Glad to see the (former) leader of an NGO coming around to the idea that privatizing social services delivery is wasteful and inefficient, but NGO leaders will not carry this thought all the way through.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
— Upton Sinclair
on the way to Bruno’s
Well, let’s see what it does. #meshtastic
High on Fire and King Woman
High on Fire pre-game. Someone in the kitchen fired up the Sleep. 🤘
springwater
springwater
I have this newish Mac Mini and hadn’t had a reason to get Homebrew on it until this afternoon. I didn’t bother saving the configs on my old Studio so it was sorta 🤞 when I ran chezmoi this afternoon. It just worked & all my stuff was on the machine in under 30 seconds.
I just set up the double-tap accessibility gesture on my Ultra (it’s a first-gen so it doesn’t get the gesture out of the box). It makes life with a mechanical keyboard so much better. Anything you can approve by double-pressing on the watch you can approve by double-tapping your thumb/forefinger.
I ended up losing my afternoon to some indifferent analysis from a hostile party at some other company. I’m usually the one doing that kind of hostile analysis, so I know bad work when I see it. The process of discrediting their work helped crystallize what constitutes good work.
So I took the opportunity to write a custom gem for Gemini that ingests the kind of reporting I have to do once or twice a quarter and does the kind of analysis I end up doing each time. That’s how to automate, right? Just after being badly offended by someone else’s incompetence, and high on your own expertise, you get it all out into code. Or after being badly burned by your own incompetence, and realizing you need to take a deep breath and describe what to do step-by-step.
Anyhow, we’re supposed to get gud at this stuff, and I’m dealing with the novel sensation of having done a deep dive into something before being told I should, so I’m casting about for problems to solve, and trying to contort myself into the approved tool.
On the one hand, I completely understand the appeal of the sort of magical oracle approach a chat interface provides, where you feed it a spreadsheet and tell it what to do, and it chats its analysis back at you. But on the back-end, to keep it from hallucinating, it has to write a Python script each time to read the input, and it’s not really doing anything besides some counting. The Gem layers on some interpretation, but I think you could just as easily get a table of output saying “These are the two broad percentages you care about, and this is a list of things you should investigate further.” That seems more deterministic and analyzable. When I was experimenting a lot with AI-driven tool-building, that was my preferred approach. I’m not super florid when presenting the kind of reporting I was working on today, so I felt a little resentment having to build into the prompt some “… and please don’t make a whole thing out of your findings.”
The custom gem approach came with a few of its own issues: Sometimes it crashes in the middle of the analysis. Just loses its mind and freezes. And before I explicitly told it had to write scripts to do the counting, it would decide that it knew how many kinds of a certain record there were, and it would state that number with a sort of thought-terminating authoritativeness. For something that needs to pick those values out of JSON, that’s sort of a drag.
So there’s the option to do a custom gem and create a magical oracle that tries to fuzz your analytical radar because it takes this know-it-all clankersplaining tone, or there’s the option to just code something up that’s just going to do the analysis and spit out a table. One feels sort of mysterious and murky and cool, but periodically decides it has no context window left to give; the other is introspectable even if it’s terse. Given a decent vibecoding platform, it’s way faster than managing the vagaries of stating and restating what you’re after, and still getting random shit back sometimes.
Which is not to say Gemini is dead to me, because it’s much faster at cranking out the kind of script I need to run: I’m an indifferent coder at best. I just have to think about how to teach this stuff to my team, among whom I am more like a creature from a mysterious and ancient computing culture than a friendly guide who will take them over the rainbow bridge to The Singularity.
So I signed up for some courses. I don’t have a knowledge or skill problem so much as I have a pedagogical technique problem, so I’m gonna sit still and allow myself to be trained, the better to train.
Feral Cat Cove
some old GRIIIX shots
evening walk
To the Grotto
Al on the 12
Too wet for the X half today so trying out Lux on the phone.
I like the Gemini summarizer in YouTube so much. “Creator”-driven video privileges everyone else’s revenue streams over my time, for “content” that could’ve been three paragraphs on some blog. I don’t understand how it is surviving as a feature.
I got turned on to Schmidt refills and I’m using them with a Studio Neat Mark I and a Schmidt reference design pen. Rollerballs are different from my traditional Pilot G2s. I wish I’d switched a long time ago.
Part of my day right now involves time-blocking on a legal pad. I had been doing this with an app, but it was too clicky and fussy. A nice pen and pad at my desk over coffee is a much nicer experience to start the day.
I realized this week that I’ve been gauging my state of centeredness and focus on my handwriting:
If the first few lines of my time block sheet are more cursive than block, with a bunch of unclosed characters, it’s a sign I should stop, put the pen down, take a few deep breaths, and reapproach. If I’m still being a little messy, it’s helpful to grab a note card or piece of scrap paper and just write arbitrary stuff until my writing becomes more block-like, and I’m closing all the characters. Then I can turn back to the task, which is giving the day ahead some thought, and considering my priorities.
Cheaper than Adderall and it seems to make my blood pressure go down.
I reupped Apple News+ because it was cheaper in my bundle with it than without. I wish it were better in so many ways, but I seem to have the mental bandwidth to tolerate free access to things like The Atlantic, which is a positive mental health indicator. I won’t read Slate even for free, though.
Deena Weinstein’s “Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology” talked about metal inverting rock’s progressive preoccupation with love to one with with evil. I keep coming back to pictures from the weekend that caught both the “horns” of any metal show, and the “heart” of YOB, with its particular path out of metal’s existential quandaries.
Pluribus update: Apple News is exposing me to Pluribus recappers, and it’s jarring: The show’s way better than plot-driven recaps are going to capture. I’m way less interested in “will Carol solve the mystery” than I am “will Carol make a shift?”
This article is a Rosetta stone. I wish Peacock were better communicators, and county politics weren’t so screwed up and fixated on privatization.
The thought of enabling ChatGPT’s “cynical” mode is nauseating. We’re surrounded by reflexive thought-terminating cliches. They’re already cheaply produced. Anyone can do that.
“You are a reflexive contrarian. You are always in search of your next flex ….”
Fuck that.
The early Kindles had good page-turning buttons. I moved to a Kobo partially because it had buttons (and partially because “not Amazon”) but the chiclet style is pretty bad. I’d rather just not have buttons. Screen taps are fine. Touch e-ink is responsive enough these days.