Dispatches

When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial.

Write the thing you wanna write. You can be strategic and whatever, you can and maybe even should try to figure out what people want to read and what publishers are willing to buy, but at the end of the day, a whole lot of people in and around this industry know almost nothing for certain.

At this rate I might have to rename this segments to Monthnotes. So let’s at least talk about the last two weeks, shall we? Python, podcasting, media, oh my.

Summing up this week in everything Daniel: code, podcasting, health stuff, book and tv reviews, oh my!

I’ve spent a lot of time working with Finns, and this quote made me smile. I’ve always had a soft spot for Finns. Some claim they’re unfriendly, but every one that I’ve ever met has been quite pleasant, if reserved.

Robert Jackson Bennett has been one of my favorite authors for a while now. His fantasy worlds are realized in stunning detail, with rich characters and intricately woven plots. His latest book, The Tainted Cup, a fantasy murder mystery that kicks off his new Shadow of the Leviathan series, is no exception.

Writing murder mysteries is largely a process of logistics, I think, ensuring that the timelines work and the right evidence gets in the right place at the right time. You essentially become the Jeff Bezos of killing dudes you just made up.

I’ve been toying with a small Django project that can be given a list of podcast feeds, and then regularly checks those feeds and updates some interesting metrics. Initially, I wanted to see how many comparable podcasts to my own made use of various RSS namespace elements, and also to pull some aggregate statistics around release frequency, episode length, etc…

In which we semi-automate an annoying production task away with the powers of Python, curiousity, and ADHD hyperfocus.

Yes, the fact that people have to choose between writing open source software and affording decent healthcare is a problem deeply rooted in our current implementation of zero-sum capitalism, and not at all a problem that can be laid at the feet of the free software movement.

Rowan Jacobson, in this month’s issue of Scientific American, has written an article that is chock-full of mind-blowing implications for how we understand cognition, memory, and cellular development. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are just a few examples.

After 14 years away, I’m back to living that OmniFocus lifestyle. Way back when, before I had received my formal diagnosis for ADHD, I bounced between so many task management systems with excitement as I struggled to get control over my life.

Today, I’d like to tell you about Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. I finished this one a few weeks ago, and I’ve found that the more I’ve marinated on it, my feelings about it have changed.

Thanks to this post from Adam Johnson, I’ve now updated my configuration to block OpenAI and Meta from crawling this website to feed their LLMs.

This week I wanted to play around with tkinter a bit. But this proved to be difficult on my M2 Mac. I use asdf to manage various runtime versions, so first I checked to see if it was already working with my existing Python installation using the built in test method.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. The last few work weeks have been so busy that by the end of the Friday work day I’ve been too tired to write a post. But I’m back home after a week overseas and it’s a long weekend, so let’s use this opportunity to catch up.

Because we do not live in the Star Trek-inspired rational, humanist world that Altman seems to be hallucinating. We live under capitalism, and under that system, the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists.

Ted Chiang has penned an insightful column on trends in A.I. and it’s dangers as an accelerant for the worst elements of late-stage capitalism. His comparison to McKinsey— whose role in corporate policies has been destructive to the middle class —is especially apt.

Erin Kissane has written an insightful post on Bluesky’s closed beta, and more importantly the response from the Mastodon community. In particular, the passage below had me violently nodding in agreement.

A great post from Monte Cook on anxiety for first-time designers. Remember that product that gamers love that includes A, B, and C? A lot of designers will look at that, put A, B, and C in their own product, and then figure they’re done.