Weeknotes 5
Tiger and me
- I savor the weeknotes that other people put out there. I don’t read them in an RSS reader, but I do jump out to all of your websites from RSS. And I don’t read them on my phone. I haul out the MacBook Pro and drink them in that way, usually during lunch at work on Mondays or Fridays when no one else is in the building.
- I’m frustrated with myself for not getting these out on a more regular schedule. The purpose of weeknotes was to just go with whatever was ready each week and not overthink things. Here I am overthinking things. But, I think the benefit of weeknotes is that it keeps water flowing through the pipes and lowers the activation energy for cranking up an “actual” post.
Did:
- Cleared out an immense amount of pure crap from the basement. A dumpster changes the equation by exerting a gravitational force on things you know you need to let go of. The bigger the discard pile gets, the more everything else you’re keeping looks like trash that’s just not thrown out yet.
Found:
general.el is an Emacs package to make creating and managing keybindings easier.
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Learned about the Richmond Synth Collective. Hmm. Venture out of the house and meet people who are into the same weird things as me? Could work.
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Went down a bit of an Elvin Jones rabbit hole:
- Elvin Jones | Fresh Air Archive: Interviews with Terry Gross
- He said that hearing Dizzy Gillespie’s Salt Peanuts (1945) with Big Sid Catlett on drums was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever heard. I don’t know if that was the exact recording, though.
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Molly White: AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?. This is an even-handed, non-alarmist essay about AI and how it’s kind of good at some things, and also how much it sucks that it wastes so much energy and steals from human endeavors.
Still, I do think acknowledging the usefulness is important, while also holding companies to account for their false or impossible promises, abusive labor practices, and myriad other issues. When critics dismiss AI outright, I think in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and benefited from AI tools think “wait, that’s not been my experience at all”.
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Jeremy Keith: Adactio: Journal—What price?
If large language models are going to improve their ethical shortcomings (which is debatable, but let’s be generous), then that’s all the more reason to avoid using the current crop of egregiously damaging tools.
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Steps - Activity Tracker for iOS and Apple Watch. I got this because I wanted an Apple Watch complication that would show how many flights of stairs I’d walked in a day. It does that in the “flights climbed” mode, but only shows a chart of one day at a time, although it’s worth it for that alone. I wish it would show the last 7 or 10 days.
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Oh no. Giorgio Sancristoforo has a new-ish app called No-Fi (scroll, scroll, scroll) that is “one mixer, five cassette recorders, one handy reverb and one delay. That’s it!” There’s a YouTube demo.
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Analog Office by Anna Havron is a deep well of to-be-read pages. I love blogs that lay it down for you authoritatively, like the first section of her “How To” Directory page:
How to Find Stuff in Your Paper Notebooks
- Set up a table of contents or an index.
- A table of contents is too much work? Set up an edge index.
- …an edge index requires too much hand-eye coordination? Enter the date on all of your notes.
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feedle is a search engine for blogs and podcasts. Each search generates its own RSS feed.
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Salesforce’s New AI Strategy Acknowledges That AI Will Take Jobs
The new iteration of Salesforce’s AI products is meant to run without supervision “in contrast to now-outdated copilots and chatbots that rely on human requests and struggle with complex or multistep tasks,” the company said in a statement.
Go to hell.
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I’d like to try Mike Hall’s twist on Making a plaintext personal CRM with org-contacts.
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special.fish is a community word processor for writing poetry, journals, and logs, supported by users like you.
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If I ever get around to trying desktop/laptop Linux, I’ll install Harmonoid for managing a music library, as BSAG mentioned in Exploring desktop Linux: Part 2.
Music:
- The Fall: Grotesque (After The Gramme) ‘Live’. “Sourced, mastered and designed by the musicians who played on the original LP, and with insightful liner notes by Henry Rollins, ‘Grotesque Live’ presents fascinating versions of all the seminal 1980 album tracks.”
- Sabrina Carpenter — Taste
- Sonny Sharrock — Many Mansions. Jesus Christ, I instantly knew this was Elvin Jones playing. Just listen. It’s like he has four arms. (This is what started the rabbit hole.)
- Lizzy McAlpine — Pushing It Down and Praying
- Wardruna — Himinndotter (Sky-Daughter) (mainly for the video)
- Sepultura: Beneath the Remains (from 1001 Other Albums)
- SS Decontrol — Boiling Point. (from Matt)
- Centro-Matic: Love You Just the Same. (from Doug)
- Steve Gunn — Ancient Jules. (from Matt)
Looking forward to:
- Ordered a RealForce R3 White TKL Dye Sub PBT Topre 45g keyboard. I felt like my recent extra work hours deserved a non-annoying keyboard. I’m living on the edge and going non-silent Topre. If it’s too loud, I’ll keep the Leopold FC660C 45g silent at work and use the R3 at home. You can go nuts watching YouTube reviews, listening to videos of switches, and imagining whether some r/MechanicalKeyboards commenter’s definition of “tactile” matches your own. Even worse if you start searching for “Topre-like MX switches”. Once you’re in that deep, you will likely spend more than you should for something worse. And that’s when you go for a stock Topre keyboard.
- Getting more sleep this week.