A software eng got sniffy with me for verifying how an app works. “I’d expect IT to know already.”
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.
Nice Saturday: Breakfast downtown, an experiment with a new barber that paid off, and a hike up to Pittock Mansion (with some ice patches we weren’t expecting). I like my old barber, but I’m not the kind of work he wants to do. The new one received me with a welcome mix of warmth and pragmatism.
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.
I’ve never done a solo RPG before. I’m not sure how I found this one, but it looks fun and it’ll be an excuse to do some writing that isn’t a series of Slack messages pestering people about software licenses.
I’ll be the first to admit that, as an editor, I was a relative dirtbag. I mean, I cared about what I was editing. I shared what little I knew about writing from writers who wanted to learn from me, but my core diagnostic tool came down to clarity. Most of my feedback over the years came down to “I think you painted yourself into a corner here. Either you aren’t sure of yourself and you’re trying to talk your way out of it, or you just got in a hurry. How does this work, instead?”
What else besides that?
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.
Short Sands Beach (Oswalt West)
Manzanita
Cannon Beach on the way to Manzanita
Cannon Beach on the way to Manzanita
I’m up to 28 active days on Gemini at work in the past 28 days, so ✅ for me on that. That is up from 8 active days the prior 28-day period, not because I wasn’t “using AI,” but because I didn’t care to use Gemini. Anyhow, I set out on a concerted effort to figure out Gemini in particular, and that led to me learning a lot more about Google Workspace in general.
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.
The place we got for the coast this weekend looked familiar. Had to go back to 2008 to figure it out.
Holy cow. My RPG info cup runneth over.
Giving Shadowdark a serious look. Looks light and simplified but thoughtful.
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?
I’ve been messing around with the idea of how to keep things I am thinking somewhere that is both easy to maintain and also not really in need of a lot of process to begin with. I read much of a book about Zettelkasten and decided a slip box is not something I need, but I liked a few ideas:
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.
I’m looking at Dragonbane for some RPG-curious people, but also because it seems to have flexibility for co-op and solo. Anything that should cause me to not look at that?
Tomo Ramen
downtown
I’ve been using my iPad Pro 13 as a full-time laptop replacement for about two months now, replacing a 15" MacBook Air. I think it has been a success, but in qualified ways:
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.
No, a wild-eyed denunciation of digital zettelkasten apostates is exactly what I need to be reading right now.
The Oregonian decided to jack my price up $5/month using an algorithm, so my subscription will be double what it was two years ago. It’s still under $20/month, and that’s a fair price, but I wish they’d plow some of that into improving their website and maybe losing some of those scummy network ads.
“I’m not trying to judge, Ashley, and this is a blameless family. It’s just that Dad and I have noticed your chore velocity was down quarter-over-quarter, so we’re going to try some new things to help with your estimation.”
floodplain
Jan 4 past
