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There you'll be
The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult.
In this week’s free newsletter, I explained how bad the circular AI economy is in the simplest-possible terms:
Anthropic not have money to pay big cloud bills, because Anthropic company cost lots of money, more money than Anthropic make! So Anthropic only PAY cloud bills if OTHERS
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Everyone, it’s time to talk about AI demand and the capacity constraint issues across the industry.
These constraints are not a result of “incredible demand” for AI, but the desperation of hyperscalers and the avariciousness of two near-trillion-dollar failsons living off their parents’ welfare.
Joe Abercrombie in 20 Years:
One observation that blows my mind – The Blade Itself is now twice as old as A Game of Thrones was when The Blade Itself came out. GRRM felt like a long established pillar of the genre to me at that point. Truly I must be part of the fantasy furniture at this one…
That you are, Joe. That you are.
Just this weekend I was visiting a fantasy and science fiction book store with my seven year old son, with whom I'm currently reading Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. As we stumbled upon the First Law books, I told him ‘just wait until you're old enough to read these ones, you'll have a blast’.
I guess The Blade Itself was about 10 years old when I read it. In another decade, he'll be the one reading it.
I mentioned in a recent note that I've been tinkering with the front page setup for a while. The previous iteration of the front page had been mostly identical since I relaunched the blog in late 2023. It showed recent posts and recent notes.
Since then, I've added a couple of content sections to the website. I add books to my reading log several times per month. The workout log is updated daily. The result is that the front page wasn't really reflecting the entirety of the activities that happen on this website. As new visitors tend to drop by the home page, I think it's a good idea to use that page to give them an idea of what's happening on this website.
To that end, I've tried several times the last year to find a way to incorporate updates from the reading and workout logs into the front page. Unsuccessfully! I've created and discarded at least five different mock-ups. Common for all of them is that I've begun with the approach of trying to lift the design elements from the two logs into the front page. As I'm happy with how both sections look, that felt like the natural approach.
The drawback is that every single time I tried this approach, the overall feel of the front page was disjointed. It came off as something haphazardly thrown together. When I tried once more to tackle this challenge the other day, the outcome was the same. But at that point, a lightbulb went off.
‘I don't have to bring the design elements from the logs to the front page. I can just bring the data from the logs and present them in the same way I do the other front page elements!’
The template was essentially already in place. Posts and notes are distinct types of content, and were already presented as such. Doing the same with two more types of content shouldn't be an issue. So I gave it a go. And, to my surprise, it worked just fine. It's not revolutionary or anything out of the ordinary. But that wasn't what I was aiming for. I just wanted to preserve the look and feel of the home page, while also showing the breadth of content I share on the site. And I think I achieved just that.
To spruce it up a little, I decided to reuse the icons from the workout log on the workout log entries. With that little visual in place, it was a short order to just reuse miniature versions of the book covers from the books I'm reading to add a little bit of colour there as well.
One unexpected result is that the posts and notes entries feel a bit flat by comparison without any visuals. But, as I want to err on avoiding anything akin to Apple's icons in menus everywhere, I think I'll leave it as it is for now.
While make some changes to the front page (I finally found a way to include the content I wanted!) I accidentally copied the settings file from my ‘dev’ directory to my actual website directory. The dev version only has a placeholder URL and site name in the settings.
Now I've gotten a reminder where I use those settings.
In addition to the header, the feeds rely on these. When I regenerated the site with the placeholder values in the settings file, every old post in the feeds were given a new URL and unique ID. This would result in your feed reader thinking these old posts were new posts. And a dead link to these posts.
Will try not to do that again! ^_^
Watched Train Dreams tonight.
Wow!
Another great film. Loved the quiet contemplation of it. The perseverance in the face on unbearable grief. Speaking of, I was, presumably like the protagonist, hoping that it didn't happen. That they simply moved on from the scorched earth, to start anew somewhere.
I still am.
Back when Copilot first came out, I immediately disliked it. But I decided to give it a fair shake and tried to evaulate it in good faith. I wasn’t interested in paying for it, but they had a form for FOSS community members to apply for a free subscription, so I filled it out and gave it a shot.
Been thinking about redoing the front page for a while now. Want to incorporate recent workouts as well as books I'm reading. Perhaps even recent listens from my ListenBrainz profile.
Fiddled around with the inspector trying to land something. But nothing feels right. Yet. Could probably take to Figma or something to get a decent sketch, but ‘designing’ with HTML and CSS feels more like shaping clay or working wood, and that's the way I want to do it.
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Yesterday morning, GitHub Copilot users got confirmation of something I’d reported a week ago — that all
Tommy Dixon in the end of our extremely online era.:
And I think we won't realize how sick we were, how sick and sad and confused it makes us, until after it's over. We will look back on these times with a compassionate sadness. Shake our heads at how ignorant and naive we all were, to give up so much for so little. And wonder why we ever cared so much about strangers on the Internet.
Came across this piercing piece of writing by way of Tommy's follow up, How to end your extremely online era. Start with the first, the follow his somewhat practical guide.
I'll do the same.
Noah Hawley in What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat for the Atlantic:
It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back.
Fascinating insights from someone who spent a weekend inside Bezos' private circus exhibition.
If you've done much with modern cellphones, you've probably noticed just how odd the architecture can be around audio. Specifically, I mean call audio: modern smartphones have made call audio less of a special case (mostly by just becoming more complicated in general), but in older phones you would often find arrangements where the cellular modem 1 had direct analog audio to the microphone and speaker, perhaps via some switching to share amplifiers.
Rewatched Interstellar tonight. First time since back when it came out.
Great movie. Very intense. Amazing music. Sure hits different when you're a parent. Cried like a baby.
It also triggers an immense longing. Something deep inside me. A desperate urge to know. What's beyond? I need to know. I must! It's almost a temptation.
Great movie. Fantastic, even. But I don't think I shall ever watch it again.
When it is time, I'll finally know.
Jeremy in Finally Finishing Ocarina of Time:
Ocarina of Time is one of those games that gets talked about so much that I’ve sort of always felt like a fake gamer for never finishing it, even nearly 30 years after release.
I don't know why Jeremy needs to exaggerate (or, alternatively, make me feel so old) when opening this otherwise great post. Was great reading some thoughts — thirty years on, apparently — about the game that defined my youth. Jeremy points out that the combat experience has aged well. I would agree. Every battle in every 3D Zelda game since has felt like a natural evolution of the standard set by Ocarina of Time. It was groundbreaking at the time, and even three decades later it holds up well.
WU LYF are back!
Their 2012 show at Parkteatret in Oslo is one of my all time favourite concerts. Fourteen and a half years later, they have a new record out and they're coming back to Oslo.
I'll be there at John Dee in September. Cannot wait!
Herman in The commodification of travel:
Perhaps once sunglasses cameras take off and people can record their entire lives they can finally experience where they are, instead of trying to capture it perfectly for later.
Yeah, I don't know it's going to be as peaceful as that. I think Black Mirror got it spot with The Entire History of You back in 2011.
Otherwise, I fully agree with what Herman's saying about travel. What I will say is that this long predates social media. Although social media has certainly exacerbated the tendency beyond all hope.
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Only took me like half a year to notice that the default port for Navidrome is 4533. As in 45 and 33 rounds per minute vinyl. Now that I have seen it, I cannot help thinking ‘that's so clever!’ every time I open Navidrome.
Kiwi Farms is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment.
Rishabh in Old newspaper like blog design:
I also added another category of posts, i.e., workout, whose design is copied from Lars‑Christian's website. Thanks to Lars for the guidance.
Stumbling across this in my feed reader put a huge smile on my face! Risabh's workout log looks great, and it's so cool to have provided a little inspiration for someone else to take control of their data and share workouts on their personal website.
Another great implementation is by Zak, who created a dedicated site on a subdomain for his workouts.
Of course, I encourage both to create dedicated feeds for the workouts. That way, I can truly recreate the good parts of Strava (with none of the many drawbacks) by building a ‘workouts’ folder in my feed reader to draw inspiration when people get the work done.
Hopefully many people will join us in sharing their workouts on their own websites like this, and this is just the beginning of the workout log revolution!
15 years ago, on December 11th, 2010, at the bold age of 17, I wrote my first blog post on the wonders of the Windows Phone 7 on Blogspot.
A few years ago, I made the mistake of filling out a form to look into a business loan, one that I never ended up getting. Since then I receive no less than three texts a day offering me lines of credit ranging from $150,000 to as much as
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I'm inside my feed reader and I click a link to a feed. What happens? The link opens in my browser and the feed file is downloaded.
Downloaded! When I'm in my feed reader and click a link to an actual feed. Come on guys! We need to fix this. But, given that Google hates RSS and are already taking additional steps to kill its usability, I'm not too optimistic.
We should be bringing back feed:// URLs and work to make them ubiquitous. The open web needs it, or an equivalent, in the fight against the lock-in of the tech oligarchies.
The internet used to be great.
I was going through my old notes and clippings (why is a big post in the making) and I came across this quote by Joel Miller. I don't know who Joel Miller is, but this quote by him feels more relevant than ever in the age of AI:
Our investment in reading changes the book because the book has changed us. ... If books are merely a means of transferring information, then perhaps, yes, a book is a waste of time. If a summary of its thesis and key points could be presented in a brief article or Substack post, why not just save the hours and read the Substack post? All the more if the information is outdated or questionable for one reason or another. But that mistakes what a book is for. A book is a tool. It’s a machine for thinking. And “all machines,” as Thoreau once said, “have their friction.” The time it takes to engage with ideas—whether factual or fictional, emotional or intellectual, accurate or inaccurate, efficient or inefficient—might strike some as a drag. But the time given to working through those ideas, adopting and adapting, developing or discarding, changes our minds, changes us. It’s not about the wisdom we glean. It’s about what wisdom we grow.
Light: it's the radiation we can see. The communications potential of light is obvious, and indeed, many of the earliest forms of long-distance communication relied on it: signal fires, semaphore, heliographs.
Soundtrack: The Dillinger Escape Plan — Setting Fire To Sleeping Giants
In what The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz and Ronan Farrow called a “tense call” after his brief ouster from OpenAI in 2023, Sam Altman seemed unable to reckon with a “pattern of deception”
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