Dispatches

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.

I’m personally skeptical that LLMs provide enough benefit to outweigh their potential harm, and so I deeply appreciate those who are attempting to make them work without relying on pixie dust.

I’m in the Netherlands currently so I’ve had lots of meetings while fighting jet lag. This week in Daniel: Finished reading How To Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix. It was an excellent novel about generational trauma, grief, and evil puppets.

This week in Daniel was quite busy: Lots of work stuff to do, so that kept me running. Setup a Github Action workflow to automatically deploy this site whenever I push a change, and then to also do automated deployments every 15 minutes for any content that I had scheduled in advance by using a future date.

I’m still alive! I’ve recovered from COVID, and back in the saddle. This week in Daniel: Did a bunch of catching up on work stuff since I was out sick most of last week.

This week in Daniel: I got COVID. It sucks. Really hard. That’s it.

This week in Daniel: After a rough first week of jetlag, finally caught up on sleep. Visited Escher in the Palace, a museum dedicated to the work of M.C. Escher, which resides in the former winter palace of Queen Emma of the Netherlands.

I’m a big fan of using direnv to set project-specific env variables. And at one point I was using it to automatically activate my poetry virtualenv whenever I entered the directory per this function.

While looking at my Github news feed today, I spotted an app via one of Jeff Triplett’s stars. The app is Sloth by Sveinbjorn Thordarson, and it provides a GUI frontend for lsof that can quickly show you which processes are interacting with various files, directories, IP sockets, or Unix sockets.

Hi there. It’s been a while. I had a whirlwind of activity over the last few weeks, both on the work and podcasting front, and quite frankly getting around to writing up these update posts was beyond my available bandwidth.