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
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
