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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.
We were lucky enough to spend the weekend at a medieval castle deep in the Umbrian countryside.
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.
I dont really need to know who is visiting my websites, although it is an undeniable pleasure to see number go up.
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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The mascot of ATmosphereConf is a goose, accompanied by the motto we can just do things.
If you've peeked at my reading log the last year or so, you'd be excused for thinking I'd abandoned Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. It has featured under my reading section for more than a year!
Finishing a book has never taken me this long before. But finish it I did, and I did it just the other day.
Stoic philosophy has interested me for many years. Even before it was co-opted by the ‘manosphere’ and quotes from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and their fellow stoics became endemic to various platforms. I just never really got around to following up on my curiosity. Not until I began listening to the History of Rome podcast a couple of years back. It renewed my interest in the philosophical teachings of the age, and — having both Seneca's Letters and Aurelius' Meditations on my shelf — I decided that I needed to read these two cornerstones of stoicism.
Seneca's letters are written as musings and advice for his friend Lucilius. The 65 letters have become somewhat of a bible or, the original teachings, for stoics. They cover a wide array of subjects. Everything from the folly of the crowds to how to meet death to the point of philosophy.
Part of the reason finishing the book took me so long is because I decided to read at most one letter per day. Given the subject matter, plowing through felt insufficient. Better to let each letter sink in and process it properly before moving on to the next. I also took a fair bit of notes.
Much of what Seneca teaches resonates with me. The stoic views on death, in particular, align with my personal beliefs. Seneca closes his 65th and final letter to Lucilius:
And what is death? It is either the end, or a process of change. I have no fear of ceasing to exist; it is the same as not having begun. Nor do I shrink from changing into another state, because I shall, under no conditions, be as cramped as I am now. Farewell.
Mic drop!
Death is a recurring subject throughout the letters. The view is consistent in that death is nothing to be feared. All of our lives we are dying. (‘For death itself is always the same distance from us.’) Not a single one of us has any guarantees for when that final moment will come. We should lead our lives as if death is constantly around the corner. ‘Let us postpone nothing’, he writes.
His first letter deals with just that. Seneca opens it thus:
Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands.
Seneca preaches that ‘life is long, if only you know how to use it’. Most of us, unfortunately, do not. We are not set free. We do not gather and save our time. Instead, our precious time is squandered to ‘the most disgraceful kind of loss’ which ‘is due to carelessness’.
His strong and adamant preaching that ‘nothing is ours, except time’ was a timely (hur-hur) reminder. I'm at a part of my life where the days seemingly fly by. Each day is filled to the brim. Reading Seneca's letter compelled me to take stock of how I'm spending my time. To make adjustments, sure. But, more importantly, to reach the conclusion that much of what I fill my days with is genuinely what I want to be doing.
What a gift.
Another gift was his thoughts on crowds. In the physical sense, in the sense of ‘everyone is doing it’ that is so easy to use as justification for our actions and in the sense that we need to strive for the approval of the many. This particular anecdote hit home:
The following was also nobly spoken by someone or other for it is doubtful who the author was; they asked him what was the object of all this study applied to an art that would reach but very few. He replied: ‘I am content with few, content with one, content with none at all.’
And, on the subject of attracting praise, Seneca wrote (emphasis mine):
Many men praise you; but have you any reason for being pleased with yourself if you are a person whom the many can understand? Your good quality should face inwards.
These are thoughts I've sort of held or vaguely surmised, but never truly expressed. But I could not agree more. Your compass should point towards something other than praise and adulation. Your good quality should face inwards. Seneca also talks about going against the crowds in how you act:
It shows much more courage to remain dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting, but it shows greater self-control to refuse to withdraw oneself and to do what the crowd does, but in a different way — thus neither making oneself conspicuous nor becoming one of the crowd. For one may keep holiday without extravaganza.
In opposing the crowd, it is easy to default to reclusive behaviour. As Seneca points out here, however, this is not necessarily the stoic way. Instead, to be among the crowds, and to do what they do, but in a different way, is both more challenging and more instructive.
Another cornerstone of stoic philosophy are the views on material wealth. It is not that they abhor richness. In fact, they actively encourage anyone to pursue it. It, however, being something quite different than what we normally consider wealth. Nothing illustrates this more than when Seneca quotes Epicurus in a story about Pythocles:
‘If you wish to make Pyhocles rich, but not rich in the vulgar and equivocal way, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.’
Seneca believes that it is equally true that:
If you wish to make Pythocles honourable, do not add to his honours, but subtract from his desires.
And:
If you wish Pythocles to have pleasure forever, do not add to his pleasures, but subtract from his desires.
Not as eloquent as his ‘Epicurean enemy’, perhaps, but it certainly gets the point across. This view that wealth and honour and true pleasure is not defined by what you own and acquire, but rather what you desire, is something I believe deeply. Seeing it written in such plain words helped me cement that belief. Every day I now try to remind myself of this. That I can become richer, more virtuous and make life more pleasurable simply be subtracting from my desires.
To that end, I will end this post with perhaps my favourite quote from all of Seneca's letters, concerning what constitutes happiness:
…teach us that the happy man is not he whom the crowd deems happy, namely, he into whose coffers mighty sums have flowed, but he whose possessions are all in his soul, who is upright and exalted, who spurns inconstancy, who sees no man with which he wishes to change places, who rates men only at their value as men, who takes Nature for his teacher, conforming to her laws and living as she commands, whom no violence can deprive of his possessions, who turns evil into good, who is unerring in judgement, unshaken, unafraid, who may be moved by force but never moved to distraction, whom Fortune when she hurls at him with all her might the deadliest missile in her armoury, may graze, though rarely, but never wound.
Alex Chan in Creating a personalised bin calendar:
I start by generating an HTML calendar using Python. There’s a built-in calendar module, which lets you output calendars in different formats. It doesn’t embed individual date information in the
<td>cells, so I customise the HTMLCalendar class to write the date as an id attribute.
Neat post from Alex. Can immediately think of a few places where this approach might be useful. Also wish I'd known that Python calendar module fifteen years ago when I spent a not insignificant amount of hours setting up a calendar grid in Photoshop by hand ^_^
Soundtrack — Soundgarden — Blow Up The Outside World
A lot of people try to rationalize the AI bubble by digging up the past.
Billions of dollars of waste are justified by saying “OpenAI just like Uber” (it isn’t) and “the data center buildout is
I was so taken with Civilisations that I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to indulge in an earlier novel by Laurent Binet.
Hooded crows are common round here and very entertaining.
