evening walk
Out and about
#
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.
Downtown, mostly
YOB, Revolution Hall
YOB and burritos
A few quick notes on my “start from a blank page and contribute the first 30 percent” theory of ideating with AI. I don’t do the LinkedIn discourse much, and definitely not on LinkedIn, but I’m sorta fighting a two-front war of subposting someone and also trying to be the change I want to see.
VoiceNotes so far
#I’ve been using VoiceNotes for a few days. It’s an AI note taker you can use for meetings or as a memory companion. I’ve got it wired into my iPhone’s action button, and running on my desktop machine.
Things I’ve tried with it:
- Dictating problems I’m trying to solve and letting it summarize. Its voice recognition is better than what I get with Gemini Pro at work.
- Dropping quick reminders as a capture inbox.
- Recording vendor demos.
- Developing action plans/next steps on some routine business stuff.
I have mixed feelings about it.
It does a good job capturing dictation. It does a good job extracting todos, tasks, and next actions from a given note.
I imagine, over time, with a corpus larger than the four or five dozen notes I’ve created this week, the “Ask AI” feature, where you can query your collection for insights, would get more useful. As it is, it’s still in that state of any new corpus where there’s not a lot of insight to glean.
That means I’m more interested in what it can do in terms of structured output, and that is just okay. It has a bunch of canned formats it can apply to a given note, but no way to build one (you can do a one-off prompt with a given note, but I don’t think you can save it). And its “todo list” output, oddly, is an ordered list.
My other use case, besides pulling actions out of a note, is getting a rundown of the day’s notes and tasks. It can’t deal with any prompt along those lines: It summarizes the last note you took. If you specify the date you want a summary for, it picks notes from other days. It does have a way to get that summary from a set of notes, but that means opening up a picker and clicking each note you want in the summary. Fussy.
It also has an integration picture: Todoist, Notion, Zapier, webhooks, and Readwise. The Todoist integration (I tried it with a free account) is primitive, and creates more work. Webhooks and Zapier seem promising.
I heard someone recently say that with AI assistants, dudes want Jarvis.
I guess maybe I sort of do want Jarvis, just for what seems like a trivial use case: “Tell me what I told you today at a high level, and then with any specific tasks, etc. I need to capture.” VoiceNotes can do that, but not without some friction. And given the friction, why not just “Hey, Siri, remind me to do this thing I have to do?”
I really wish Apple would get its act together with Apple Intelligence: All the pieces are there, but the glue isn’t. You should be able to just capture voice memos with the native tool all day long and have a variety of outputs via Notes, Reminders, etc. As it is, you’re stuck recording things, then explicitly generating a transcript, then explicitly pasting it into a Note, then asking Apple Intelligence to do stuff it sometimes manages and sometimes mysteriously fails at.
This “empty your mental pockets into a little valet tray at the end of the day” thing is something I’ve wanted for a while. When I was first learning Ruby I wrote a thing called “panopticon” that just traveled things like Pinboard, Evernote, the Safari history sqlite db, NetNewsWire’s read/unread AppleScript API, my starred inbox, etc. and dumped out a report into Evernote that let me see what I’d captured or looked at on a given day. I’d like an assistant that did something like that.
Well, the weather will keep it indoors for a bit but I’ve fully kitted up the X half: Soft shutter button, new Peak Design rope leash, metal lens hood, and grip. It has been a nice palate cleanser: Well, this is what I captured, so I guess that’s the picture I’ve got. Still haven’t tried film mode.
The “Apple locked my account over a sus gift card” guy was made whole, so that’s good.
Also, some guy from Singapore who helped him said, “only buy gift cards from Apple,” which registers with me as “just don’t buy Apple gift cards.”
Love Nuphy. I ordered an Air75v3 as soon as I knew they existed, and broke with tradition by going with the super quiet Blush switches instead of my usual Browns. I think the mechanical keeb people in a past Slack would probably turn their noses up, but this is a nicely built piece of normie kit.
One little Highlander joke and these tankie shitbirds downvote me into a crater. Dicks.
I just read there’ll be a Pluribus season two and I feel uneasy. And my god, people, saying Carol isn’t curious isn’t a comment on, like, her sleuthing for a cure or whatever. Yes, she’s “curious” in that sense. No, she is not at all curious in another.
I’m going to experiment with VoiceNotes for a month. I wanted to see if I could cobble something similar together with Apple Voice Memos, Notes, and Apple Intelligence, but it doesn’t look like it’s there yet. I hooked it up to my action button today.
