. It also captured observations about a call with our privacy counsel, and added an item to chat with my boss about next steps there.

I make all this easier by using Wisprflow: I just go to the channel, press ctrl + opt, dictate a quick note between meetings, and it’s captured. No typing or visiting individual tools in the system. In the event of agent failure, well, there’s a Slack record I can go visit.

All the notes in the system are using Markdown with YAML frontmatter, and they have relationship arrays in the YAML, so as associations are made between people, tasks, and ideas, the agent knows to look for them when one of those things becomes a topic, stitching together context from the existence of a relationship in the frontmatter and scanning the interaction logs for more context.

… and all this context is there at the beginning of the day during my morning timeblocking ritual:

The agent retrieves my calendar, checks the invites for people and projects it knows about, and gives me a small cheat sheet for meeting agendas. Then it looks at my live projects and tasks, their priority, and estimated effort, and helps me block work in my discretionary time.

Ambitions

I’ve been keeping an eye on a vibecoder at work who is currently beginning to brush up against the limits of Google’s AI Studio. Its integration picture is poor and it has its limits, but it does crank out nice-looking little web apps with integration into Gemini. I did a quick sprint on Friday to implement the guts of asystem as a little PoC app I named Hecubus. Hitting my own limits with AI Studio, I learned that if you’re desperate you can store JSON on Google Drive to feed a chat agent you can embed in a Studio App. I’m assuming I could just store Markdown that way, too, and build a web front end for all this, leveraging Gemini for the LLM.

Between the three apps, I get fast, local agent access to people, ideas, and actions that can be related internally and among themselves. So, for instance, once it’s online, during daily planning sessions, brainstorming sessions, etc. the SKILLS for each will allow for associations and connections. Individually they’re also just basic TUI utilities to manage my todos, store contact info, and keep track of things that are not quite ready to be work or action, but I don’t want littering my task list.

Could be the current “screw around with agents” thing will fall completely by the wayside, but I still get to keep portable, transparent, and human readable content with a TUI I like working with (or even just drop the TUI and write an exporter to a better tool someday, because it’s all structured enough to keep that simple).

I’m not really interested in the “order me a pizza,” or “make sure I always have deodorant” end states. And I don’t like the landscape any agentic workflow for a consumer has to operate in. I tossed off a quip about how browser automation to do agentic workflows is turning me into a Maoist not because “I hate capitalist pizza places” or whatever, but because I remember the way I felt after finally torturing AppleScript into doing UI scripting for some Mac app that its slob of a developer couldn’t bother to build an AppleScript library for: It was plainly just the very worst thing in the world. There was nothing human readable about it at all. There was nothing I’d ever be able to turn my back on at all. Brittle and opaque. I was in that stage of my automation journey where I was usually blaming myself for failed experiments, but this was a rare case, for the time, of feeling completely cheated by the tools available.

We’re cheated by the tools today. All these silos. You can make agentic workflows to do things, but the underlying infra sucks for it, and a lot of the things people want to do are forbidden by the silos commercial imperatives create. Want to automate a simple flow for a service you hold an account on? Probably a ToS violation even if you’re paying for a premium tier of some kind. And probably a security nightmare.

So for now, whatever. I didn’t create the problem, I don’t want to think about the problem. I think browser automation is a bad idea. It’s inelegant and wasteful. Rube Goldberg shit. And just try using it with some everyday sites with their either inept or automation-hostile tire fire markup. Just, no thanks. And as a digression, all the hooting and whingeing of the tech press aside, I’m kinda +1 on Apple’s “slowness” to improve Siri with LLMs, because Apple’s fundamental neuroses are on full display, but in a way that is probably better for me as a user. Siri sucks, but we’re in real “frying pan/fire” territory with generative AI. Good for Apple. Take your time.

Anyhow, not worrying about how to order pizzas or deodorant, and not primarily a software developer, so what I want to do with agents is more around persistence, executive function augmentation, connection-making, and pattern-matching.

Oh, also really put off by the way I’m seeing marketing people on LinkedIn doing the whole “it’s a feature not a bug” thing with LLM randomness, intoning that these are “stochastic sytems” that demand a new kind of leadership to avoid getting left behind. I am so glad that my content marketing days, however brief, were spent marketing something helpful and good.

My local rig is running LocalGPT. My primary uses for it involve planning my day/week, capturing ideas, wrangling tasks/projects, and knowing about me. During setup, I fed it a number of corporate personality tests I’ve taken over the years, had it step me through a 20-question “getting to know me” workflow, and gave it a Markdown document with my org chart and a few observational notes on everyone in it.

My initial approach for outside context was pretty exuberant, but I cooled my jets after a day or two because I’d piled too much context in and it was beginning to get weird and scattered.

My initial approach for inside context was to just have a directory of more or less freeform Markdown/YAML. That led to lossiness as the LLM struggled to make sense of the hodgepodge of concrete task/project metadata and human musing. So I woke atask back up to provide more structure: There’s JSON output, better automation for the CLI tool, and a SKILL.md agents can use to understand how to use atask in planning and interaction sessions. My task data remains my own, I don’t have the overhead of an MCP, the sandboxed agent just gets access to what it needs, and it’s pretty fast.

So to anote for the things that aren’t tasks … they’re just ideas and relationships. Same underlying data format: Denote-style filenaming, Markdown/YAML, affordances for humans and machines, but with an ideation/incubation/continuous improvement workflow where the entry point is “hey I had this idea,” the exit point is “I ended up here with this idea and rejected it,” or “I ended up here with this idea and accepted it, implemented it, etc.” The SKILL is there to guide the agent into making sense of, working with, and accounting for that corpus of ideas and understandings without the current approach the assorted -claws take of a flat Markdown file.

As I’ve sat with Claude this morning, I’m up to “working CLI that can capture ideas into Markdown files,” and there are a couple of taxonomies rattling around: Everything is an “idea.” Some ideas are “aspirations,” — things you want to do, make or build. Some ideas are “beliefs,” things you consider and either accept or reject.

The conceptual glue lives in the SKILL, where the agent is prompted to work with these things in distinct fashions depending on their stage:

The thing I’m trying to deal with is that I’ve increasingly found LocalGPT useful for kicking ideas around (I fire up wisprflow and free associate and it chatters back at me using that loose collection of things it knows about me) but sometimes it is just … Jesus Christ. Like, “sorry, that dog was distracting me with its barking” leads to “do you want me to find you contact information for animal control,” or worse.

It took some random work noodling and wanted me to go to HR by the time it was done. It took some additional, unstructured prompting to get it to memorize that senior directors don’t go to HR for that kind of thing, and that the problem I am trying to solve is entirely within me to solve. Now that it “knows” that, it’s a more helpful mirror because it doesn’t suggest stuff I don’t think is okay to begin with, and because I can see it making connections with the existing corpus (e.g. those personality profiles) before proposing ideas.

(I am wondering if there’s an idea to explore that for every technology person of a certain age, there is a foundational or formative BASIC program. Given how many hours I lost to Civilization and Sim City over the years, it makes sense that “Hamurabi” was a fave. And for this line of experimentation right now, it makes sense that I was also deeply intrigued by—then immediately irritated by—“ELIZA.” )

“You know, Mike, you could do this with other humans.”

But I kind of don’t want to. As much as I like to be in collaborative settings and interact with people, there is a part of me that is probably more intensely private than many, and right now at work I am very much in “go it alone” mode for assorted reasons. It is helpful to have a big, connected mesh of tasks, projects, and ideas to ideate with. I am after persistence for things I care about as a human being who does things besides write code.

The SKILL.md is plenty useful for understanding what it is about so far.

LocalGPT was making Markdown files with project content in them. It wasn’t very structured and I had no simple way to quickly interact with a project; just open-read-edit and a sense that it was more cumbersome than I wanted. There was also some “oh, btw, check in a few other inboxes” that was making life harder and slower.

I realized this morning that I wrote a spec for how I think about tasks and projects when I did denote-tasks earlier in the year. It covers all the things I care about, and its TUI is how I prefer to process lists of things to do. At one point I was running a local MCP that understood the denote-tasks spec, but it was slow and I wasn’t very far along on personalizing work management with AI.

So I pulled denote-tasks back out, added JSON output, added better search/query features, and a SKILL.md meant to help agents gravitate toward the machine-friendly parts. No need for an MCP, and it feels a bit more predictable and deterministic. Previously, the quality of interactions over open projects and tasks was more variable. Not exactly hallucinations but just a little sloppier than I’d like.

With denote-tasks I get a TUI for quickly making/managing tasks that operates the way my ideal list manager works, but underneath it’s Markdown-n-YAML so it works for readability but has structured data a machine can deal with better.

From the looks of it so far, just going through and having LocalGPT process those free-form project files, then interact with me to bring order to the resulting denote-task tasks, bolting on the more machine-friendly approach is making things smoother when working through projects.

I ought to change the project name. It borrows the denote file naming convention and format, and I believe it would all parse as clean denote content, but I don’t actually use Denote (or Emacs much lately) and don’t want to give the impression I’ve got anything to do with Prot’s thing.

Not sure how exactly radlibs are gonna see what was an already woeful construction to conclusion, but if the actual mid-century Marxists are an indicator it’ll involve chasing tenure and blaming workers.

I mean, that’s already what radlibs do, so … 🏆🏁

First, it is doing the moralizing thing. We’re introduced to a character whose natural place in the narrative would traditionally have involved bringing them into the action a bit later. But the writers felt the need to insert a beat where they don’t do much but position him on a moral spectrum so we can know how to read him later, where he’d have been a more ambiguous character. Once upon a time, sussing out this sort of character was part of the fun; now we appear to need to be told he’s “bad” for a set of reasons that are orthogonal to his organic place in the story, so that when he naturally enters, we know how to read his behavior and motivations because we’ve already been told he’s bad.

I think this is part “spirit of the times.” There’s a little reaction to the troubled white male antihero trope, and there’s a little bit of plain old moralism under new rules. Everybody thinks they’re better than old ’50s and ’60s morality plays, but we’re not: There was a brief window where moralizing wasn’t cool, but that window has closed and mass-marketed entertainments understand they’d better make their Position on Matters clear. It’s a source of some family discord right now, in that two of us are having allergic reactions to the moralizing even if our values are aligned with the moralizer, and the third doesn’t understand how agreeing with someone while feeling condescended to by them can be a thing.

Another part of it is related to my second issue with Black Rabbit, which is that you can sense the way modern t.v. writers are reacting to binge streaming and competing with phones for attention:

The old saw about stage actors moving to screen was that they had to learn how to pull in a broad style of stage acting keyed to the physical characteristics of the performance space, and become more understated for screen.

Now writers are learning they have to be more overstated and broad, because they know people are only half watching, and for plot-driven narratives probably barely watching until whatever is happening on the screen gets loud enough to get them to look up. Just go read an average recap to understand how little of 50 minutes of a screenplay is even registering with people paid to watch.

One way that broadness plays out is uneven pacing in the takes. Sometimes a scene goes on a little long, or a reaction is held a few beats over its natural length, apparently to make sure it lands.

I just got through The Task and it did that several times. A director who trusted the actor, script, and audience wouldn’t hold some of those takes that long or make such a point to keep the camera on a reaction. Writers and editors are dealing with an audience that is both six feet away from “the stage,” but psychically up in the third row of the balcony.

It’s weird, because Black Rabbit screen editing is paced like any other fast-cutting t.v. thing in the 21st century, but there’s this weird sense of friction or slowness at key moments when it briefly feathers the brakes to make sure the reaction landed. It’s like start and stop rush hour traffic, but for your brain.

I feel weird even writing about television because it suggests I spend a lot of time on it. I really don’t relative to any national average I’ve read about recently, but I think that’s made me more sensitive to modern norms: I used to watch a lot more television and notice the difference.

Comes with a built-in CLI chat interface, a built-in webserver on localhost for web-based chat, and there’s a Telegram interface that hasn’t been attached to a tag yet.

Curiously, it is also less, erm, “aware” of its own existence as a mediating layer between it and whatever LLM it is connected to. OpenClaw handles questions about itself with operating information that it is OpenClaw you are talking to. LocalGPT periodically answers questions directed to “you” in Claude Code’s voice.

I like that, by virtue of running it through the Claude Code CLI, it has access to all the tools Claude Code has: Any cloud MCPs and skills pass through to LocalGPT, so it shares basic-memory with any other LLM talking to that MCP along with its own memory layer (which is fast and transparent).

It is far less likely to induce the kinds of quasi-religious experiences OpenClaw was inducing because it feels more stripped down and the seams show more. That makes it a way better experimental tool to me. There’s less complexity, it’s more transparent, it’s lighter weight, and it’s less aggressive. At the same time, it borrows some of the patterns that make OpenClaw more useful out-of-the-box than the kinds of Jarvises you see people cobbling together.

As with all these things, it is reflective of the discipline that produced it, so I have to steer it toward my “humanist manager” use cases more. But the transparency, speed, and simplicity mean a little less “what on earth is going on in there” and a little more “if I’m not sure, there’s a limited set of Markdown files this thing is using to ‘know’ stuff, so I can introspect and nudge.”

I fed it a bunch of blog posts about management and work, along with a couple of skills assessments, and it has become a good planning aid because it nudges me to remember the things that matter to me during a time when it’d be way easier to embrace my inner asshole.

Corporate leaders who know my biography have said things like, “compared to normal startup people your background probably means you understand the importance of strict control and compliance.”

No, my background means that I operated in a culture where we were given careful plans for operations, but focused on what the plans were for and how any one of us might, at any given moment, end up needing to toss the plan to accomplish the mission.

And that wasn’t just paratrooping. My first assignment out of jump school was a conventional signal unit in South Korea, providing FM retransmission over the southern half of the peninsula. Things were always going wrong, and it was always left to teams of three or four operating in isolation on a series of mountaintops to “adapt and overcome,” regardless of the original plan or what the field manual said. My very first radio watch in the field, something went wrong, I reached for the troubleshooting flow chart, and my team lead sighed, and said, “that’s going to take an hour. Forget what those instructors said. Use your common sense. What do you think is wrong? Fix that.”

Micromanagement, strict alignment, and deep discomfort with creative interpretation and execution are way more common in the businesses I’ve worked in than they ever were in either a conventional Signal platoon, or an airborne unit.

The challenge for me, as a leader in a corporation, has been to understand I have that formative experience and am just stubborn and naive enough to believe it was a good operating model that left me feeling empowered even if I had to keep my uniform pressed and hair short. Out in the civilian world, not everyone had that experience and often will interpret “here’s a rough plan, improvise as needed” as “execute in this manner, don’t deviate.” Or rather, it’s a mindset that appears at some frequency above “uncommon.”

In that retransmission platoon, and in that airborne unit, we all knew better than to think like that. We knew we needed to just get the shot and keep comms flowing.

“The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine” remains the best expression of what I keep learning with each wave of “no, it’s different this time” with this stuff: OpenClaw addresses things I was trying to cobble together for myself in a coherent, intelligent, useful way that I personally do not have the wherewithal to build for myself; but the underlying tech on which it is built still requires scaffolding, kludges, and computationally expensive workarounds, and you still end up having to do work to get it to work.

It is a definite step forward. It’s a proof of concept that is a few steps closer to what I think a lot of us imagine when we talk about the possibilities of agentic AI. I really appreciate that it is a bit more proactive in its way around proposing and implementing tools that reduce the burden on me to craft hyper-specific prompts or continuously redirect it. But you’re still doing work to get it to work.

The religious rapture with which it is being greeted is not a comment on the technology. It is a comment on the narcissism the tech industry is goading us all into with these things.

My OpenClaw instance is operating in a personal Slack account, btw. I have a few channels set up where it provides slightly different kinds of assistance depending on context and the kind of help I need. I picked Slack because the integration picture is good with several tools I use. If OpenClaw can’t solve a problem with a tool it made, or if I need to make a quick update to state on a given piece of information, it’s a /command away with the appropriate integration. As I get ready to start a bake-off on agentic AI tools at work, this is helpful validation for a few ideas I have about where Slack fits into it all.

I gave Chrome’s new “run the browser with Gemini” feature a try with a pretty mundane task: Starting from my Amazon Kindle account, find and remove the samples from my library of 400+ Kindle documents.

It was an exercise in utter misery. Amazingly bad. I made it stop after watching it “think” for two minutes just to ask me four times before it would remove the first sample, at which point it said “well, this is a bad website so it’s understandable this was not a good idea.”

I mean, who knows what Amazon’s web team has done in its quest to thwart a few common workflows people use to automate Kindle management (and de-DRMing). It probably had a point.

“Let’s see in a year!”

Sure, dude. What IT knows is that we have to use software made by people like you, which means we leave a lot of room for nothing to work like you tell us it will. Forgive me for doublechecking.

The World Is Drowning in Tourists. Who Should Pay the Price?

The benefit of traveling with another introvert is that you can round a corner with them, realize neither of you are going to like this situation, utter a low growl, and go somewhere people are not. I suppose you miss the opportunity to recreate postcard photos, but you also get to just see the place a little more as it is lived in, not traveled.

What else besides that?

• Be ruthless toward needless occurrences of “that” (thank you, Martin L. Gibson).
• Never call something a “misspelling” when it’s obviously a typo.
• Passive voice bad.
• “You’re doing fine. Clear thinkers make for good writers, so don’t overthink it and keep going.”

I think a lot of it came down to a fraught relationship to writing: Some middle school diagnostic administered by the state of Indiana declared me a mediocre fifth-grader in writing aptitude. What did I know? The test said so.

I self-selected into the remedial composition course when I got to college. A week later the prof said, “I don’t know what you’re doing in here. Did someone tell you that you had to take this course?”

“No, I’m just a bad writer.”

“Well, you’re actually a good writer. You can stay if you want. You can help the people who are struggling. My husband’s the school paper advisor and I think you should go talk to him.”

It kind of came down to “what did I know” all over again, just with a message it was nicer to hear. I did go visit her husband, and he did give me a column, and I won a few college newspaper awards for my columns. I liked it enough that I dropped out my senior year because I just wanted to go work at a newspaper.

I wouldn’t say I applied myself to writing. I was thin-skinned and fragile about feedback because the coaching I got amounted to “you’re actually good at this, just trust your instincts and write.” Much later on, dealing with new writers, I realized how much I felt my quality as a writer was externally conferred and hence vaguely magical or spiritual … a thing that was conferred upon me by some authority and that could be taken away or disproven by some other authority.

So my sense of myself as a writer wasn’t really bound up in any personal grounding in “what is good writing.” I didn’t think about it much. A friend who was editing my work said in a state of mild exasperation, “writing is something I know how to do, and I’m good at it, but you have to do it.”

I had to do it, and I was always waiting for someone to say I was no good after all.

So when I started doing more editing work, I felt like an imposter with a bag of small tricks I’d learned at the feet of a very angry regional editor at a small midwestern newspaper chain whose first guidance to me was “quit reading philosophy and read only Hemingway until I tell you to stop,” and whose next piece of feedback after that was “keep up with the Hemingway.” Or it might have been him faxing a copy of a story back to me with the word “NO” written through the second paragraph.

Anyhow, as an imposter editor who remembered very acutely what it felt like to be “good” at something I didn’t personally understand, it was important to me to encourage new writers to just pay attention, learn a few ideas about how to be clear even if you can’t Write Amazing Sentences, and otherwise just believe that if they were clear thinkers and knew what they were talking about, they’d probably be fine.

I say that with a little shame, because I have known so many stellar editors. People who had, as I once explained to someone who didn’t believe there could be a principal-level writer, “advanced degrees in this shit, dude.” People to whom good writing was science, vocation, and passion. Leading a tech writing team? Jesus Christ. I had no place. But I did love that period on a marketing team where I drove an internal contributor program, because I could just tell these bright, thoughtful people, “write about what you know. It’s interesting. I can tell you’re thinking clearly, so you’ll probably write clearly.” And I took joy in running into them in the hall and saying “oh, that blog post did a few thousand views! Top post of the quarter so far!”

The tech writers, on the other hand, tolerated me with good grace. That was a good team and a good time.

Anyhow, I suppose my last point on all this, what inspired me to start typing, is that I saw yet another post about em dashes and AI, and how this person was with immense regret no longer going to use em dashes because they’re the mark of an LLM. Reading that kind of post, of which there are many, makes me feel sad for good writers who feel pressured to drop a tool from their self expression toolkit for fear of stigma. And it makes me angry at people who go around calling out em dashes, because it combines the worst elements of phrenology and witch trials, then wraps it all in social media histrionics.

For what it’s worth, and speaking as a former dirtbag editor with little useful knowledge of what makes writing good, I will say that Wikipedia’s guide to signs of AI writing is interesting and educational. It puts names on things I’ve felt but couldn’t name (“negative parallelisms,” for one) and is much more useful for critical reading conducted with the intent of catching a bot.

I’ve never felt in sync with Google’s whole ecosystem. I have a lot of appreciation for GMail as a standalone product. I’m so used to Google Calendar at this point that I’m resistant to anything that doesn’t act like it, but I don’t really calendar my personal life. I tolerate Drive, hate Slides, get along with Docs, and have developed a grudging respect for Sheets. Meet has gotten better over the years. Tasks is super simplistic and its apps are bad, but I’m going to get back to it. Keep – I’ve never stuck with it.

But being under a mandate to use AI in prescribed tools, I sat down to a Gemini prompt and started poking around. You can give Gemini the run of your Google Workspace stuff with one configuration switch. So I enabled that and started playing. As with anything like this, I started with the calendar because I’m in that more than any other app during the day.

The integration with Workspace apps is faster than any MCP that offers the same integration via Gemini CLI. It’s quick to tell you what your day looks like, and Gemini tries to be helpful with interpretation, looking out for opportunities to optimize or figure out when the best work might be squeezed in between events. I put together a custom Gem named “Hecubus” that helps with day and week planning. I can’t see myself using it regularly (though I might if Gemini on the desktop had a live mode that allowed me to dialogue with it as I poke at emails and invitations and skim documents).

And calendar wrangling … I dunno. It’s a natural use case, and there are a million AI apps to help with that now, but I think they probably work better with less dense calendars. Given some up-front work to provide Gemini with more context about my priorities I might eventually leverage it more to help with a hectic week, but it’s just easier at this point to work it out myself. That one year I had an EA was pretty nice.

Keep ended up being more interesting than I expected. I’ve known a few Keep adherents, but I could never get past the way it presents like Post-It notes — which are finite things — but allows them to be bottomless. The thing is, Gemini understands them and can search them quickly, so they’ve got a potentially powerful place in the ecosystem as little nuggets of context you can farm. I experimented with hijacking Basic Memory’s knowledge format and Gemini did an okay job understanding “relationships” and “observations.” Gemini also responds well to just being told a fact about something you have a note about in Keep and adding it without needing an exact title.

In terms of personal organization, the mind-meld between Gemini and Keep is promising in a way that Apple is not managing with Siri and Notes. For instance, Gemini in Live mode responded perfectly (and predictably) when I’d put a bottle of wine in front of the camera and say “add this to my wine list, I got it at Bread and Roses” perfectly transcribing the label and adding it to the right list. Likewise, it ingested a bunch of products I showed it, and then knew how to respond to spoken queries about which beard shampoo is in my products list. Next time I’m at Bread and Roses, I’ll experiment with a Live Mode query to tell me which wines I can pick up there.

Years and years ago I had an Emacs extension called “remembrance agent.” Its whole schtick was that it would vectorize your documents then hang around monitoring a small context window around the point in the current buffer, suggesting a list of related documents you could jump to. I always liked the very ambient way that worked. I’ve struggled a lot more with systems that are about deliberate maintenance of a taxonomy — I’ve struggled with systems in general — but I can totally live with my main Keep window being generally clear of non-archived notes, and just quietly hucking bits of data into Keep’s weird little tesseract Post-Its, where they just go live in the Gemini Overmind as knowledge loam. I’m not trying to write 70 books here, I’m just trying to remember where I bought that one good beard balm, and which scent it was, or what the dimensions of all the windows in the house are.

While I was trying to learn more about how Google Workspace hangs together I came across this productivity guy/ex-Googler who is all in on Google stuff and built a “Capture, Organize, Review, Engage” workflow using Tasks and Keep. He gave me the idea to keep the Keep “desktop” fairly clean, and he also drew all the connections between Tasks and everything else in the Google Workspace ecosystem. There are hooks between Tasks and Mail, Docs, and Keep that are super useful. If you’re in that stuff all day, the case to not move to Tasks is a hard one to make because every Task you add from those tools includes a link back to the originating tool for instant recall of the context. (Gemini also labels Keep notes it creates with a little Gemini icon that takes you back to the chat session it came from.)

Anyhow, that all has less to do with Gemini and more to do with Google’s integration game, which is stronger than I realized a month ago. But Gemini is able to leverage or access all of it quickly and effectively.

The net effect of the past 28 days has been that I have largely migrated to Tasks for day-to-day work organization. It is the simplest todo system I can imagine outside Markdown checklists in terms of its up-front functionality and curb appeal, but it is omnipresent in my tools, and its simplicity is a real strength: Less systeming, more capturing, but the capturing is to concrete things, not abstract ideas that never get turned into an action or an outcome. The thing it doesn’t do well is maintain focus on projects, but I’m getting great support from the ops team at work to use Jira more consistently and effectively. Anything that ascends to the level of an epic starts generating messages about things assigned to me, and they get turned into Tasks that link back to the thing that generated the message.

Personally, it is much more useful to me to have all this stuff under one roof. I have my individual beefs with each component, but the integration is too good to ignore.

On the AI front, in my ideal world I would probably be happier using Claude with faster MCPs. Gemini itself is good, but Claude Desktop and Web are better, and Claude knows how to use MCPs, which makes it more versatile. But Gemini’s deep interlock with all these daily tools makes it easy to get over in a work context.

Giving Shadowdark a serious look. Looks light and simplified but thoughtful.

ask.metafilter.com/388561/Lo…

At its core, Soylent feels like an extension of capitalism & a byproduct of one of Silicon Valley’s most harmful ideologies: that we ought to forgo the human experience in favor of productivity. Why spend precious time on Earth connecting with friends and family over drinks and dinner when you could just throw back medical-grade slop alone at your desk instead?

The Soylent guy got to be a goat farmer. And I guess they fixed the part about diarrhea?

www.sfgate.com/food/arti…

• Making little fleeting notes or having an inbox where just crap can go in without a lot of thought.
• Having a concept of a note that is representative of a more settled idea.

Today, spending a little time between pomodoros on some weekend work I incurred for myself, I revisited my habit of steadying my handwriting by grabbing a note card or sheet of paper and just writing whatever comes to mind until I feel myself slowing down and getting into a more deliberate mindset. In this case I wasn’t so much trying to get my handwriting steadied as I just wanted to kill five minutes between work blocks and didn’t want to get up and do something else. In the middle of doing that, a few things happened:

First, I had an idea I wanted to hold on to, and second I had a feeling about a thing I am dealing with.

I happened to be doing my handwriting fidgeting in my Supernote, and I was in the mood to be distracted by gadgets. Supernote has these ideas of keywords and headings:

Headings: Lasso a word and the Supernote highlights it and makes it visible in a ToC view for a given notebook.

Keywords: Lasso a word, and the Supernote does some text recognition and proposes a tag you can correct and then apply. That tag then appears in a special index view of a given notebook, so you can see what pages it appears on and tap them to jump to them.

I focused on the keywords idea, because I had just written a little about a topic and written a little about a feeling. I circled each and assigned them keywords. Now they’re findable in that scribbles notebook via the keywords screen. That seems cool.

Having done that, I sat there for a few minutes thinking about it, and realized when I’m doing my handwriting steadying, a lot of things can come up. I just usually don’t do much with it if it is a concept or a feeling. I usually only respond to tasks or actions I’ve suddenly remembered. Video games are another activity where things come up for me that I don’t do much with. It’s why I like simple, repetitive games: They soak up some of my available environmental awareness and leave me free to process stuff, which always surfaces after playing for a while.

That caused me to do a little research and I learned about the idea of the “default mode network”:

… best known for being active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest, such as during daydreaming and mind-wandering. It can also be active during detailed thoughts related to external task performance. Other times that the DMN is active include when the individual is thinking about others, thinking about themselves, remembering the past, and planning for the future. The DMN creates a coherent “internal narrative” central to the construction of a sense of self.

… which seems to be what’s going on when I’m free-associating while I steady my writing or letting my mind wander when I’m playing a game.

So I made a pinned a notebook in my Supernote that’s just for doing that writing. It’s a swipe and a tap away from anywhere in the notebook. For the rest of the morning, as I did my work and took my breaks, I tried out “just writing” for my breaks. When the pomodoro would time out, I’d scan for ideas/keywords and lasso them for indexing. Then get back to it.

By the end of my working block, I had several pages and a few ideas. That led me to wonder what, theoretically, I would do with conclusions from those. So I made another notebook that I think will just have topical pages. If I were doing a Zettelkasten I would be making cards, etc. I think I am doing something more like a commonplace book. Since the Supernote has linking, I made a page for the general theme for these ideas and made links to the source writing.

I was talking to a friend at work about her daily routine and realized in passing that she’s sort of like me in that we both talk about things we’re “doing” that are probably best framed as a series of experiments that come and go, and stick or don’t. The idea of doing this sort of free-writing, DMN-activating activity in an electronic notebook is interesting for now, and it suits how I work during the day given I’ve got a big desk, can keep the notebook handy, and am trying to timeblock with it. But I can see foregoing the tablet and doing this with a physical notebook to helpful effect as well. If I had to pick which was nicer, I’d say writing in a nice notebook with a good pen is a bit more satisfying, but the Supernote is pretty nice on its own. (Not as nice as a reMarkable, which does a much nicer job of replacing paper, but is not nearly as good for linking or finding your way back to things you’ve written.)

I know someone else who takes a lot of typed notes. I find that overwhelming, and have noticed a few times that there seems to be some disconnect between what was captured in the detailed, heavily nested notes and what is remembered or effectively applied. I am a believer in the value of friction at capture, so if I stick with this the Supernote might not remain central, but the act of writing will.

For most personal tasks I really care about it has been a seamless replacement: Personal writing, photo editing, mail, news, YouTube grazing, etc. I like being able to plop it into the keyboard or take it out depending on use. I got an inexpensive folding stand for it when I’m using it at the table.

I finally broke down and got a mosh server running on my Mac mini because I’m running a few MCPs on Gemini CLI, which I can’t do from the Gemini iPadOS app. With the Blink term app I can get to the mini and run the CLI.

It still feels like a number of apps aren’t as robust on an iPad as a Mac. It comes up sometimes, when I want to do something on the iPad in an app I also have for the Mac and the option just isn’t there. I suppose that’s the signal to pivot to work:

I don’t like to use it for many work tasks at all. It’s fine for Slack, the Gmail app, the Google Calendar app, and Zoom. I don’t like the app versions of Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides at all. The mobile web version of Google Tasks, which I use as an inbox for a lot of work stuff, is much better than the app.

So that’s created a dynamic where I don’t use the iPad much during the day for intense work. I prefer to just go up to my office, sit down to my Mac mini, and have a full computer experience on a big screen: As much as the window management has improved with iPadOS 26, it is still too fussy and the 13" display is too small to work comfortably.

At first, my ADHD-driven perfectionism made it very hard to manage those transitions between machines. I can get very focused on wanting things to work just one way across everything, but I stuck with this experiment past the initial uncomfortable stages, and now I don’t think about it much. I just realize that what I am doing needs more immersion and better “real work” affordances than I am getting on the iPad, and I go upstairs.

That’s turned out to be a real improvement for general work mental health anyhow: I ended up spending so much time in the office that I reinvested in its tidiness and organization, and I really enjoy going up there to a secluded, quiet part of the house to get things done.

With a Pomodoro timer, the Endel app, and headphones, I can work steadily in the time I have between meetings. When I remember my Slack hygiene, a two hour deep work block is a meaningful investment and not just a polite fiction. Shifting my time blocking practice away from apps and screens to a notebook and pen has been salutary, too. Writing has a very centering and calming effect when I attend to it, and I have come to look forward to the 8 a.m. planning/blocking ritual.

If the iPad didn’t feel a little bit limiting, I wouldn’t spend as much time at my desk as I do, and I don’t think I’d do some of the rituals I do, or work the way I do, if I were working out of my lap in the living room. It’s more comfortable to sit in a recliner with a laptop, but it’s harder to jot things into a notebook, rearrange planning blocks, keep a physical timer handy, etc. Working out of a laptop in an easy chair creates a lot of pressure to do things with digital tools because they’re easier to keep at hand. And personally — just me writing about my experience of the world — working out of a laptop makes my brain feel cramped and boxed in. I like a large screen, a work surface I can spread things out on, and a space to retreat to.

This combination of storytelling, articulate language, and occasional profanity suggests a confident, seasoned, and highly integrated senior leader who is comfortable with his authority.

There is, indeed, a lot of profanity.

To be frank, we tested weather sealing before starting the GR IV development but that definitely makes the model bigger. Additionally, sealing materials trap heat inside the camera, making heat management another challenge. To address this, we would then have to make the camera bigger or reduce the speed at which the camera can capture photos. Both of those are against our concept of snap shooting. In that way, we are trying to balance customer demands but we always give priority to keeping our GR concept

I appreciate that. The GRs are a particular kind of machine, and I get why they have their loyalists. I couldn’t believe they were as flexible as they are until I had one for a while.

petapixel.com/2026/01/0…

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

— Upton Sinclair

www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2…

So I took the opportunity to write a custom gem for Gemini that ingests the kind of reporting I have to do once or twice a quarter and does the kind of analysis I end up doing each time. That’s how to automate, right? Just after being badly offended by someone else’s incompetence, and high on your own expertise, you get it all out into code. Or after being badly burned by your own incompetence, and realizing you need to take a deep breath and describe what to do step-by-step.

Anyhow, we’re supposed to get gud at this stuff, and I’m dealing with the novel sensation of having done a deep dive into something before being told I should, so I’m casting about for problems to solve, and trying to contort myself into the approved tool.

On the one hand, I completely understand the appeal of the sort of magical oracle approach a chat interface provides, where you feed it a spreadsheet and tell it what to do, and it chats its analysis back at you. But on the back-end, to keep it from hallucinating, it has to write a Python script each time to read the input, and it’s not really doing anything besides some counting. The Gem layers on some interpretation, but I think you could just as easily get a table of output saying “These are the two broad percentages you care about, and this is a list of things you should investigate further.” That seems more deterministic and analyzable. When I was experimenting a lot with AI-driven tool-building, that was my preferred approach. I’m not super florid when presenting the kind of reporting I was working on today, so I felt a little resentment having to build into the prompt some “… and please don’t make a whole thing out of your findings.”

The custom gem approach came with a few of its own issues: Sometimes it crashes in the middle of the analysis. Just loses its mind and freezes. And before I explicitly told it had to write scripts to do the counting, it would decide that it knew how many kinds of a certain record there were, and it would state that number with a sort of thought-terminating authoritativeness. For something that needs to pick those values out of JSON, that’s sort of a drag.

So there’s the option to do a custom gem and create a magical oracle that tries to fuzz your analytical radar because it takes this know-it-all clankersplaining tone, or there’s the option to just code something up that’s just going to do the analysis and spit out a table. One feels sort of mysterious and murky and cool, but periodically decides it has no context window left to give; the other is introspectable even if it’s terse. Given a decent vibecoding platform, it’s way faster than managing the vagaries of stating and restating what you’re after, and still getting random shit back sometimes.

Which is not to say Gemini is dead to me, because it’s much faster at cranking out the kind of script I need to run: I’m an indifferent coder at best. I just have to think about how to teach this stuff to my team, among whom I am more like a creature from a mysterious and ancient computing culture than a friendly guide who will take them over the rainbow bridge to The Singularity.

So I signed up for some courses. I don’t have a knowledge or skill problem so much as I have a pedagogical technique problem, so I’m gonna sit still and allow myself to be trained, the better to train.

Part of my day right now involves time-blocking on a legal pad. I had been doing this with an app, but it was too clicky and fussy. A nice pen and pad at my desk over coffee is a much nicer experience to start the day.

I realized this week that I’ve been gauging my state of centeredness and focus on my handwriting:

If the first few lines of my time block sheet are more cursive than block, with a bunch of unclosed characters, it’s a sign I should stop, put the pen down, take a few deep breaths, and reapproach. If I’m still being a little messy, it’s helpful to grab a note card or piece of scrap paper and just write arbitrary stuff until my writing becomes more block-like, and I’m closing all the characters. Then I can turn back to the task, which is giving the day ahead some thought, and considering my priorities.

Cheaper than Adderall and it seems to make my blood pressure go down.

www.oregonlive.com/business/…

“You are a reflexive contrarian. You are always in search of your next flex ….”

Fuck that.

Things I’ve tried with it:

• Dictating problems I’m trying to solve and letting it summarize. Its voice recognition is better than what I get with Gemini Pro at work.
• Dropping quick reminders as a capture inbox.
• Recording vendor demos.
• Developing action plans/next steps on some routine business stuff.

I have mixed feelings about it.

It does a good job capturing dictation. It does a good job extracting todos, tasks, and next actions from a given note.

I imagine, over time, with a corpus larger than the four or five dozen notes I’ve created this week, the “Ask AI” feature, where you can query your collection for insights, would get more useful. As it is, it’s still in that state of any new corpus where there’s not a lot of insight to glean.

That means I’m more interested in what it can do in terms of structured output, and that is just okay. It has a bunch of canned formats it can apply to a given note, but no way to build one (you can do a one-off prompt with a given note, but I don’t think you can save it). And its “todo list” output, oddly, is an ordered list.

My other use case, besides pulling actions out of a note, is getting a rundown of the day’s notes and tasks. It can’t deal with any prompt along those lines: It summarizes the last note you took. If you specify the date you want a summary for, it picks notes from other days. It does have a way to get that summary from a set of notes, but that means opening up a picker and clicking each note you want in the summary. Fussy.

It also has an integration picture: Todoist, Notion, Zapier, webhooks, and Readwise. The Todoist integration (I tried it with a free account) is primitive, and creates more work. Webhooks and Zapier seem promising.

I heard someone recently say that with AI assistants, dudes want Jarvis.

I guess maybe I sort of do want Jarvis, just for what seems like a trivial use case: “Tell me what I told you today at a high level, and then with any specific tasks, etc. I need to capture.” VoiceNotes can do that, but not without some friction. And given the friction, why not just “Hey, Siri, remind me to do this thing I have to do?”

I really wish Apple would get its act together with Apple Intelligence: All the pieces are there, but the glue isn’t. You should be able to just capture voice memos with the native tool all day long and have a variety of outputs via Notes, Reminders, etc. As it is, you’re stuck recording things, then explicitly generating a transcript, then explicitly pasting it into a Note, then asking Apple Intelligence to do stuff it sometimes manages and sometimes mysteriously fails at.

This “empty your mental pockets into a little valet tray at the end of the day” thing is something I’ve wanted for a while. When I was first learning Ruby I wrote a thing called “panopticon” that just traveled things like Pinboard, Evernote, the Safari history sqlite db, NetNewsWire’s read/unread AppleScript API, my starred inbox, etc. and dumped out a report into Evernote that let me see what I’d captured or looked at on a given day. I’d like an assistant that did something like that.

Also, some guy from Singapore who helped him said, “only buy gift cards from Apple,” which registers with me as “just don’t buy Apple gift cards.”

hey.paris/posts/app…

voicenotes.com

It’s like when they’re reading Balin’s final words in Moria.

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/…

Twitter: Moderation? lol

Mastodon: Really who is to judge? Thirsty people need followers, too.

pixelfed: It’s monochrome. I’ll allow it.

Threads: Whatever. It’s a DAU.

I think I’ll leave it on. I’ve gotten so used to having megapixels to spare that any time I take pictures in the city I rush a little to minimize how much time I’ve got the camera to my face, and I just fix composition and straightness in post. Maybe this’ll shame me into rectitude. Back to the basics. Sent to the farm for fresh air and hard work.

I recently chatted with a college age person about photography and social media. He has a friend who is very considered in her Instagram posting and tries to take nice pictures. He mentioned always noticing when her phone goes horizontal because it means she is composing. I think – he didn’t say this but I think I understand the dialect – those are probably considered “aesthetic” pictures in the way “aesthetic” has become an adjective.

My informant, on the other hand, prefers an aesthetic. He sort of wants his pictures to look a little tossed off and messy. Capturing the moment is a higher priority than taking a nice picture, and enjoying the moment is a higher priority than capturing it. Or at least those are the values the picture is meant to convey. If his Instagram was too curated and his photos too considered, it’d be saying the wrong thing about him.

I can’t generalize too much because I probably only read a few dozen X half reviews, but “responds to the idea of spontaneous capture with little regard for the niceties of composition, lighting, and focus” was a definite class of reviewer, in some contrast to the “tourist/walkabout snapshot” people, and in stark contrast to the “staid urban still life” and “arty jank aesthete” people.

In every case, the little orange timestamp sort of pulls the image into a little persona. The oblivious party snapshot shooter, the film-burning tourist clicker, and the Goodwill $2 camera find, battery-held-in-with-electrical tape art crank. There’s a dweebishness to the time stamp – I associate it with a traveling companion who stole salt and sugar packets and secreted them into a ZipLoc “just in case” – but also maybe obliviousness, and also maybe disinterest in that particular detail in a “the best artists are a little slovenly because they’re laser focused on the muse” kind of way.

I think, as I get familiar with it and quit trying to understand how everything works I am going to end up drifting into the jankier end of the spectrum. I really enjoyed Jana Mänz’s Wabi Sabi Photo School few years ago. I put a little toy body cap lens on my X-Pro3 and lived with the fixed focus slow lens limitations. I still like seeing the things that came out of it once I got on a roll with it.

Which sort of raises the question, where does the creative spontaneity lie, anyhow? In a moment of abandoned capture, or the singlemindedness of letting the time stamp get cut off and tilted in pursuit of the thing that should look just so?

I got caught up on the (slightly dated) chatter about the Fujifilm X half and then decided to buy one. After a brief spin around the block, I think it is a keeper. The outrage it has generated is a little entertaining.

I have been buying stuff in the Instax ecosystem for years, including the assorted mechanical cameras, the digital hybrids, and a few of the printers.

On that side of the portfolio, they sort of nod over to the X series now and then, but stay grounded in the target demographic with big, colorful, rounded designs and simple supporting apps. They take a little advantage of the low expectations of their customers by introducing odd limitations with the digital hybrids, e.g. limiting obvious sharing options just to photos you have printed out of the camera (though if you decide to bother, you can always get them off the optional micro SD card, if you knew to install one in the first place).

I have a sweet tooth for toy and novelty cameras. There was a brief period in the early aughts where there were some genuinely fun designs, like one that was shaped like a thumb drive and came on a lanyard. I really loved the camera module on my Handspring Visor. For a brief period I had a shared photo album site set up I called “crapshoot,” and it was devoted to snapshots with bad early digital cameras.

I think because I learned photography as a supplemental skill to my small town reporting, I’ve always had a small inferiority complex about it. I learned how to do a very functional “will hold up well in a bad darkroom and newsprint environment” style. When I rediscovered how much I loved taking pictures, the thing I most loved about it was learning how to get into a particular frame of mind and treat photo outings more like a kind of walking meditation. So I went straight from “this is a task I do that involves a kind of simple craft” to “this relaxes me. I like what I see doing it.”

So I love taking pictures, but shy away from wanting or needing anyone to believe or think anything about what I’m producing. I make things that are to my taste. I like to have a supplement to my memories. Every now and then, when there’s an odd confluence of a story and me being around when it happens, I’m glad to capture it, but I am not really a street photographer in that sense, even if I sort of favor urban settings.

Toy cameras and bad cameras make it easier to always be taking pictures. They don’t attract a ton of attention, they don’t permit some kinds of rigor and control, and they do things/have artifacts that lower expectations – mine and everyone else’s.

Back to the X half, I really like the small subreddit for it, because you can see an array of styles and approaches. The “light leak effect + digital timestamp” people fully lean into the bit, and those are the features that seem most outrageous to the people who hate the X half (and probably hated Instagram filters). One commenter explicitly called out the softness of the images from the small sensor as a mark in its favor.

Reading assorted fora and subreddits, I see a number of people who are considering switching to the X half as their main camera, or comparing it alongside Fujifilm’s lower end ILCs as a simpler, more approachable option. One person sold a bunch of gear, spent some of the proceeds on an X half and just pocketed the remainder.

So there are people who take the camera very seriously despite thorough documentation of its limitations. I can’t get myself there: I want to have a camera that is in the “nice” tier, and that means the specs will probably start at M43, weather sealing, and a lot of control. I’d be very unhappy with an X half as my sole camera.

At the same time, look at the wider context of being a person who likes to take pictures, and the hustle-ification of everything. I’ve sold a few prints to people who’ve asked for them because I use SmugMug to host and it’s dead simple to turn on the cart and do literally nothing to sell a print at cost. I auctioned a few off for MetaFilter a few years ago, too. But when people ask if I want to make the whole thing into a side hustle, I’m a little resistant: When I restarted my writing career in the late ’90s, it took a lot of the joy out of writing for me, and it took a few years after I was done doing it for a living to be able to write without feeling a certain dull resentment.

Where photography is concerned, I just packed up the last of a big lens and body sell-off. A lot of it was gear I acquired because I was curious about a certain style of photography I thought a given lens would benefit, or because a certain body had some feature that would get me this or that thing in the pictures I took.

I feel immensely relieved about being down to a single “real” body and a few lenses for the kind of photography I continue to do despite all the side quests. I have two other bodies and two lenses: One’s my Fujifilm X-Pro3, which I feel very attached to. I kept my 23mm and 35mm Fujicrons to go with it. I am not sure it’s forever, but I didn’t like the thought of parting with it. The other body is my old X-T2. I don’t shoot with it anymore, but I have a sentimental reason to hold on to it. Some part of me wants to keep a foot partially in that world, and I’m just going with that.

But again, back to the X half, which is also in the collection now: I think I understand why someone would consider it as a main camera, because it’s a low-pressure device. There’s only so much it can do for you, and only so many choices you can make with it outside the act of simply shooting with it. I’ll spoil my first impressions by also saying that people have called it “plasticky” but it has enough heft and solidity that it feels “real.”

First impressions

Taking it out tonight to put a few dozen shots through it before I met Al for dinner, I noticed a few things:

It really is very small. Easily jacket pocketable. Close to “pack of largish playing cards” size. People keep posing it alongside an X100 and it is hard to explain, but when you take a picture of them next to each other, it somehow doesn’t convey how small this thing looks and feels in real life.

It feels very solid. Dense. There’s a sense of weight to it.

People complain about not being able to see the little indicator LED to the left of the viewfinder. I was able to. By default the camera is set to center focus, and I could tell when it had lock when I composed through the viewfinder.

Where autofocus is concerned, since it does center focus out of the box and offers no AF feedback through the OVF (besides the green lock light to the side), you can just sort of treat that as liberating and do the old “focus and recompose” thing with it. I once read an extensive treatise with pixel-peeping proof of why that is bad, and it was early enough in my time with autofocusing digital cameras that I sort of internalized “compose, move the focus point; don’t focus and recompose.”

Once I realized that the half would utterly thwart any focus perfectionism, I just muttered a cheerful “well, fuck it” to myself and got on with focusing and recomposing.

(On reflection, this was a problem I had with the Ricoh GR IIIx. I had a little OVF that went in the hotshoe, but didn’t have center AF set up. It was annoying. And stubbornly dense on my part. Because I had way too many cameras, it was easy to just set the Ricoh aside and not try to work with it. If all my gear disappeared tomorrow and I woke up to a GRIII on the kitchen table, I’d re-order the OVF, set it to center focus, and use that for all my street photography. I’d bother with EVF and focus point setting for, like, portraits or things where nailing focus really matters. Not for “f8 and be there” sorts of deals.

I was a little leery about the fact that it is all touch/slide control. It’s perfectly responsive. Much better than the old XF-10. The screen(s) are readable despite being so small. Enough to compose with and quickly review. You can pinch/spread to zoom in and out of an image.

There’s very little to control. You have a grain setting, an exposure control knob, an aperture ring, a simple Auto ISO function, a few autofocus modes, and face detection. There are no tone or saturation settings. You can manage white balance. You get a bunch of film simulations and a bunch of special effects. I think the color may be goosed a little but I can’t be sure.

I think there’s enough there to make nice jpegs. Not enough to go into a super deep rabbit hole.

I haven’t yet done a “roll” of film in the film mode.

The app pairs with the camera pretty reliably. Downloading pictures from camera to phone is as slow here as it is ever with any app/camera combo, so that’s what a USB-C SD card adapter is for. I did a firmware update with the app when I got it home and it was painless.

Now what?

Well, I have this thing. It was $200 off, which made it pretty hard to ignore. I am not going to return it. I don’t even have a twinge of remorse. I sold off so much gear that this was a small percentage of the proceeds, and it truly is what I wanted the Instax hybrids to do, meeting me on the X series side of the product line while being simple and fun. So, Fujifilm granted me my wish and I’m gonna go with it.

I don’t imagine it to be a travel camera, exactly. That’s the OM-3. But it’s a fine downtown camera, a running errands camera, karaoke night camera, etc. etc. Too small to not just bring along where I might balk with the OM-3. Just toss it in a sling or stuff it in a pocket and know I won’t have to suffer the indignity of taking pictures with my phone. Seems okay.

The heart of the Woodstock neighborhood is about 40 blocks—2 miles—away. Over three seasons it’s a pretty nice walk, in the winter it’s not great. It’s okay by bike, but the main drag has really aggro drivers, and the unimproved roadways in that neighborhood mean you can’t really just assume a safe grid to evade the arterials. In the winter, the aggro drivers, dark conditions, and narrow areas where bikes and cars have to squeeze together make it pretty daunting.

Also, forget taking a car. Parking is not actually too bad—nobody seems to be policing the giant Safeway parking lot—but it’s really not a fun neighborhood to drive through. Lots of people on their horns, sorta slow going.

There is, on the other hand, the 19 bus line. The nearest stop is a five block walk, and there’s a shelter. When I need to run an errand into Woodstock I grab the Transit app and figure out when I need to go out the door. The ride itself is maybe 10 minutes. If I time my errands right I can probably hop off the bus, do what I need to do, and cross the street to catch the bus headed home with time to spare. Today I headed out the door at 3:15, ran through the UPS store to ship something, and had a ten minute wait for the return ride. I was home by a bit after 4.

Woodstock is a nice neighborhood to have this easy a connection to: There are two grocery stores, a hardware store, a bakery, a legit butcher, bars, restaurants, a newish food cart pod. With a big Banjo Brothers backpack I can haul a lot of stuff.

It’s pretty easy to knock off for the day, hop the bus to Woodstock, grab groceries for dinner, and be most of the way through prep before Al gets home.

There’s also the 14, which runs up Foster. It’s a bit longer walk to catch it, but also a quick ride to the good stuff on Foster in the 50s and 60s: Bread and Roses Market, Bar Carlo, Bruno’s, and a new kitchen consignment shop, among lots of other stuff. Also fine for walks or bike rides in nice weather. Also not somewhere I like to drive for as short a distance as it is.

And there’s the 72, which goes up and down 82nd. It’s a busy line, but the nearest stop is five or six minutes away, and it’s another quick ride down to the Johnson Creek shops, where there’s a Trader Joe’s, our pharmacy, a FedEx drop, and a few other things. Biking around there is not great. Walking is atrocious. Taking a car is frustrating. The bus is pretty nice. /r/Portland lives in superstitious dread of the 72 because there are a lot of poor people on it.

Anyhow, it took me a long time to understand the short-range benefits of the bus service. It just seemed easier to hop on a bike or plan for a leisurely walk. Now that winter is here, though, and it’s dark and wet, I really like running errands using the bus, especially into Woodstock. There’s a short, blustery walk, a wait under a shelter, then a quick ride. No worrying about getting run over or getting soaked.

The 14 & 19 will also go downtown, eventually. In terms of total trip time, they’re about as fast as the Green line (I have a longer walk to get to the stop), slower than a determined e-bike ride, and much slower than a car, but you can have that second Old Fashioned at the Tear Drop with any of the TriMet options. I tend to prefer the Max for downtown trips because it’s quieter and smoother.

Anyhow, tonight I signed up for a bunch of TriMet newsletters. I’m a fan of our transit system. It felt sort of prosocial.

“This is no time to be driven by ideological rigidity given the current economic and political climate.”

Signed,
People driven by ideological rigidity who just don’t realize it.

www.nber.org/papers/w3…

#highonfire #metalmondayonsunday

In the process of canceling my feedly subscription it reminded me I have over 30 feed filters enabled. Hm.

Oh, right: The Oregonian, my hometown paper. I pay for a subscription. The website itself borders on unusable, and the RSS feed is a nightmare. There’s only one. At some point they had feeds by section—there’s evidence of that in their outdated help documentation—but no more. You just get everything:

• Astrology
• All the advice columns (not sure how many, maybe four or five?)
• “Most expensive house in Lake Oswego this week”
• Online sports book promotions

… plus the actual news news, but good luck finding the kernels of corn in the pile.

And if you do manage to spot a news article you’d like to read, their paywall has the memory of a goldfish and godawful session handling: You’ll land on your story, get directed to the paywall, go through the login, then get kicked out to somewhere besides the story. It’s really, really bad.

I wrote the paper’s editor about this a while back, before she retired. As you might expect, the online publishing division doesn’t answer to the editorial division, and there was also the same “that stuff gets views” rationale I remember from my online media days, when we thought “views” was the prime metric.

Last month as I was cleaning up subscriptions Apple informed me I could get News+ added to my existing Apple bundle and end up paying less per month than without it, so I went along. The Oregonian is one of the publications in the News+ package, so I follow it (where they still dump a lot of junk, but not quite as much). And if you just add Oregon and Portland as topical areas to follow, the Oregonian gets pulled in to that. So I just dropped the RSS feed from my local folder (but still have WWeek, because they don’t show up in Apple News).

Some people are, like, “drop that centrist rag already … the Mercury and Willy Week are all you really need.”

Honestly, kindly, gently: lol.

I’ll always read their coverage—media literacy is about understanding and balancing a diversity of inputs—but they’re just not enough, and their reporting can be weirdly incurious if they can’t find a salacious or spicy angle. The Oregonian has its own biases and general slant, but it provides more coverage, and more diverse coverage. It’s essential.

Anyhow, I am guessing the Oregonian gets a lot more money from my paid, direct subscription than they do whatever revenue sharing Apple gives them for a content license, but their website is atrocious, their RSS feeds are unusable, and their editorial staff is held hostage by a web team operating on 2008 rules.

I wish they’d get nonprofit status so I could just budget them under “charity.”

In the case of anything to do with a calendar, where Google Calendar is providing the back end, there’s going to be a certain amount of split living if you don’t want to just go live in Google Calendar’s web and mobile apps: Any video conferencing integrations you’ve got will require a manual tweak for events created outside Google’s web or mobile apps, and I’d argue Google’s own availability widget is better because it is more transparent.

But at the boundary of working with your calendar as opposed to working on your calendar, Apple’s stuff is fine. You can tell where stuff is scheduled, you can use the iOS and macOS widgets and alerts, you can get the benefits of Siri and Apple Intelligence integrations, etc.

Structured is a timeblocking tool. It shows you your Reminders, it shows you your calendars, and you can drag reminders into a list of your appointments for the day where they fit. It offers a few extra things, like assigning an energy level to each item so you can keep track of how sustainable your day’s plan is.

Yep, there are other ways to time block. Reminders and Calendar integrate with drag-and-drop now, so you can literally drag a Reminder out of a list and into your calendar to schedule it if you like. Structured refines the idea a little:

To start, you can configure which calendars and Reminders lists it can work with. I’ve got some “to-read,” “to check out,” etc. Reminders I don’t care to ever time block, so they stay out. I’ve got a few other things that are super granular, and generally opportunistic, so they stay out. I leave in Reminder lists for broad areas of concern: Each of the three functions I direct at work, a few lists for broad initiatives or concerns, and a couple of domestic sphere things.

In the main Structured screen, you get a day view that shows all the scheduled blocks from your calendars.

• Any Reminders tasks with a scheduled date but no time appear at the top of the day. They’re candidates for time blocking that you must have previously decided needed to happen on or by today.
• Any Reminders tasks with a scheduled date and time appear blocked into the day’s schedule.
• You can view any Reminders tasks without a date/time by opening an “Inbox” sidebar.

The Reminders from the top of the list and the Inbox area can be dragged in to the day’s schedule. That’s the core idea.

For instance, just now as I was sitting here typing, I couldn’t unsee a Slack notification from someone working over the weekend. I made a Reminder in my inbox, gave it a due date of tomorrow and kept moving. Tomorrow morning, when I triage and block my day, it’ll be in the list at the top of the day ready to be dropped in and time blocked.

For $15/year to unlock access to your calendars and Reminders instead of just using its internal appointment and calendar model, that seems fine: It’s an overlay that lets you manage your time in a certain style.

There are a few other things that are potentially handy:

First, you can add subtasks to a calendar item. They’re visible only to you and they don’t turn up in Structured’s task model. GTD people will probably grind their teeth at the idea of having another inbox, and that’s reasonable. I think these are probably useful less as a whole unit of work and more as ticklers or reminders. The immediate idea I had for them was to add them to 1:1s and other meetings where I need to check in on something. There are other ways to do that.

Second, there’s an AI assistant (using Apple Intelligence) that helps with subtasking a given item. I gave it a try on a few things where I had a loose list of next actions copied into the task note from somewhere else, and it did okay picking out the work items and making subtasks out of them with the prompt “subtask based on the notes.”

Third, there’s a “Replan” feature that lets you visit the purgatory of tasks that have passed their due date and put them back into circulation (either by turning them back into Inbox candidates or giving them a new date).

Oh, it also provides a web app with a Pro ($15/year) subscription. I am trying it out on my iPad Pro with a keyboard (more or less my laptop replacement) so I haven’t used that much.

There’s also one glaring oversight: No search. That’s on their roadmap. If you want to find things, you need to either pick through future dates or go back to Reminders and search from there. I wish it had search, and it should have search, but the app didn’t start life as a task manager, it started life as a time blocker.

Structured is interesting because it can break either way in terms of how much of your task management life it takes over:

Because it starts from its own internal task and planning model, you could use it as your sole todo app, understanding that it won’t lend a lot of support to your conception of task containers, whether those are “Areas,” “Projects,” “Lists,” or whatever. If you have a bunch of plates spinning in disparate areas, I don’t think it’d be a good desert island tool, because you’d probably end up shimming in some kind of meta layer that would end up hiding work or making it fussy to manage.

(There is, btw, a ticket in their roadmap for filtering, folders, etc., and the comments on that thread tell you all you need to know about how many ideas people have and what a recipe for UI messiness containers (projects, areas, whatever) could be. Good luck, Structured team.)

As an augment to Reminders, it sort of shrinks in ambition but gains in enabling easy timeblocking the work you’re deeply organizing elsewhere. For instance, my Reminders set up has several groups:

• Work
• Interesting Stuff
• Home

Within those groups you might see lists like:

• Enterprise Security
• Application Management
• Business Operations Support
• donation roundup
• administrivia
• shows to watch, things to read, music to try
• the packing list for some trip

The groups provide high-level segregation of the modes I operate in. The lists are either very tactical enumeration of a bunch of little things to get a household project done, or just work items that fall under a broad area of concern. Because I like my “big dumb list,” the Reminders “Scheduled” filter lets me see everything I put a date on, and the “All” filter just shows all of it by list. That more or less gives me the best of both worlds: Filtering to preserve attentional resources, and broad visibility to reassure myself nothing is hiding somewhere.

Structured just provides a sort of last mile for turning those things into action within the constraints meetings and 1:1s introduce into a given day.

Yesterday I wrote up GoodTask , which is more of a Reminders UI enhancement skin than a time blocker. It has some time blocking capabilities, but nothing quite this refined for timeblocking specifically. It’s more like a way to wedge a lot of OmniFocus’s Perspectives into the Reminders database while providing some ways to add metadata that are less fussy than Reminders itself. You could use the two together and never even look at Reminders itself if you wanted.

Ecosystem digression

Because I try very hard to keep third-party apps out of my life, Structured and GoodTask are interesting edge cases. Because they’re inexpensive and don’t mess with the underlying data in Reminders and my calendars, I’m okay with them. They’re just augments. If they stopped working tomorrow, I’d be left with the basic tools again, and still on a footing of having my data and being able to work with it in tools that are good enough. They’re sort of like Greasemonkey scripts I can rent cheaply, just for apps.

I could choose a second order of rabbit-holing about whether or not the Apple ecosystem is forever. I’ve decided that if the Apple ecosystem ever ends up not being forever, some change in life circumstances must have made any todos I was tracking irrelevant to the current moment.

Okay. Enough. The problem I’ve been thinking about this weekend is “where to keep things to do.” I’ve made a choice (Reminders) and have a couple of tools to augment it.

It promises “From Simple Checklists to Complex Project Management,” but I don’t really want a complex project management tool and need just a bit more than “simple checklists” and just a few more smart list options than Reminders provides.

Doing an inventory today, I realized how much I’ve allowed the language of projects to slip into my mental model. I don’t have “projects,” I have areas that occasionally involve things that have a couple of other things nested in them. When something gets so complex that it’s a project, there’s a staff program manager sitting right there who can help with wrangling the work streams.

GoodTask includes a Smart List feature that works close enough to OmniFocus’s Perspectives for my purposes: It took about two minutes to make a Big Dumb List of date-sorted tasks in my Work group. If all hell broke loose and GoodTask stopped working tomorrow, it’d sort of suck but it separates its organizational metadata from Reminders’ enough that the real fallout would be “well, I need to drag some of these groups I made into new Groups in Reminders.”

It also lets you tell it to leave some lists in Reminders out of its reckoning. I have a few shoebox lists that just gather recommendations, items of passing curiosity, to-read, to-watch, etc. I don’t want them in a tool I’m using to manage things I have to actually do, so GoodTask hides them for me.

This is all coming after a reorg I did with my group at work. I’ve got historical reasons to be a little averse to reorgs, but this was one of those times where I was watching managers tripping over each other to get capacity for their projects, unpleasant “everybody in the org is at the same meeting” experiences, and a realization two-and-a-half years into this place how few professional development opportunities we’d made for people. So we spent a month as a management team, talking about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do, and how we could think beyond “this team is full of people who do this kind of work, and that team is full of people who do that kind of work.”

And for me, I felt mired in the day-to-day of the managers under me, trying to sort out what went where and playing a glue role all the time to hold us together at one level, with no room to figure out new levels.

Shifting from a very rigidly functional structure to a delivery-oriented structure is creating some definite short-term pain. We inventoried all the things we’re doing and decided that we could allow one particular kind of work to be much more distributed in order to concentrate management attention on other kinds. That distributed work needs some supporting rituals and routines to keep on track.

But for all the short-term tradeoff pain we’re dealing with, I came out of the planning cycle for next year with sign-off to build a new program and a new governance structure, and with a mandate to add a role that seemed out of the question a month ago. I have to refine my model of what I think work is.

I thought this was gonna be, like, when “typography nerds” complain about kerning or something.

fxrant.blogspot.com/2025/12/t…

What is YOB? YOB is love.

(And Buddhist doom metal)

www.youtube.com/watch

www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025…

puddingtime.org/denote-ta…

Using it on iPad would entail hosting it where I could get at it from a mosh or ssh client.

Sounds unwell.

“the story of the most miserable person on Earth who must save the world from happiness.”

… which would have affected my read a little. I haven’t been clear for the first six episodes that the world needs to be saved. 📺

“The bad news: You’re falling through the air with no parachute. The good news: There’s no ground.”
— Chögyam Trungpa

I’m going to keep this first part short:

I got my first account on a Unix machine some time around 1991 or 1992. Up until that year I’d almost solely used 8-bit computers at home, but had some experience using a DEC PDP-11 in college to work on the school newspaper.

“Unix” became my home environment – the place I wanted to be regardless of what I had to use. I was a little late to Linux, finally getting it installed on a machine in ‘95 or ‘96. I lucked into a freelance gig where I could write about Linux. I co-authored a book about Linux. I got some gigs helping complete books about Linux during the heyday of tech books, when Borders or Barnes and Noble had large tech sections. There are a lot of people in the world who read my chapters on how to use the command line in Linux. If they didn’t read about it in the original edition of a doorstop-sized “Unleashed” book I contributed to, which I think was about Red Hat, then they read the mildly revised editions for other distros.

I completely subscribed to “The Elements of Style: UNIX as Literature”:

“UNIX system utilities are a sort of Lego construction set for word-smiths. Pipes and filters connect one utility to the next, text flows invisibly between. Working with a shell, awk/lex derivatives, or the utility set is literally a word dance.

“Working on the command line, hands poised over the keys uninterrupted by frequent reaches for the mouse, is a posture familiar to wordsmiths (especially the really old guys who once worked on teletypes or electric typewriters). It makes some of the same demands as writing an essay. Both require composition skills. Both demand a thorough knowledge of grammar and syntax. Both reward mastery with powerful, compact expression.

“At the risk of alienating both techies and writers alike, I also suggest that UNIX offers something else prized in literature: a coherence, a consistent style, something writers call a voice.”

Like a lot of people, I ended up migrating to Macs once OS X came out, but I did so because there was Unix in there somewhere.

But today I don’t live in a work world where it’s a meaningful skill set. I spend a lot of time making decks and working on documents. I use a lot of browser-based SaaS for work. There’s pretty much nothing to script at work, and when I do spot things where I could, the right play is invariably to drop a few suggestions about how to best write that script to the person I’m paying to do that.

I’ve worked on a few personal projects over the past few years that were meant to help me keep my hand in: TUI apps, a CLI interface to the SmugMug and flickr APIs, etc.

But I have also had to admit those projects haven’t been particularly sticky, even though I spent a lot of time making sure they mapped to my sense of How Things Should Be, because a command line/shell orientation makes less and less sense to me. There’s friction getting things in and out of a shell environment when so much of the work you have to do doesn’t live in there. And once you start cobbling together tools that might let you live in both worlds, you’re in a UI wild west, with myriad configuration conventions and differing ideas about ergonomics.

It has not been easy on the ego to slowly transition out of that Unix orientation. I have the career I have because of that first account on an Ultrix box and years spent in and out of the Unix and Linux orbit as a writer, sysadmin, web developer, consultant, and manager. It has been almost as much a cultural identity as a skill set, and possibly more.

But it also feels increasingly awkward and shoehorned into my day-to-day life, and clinging to it bothers me because I’m at a stage of life where I want to be less set in my ways, not more. I think about how to maintain my fundamental plasticity as a matter of aging gracefully, remaining a learner, and embracing the ways the culture around me is changing in ways I’m not always chill with, but need to accept.

As hard as it is to set aside or let go of something that was such a big part of my life, though, it’s also nice to lose that sense of obligation to a past self who’s indifferent to my present self.

Yesterday I quoted Joan Didion:

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking …”

… and this morning I found myself replying to a comment on micro.blog. I am not even sure how I ended up on there, but I did, and saw an interesting comment, replied, and had a brief exchange, and it was pleasant, because micro.blog has that kind of vibe. A few days ago Luke warily noted the existence of “the HOA” on Mastodon, and I completely got what he was talking about.

Mastodon was never going to remain immune to a very Twitter-like kind of discourse creeping in, and as Twitter continues its descent that will only get worse. Some of Masto’s design choices will make some of the worst Twitter excesses and abuses harder to replicate, maybe, but there’s nothing the lack of quote toots is going to do to blunt the fundamental nature of Twitter discourse, which is reductive and loud. That’s what happens when you give primates 500 characters to get an idea across and limit them to their thumbs to express it. Sorry. I didn’t write the rules.

micro.blog has managed to avoid that, partially through software design and partially through community governance. What’s really amazing to me is that I remember sometimes things would get sort of bad for someone and they’d get a little spikey or prickly, and others support them through their spikeyness or prickliness. It feels like there’s a community there.

All to say, I used to pass micro.blog posts through to Mastodon and got to kind of double-dip on communities. Maybe I want to try that again.

A small thing

Poking around my micro.blog profile I saw that I had a bunch of things linked in the little socials bar my theme provides, including LinkedIn and GitHub. I got rid of those links and that felt pretty good. I also stopped paying for a LinkedIn account, and that felt great. Then I went through the pages I have set up on micro.blog and got rid of job information.

It is sort of strange to be in this mental space where I really like my job and also feel pretty good about disentangling it from everything. I think that over the past several years I spent so much time fretting about what I was going to do next, and wanting to make sure I had all the self-marketing infra built out, that it just seemed normal to let things blur.

Now that I’ve been through the last year, I think:

1. The intersection of what makes me great at work and what people on Mastodon want to read about is probably a very small set. I have nothing interesting to tell you about what I do for a living that you could copy from a code snippet or run in a container to try for yourself.
2. It wasn’t a good idea to pay for LinkedIn all those years, but I am keeping my free account because that’s where people who have a lead will think to look for you, and where you can keep up with people you met at work and care about but have not formed an outside social bond with. The job search stuff, though? The special messaging? Just not necessary.
3. I think I will hold the line against blending the socials and the work again. Meaning, no linking to my LinkedIn profile, no linking to my GitHub profile, maybe the occasional post about things that are work-related, but just setting aside the idea that my web presence is a content marketing exercise for the product that is me. As a strict question of ROI, it wasn’t there. If the matter comes up again, anything that might have helped will still be there to help if I want it. I don’t need to make more inventory. As a question of mental health, it wasn’t good for me.

On the last few bits, it’s just another gift I got from Puppet. I went in there figurative hat in hand, and I’m glad whatever I did during interviews worked; but confidence, humility, and a sense of self-worth all exist in a curious sort of balance that is different for me today than it was ten years ago. Taking something that brings me joy — fiddling with web stuff — and putting the anxious weight of helping me find work or feel more prepared to lose work wasn’t a good formula for me. Because when a thing you love takes on a work aspect, when do you get to stop thinking about work?

Like, if I were a professional web developer or designer or writer, then my web presence would, unfortunately, need a certain kind of attention, I guess. At least to my standards. But I’m not. I’m just this leader/director/works in tech/“seems like he came from somewhere else and could possibly end up there again kind of guy.” I think if you just started reading backwards you could learn some useful things, and if anything you found made you decide I was not hirable, that’d be awesome. And there’s perhaps a small chance I won’t bother to cultivate into a larger one that at least the way I seem to approach my transient obsessions, oblique references to political annoyances, and amateur web engineering tasks is good marketing for my particular je ne sais quoi in a way that bleating about my passion for the business/IT partnership, good process, and container technology is really not.

Anyhow, this is a good time. I will enjoy it.

The Playdate came

I’m not sure what to say about it beyond that besides “yay, it is here!”

It’s a little smaller than I imagined, it feels a little better crafted than I imagined — I really like it as an object — and it is perfect for the use case my Nintendo DS used to occupy, as a thing on my desk I would use to reset between meetings or when I had a little time to kill but not enough to start something new.

The one downside: My first season 1 game drop arrived around three in the morning and it started flashing on my bedside table, waking up Al who sleepily tried to press buttons to just make it stop before giving up. Her struggles woke me up enough to think to stick it in the bedside table drawer.

Otherwise, happy to have it. Maybe I’ll write more as more games come in and I form more of a thought.

Pausing to appreciate

The matter of remaining Intel MacBook Pros in the fleet came up at work. We’ve been steadily dredging them out as they age out, but a few remain. As I talked to the leader who was asking me to do something about a pocket of them in his group, it wasn’t hard to empathize at all. I had a 16" “one down from the very best” Intel on my desk, and when I put the M1 mini in it made a startling difference. I sold the mini and got a Studio, and I think the best thing I can say about it is that new Studio models haven’t caused me to bat an eye. It’s just smooth and steady. Performance improvements are just an abstraction to me. I don’t think about it being a computer because it just does what I want without making me wait.

A few years into the Apple Silicon Age, I still feel a little amazed. The Studio is the best computer I’ve ever owned, and my 14" Pro is my favorite laptop ever. It’s very strange to me that when I think “what would I like next” the two things that come to mind right away are:

• An iPhone mini with all the lenses
• An iPad Pro with a landscape camera

The former isn’t going to happen, and I think that means the right iPhone for me is a Pro Max, because I’m doing the Pro for the camera and it’s already too large, so might as well just go for it. The latter … eh. I made a go of full-timing on an iPad, at least as my mobile computer, and it didn’t take. I named my 11" Pro “Evolutionary Niche” because it’s good to take camping or traveling, but I’d just rather use a regular laptop most of the time.