10 KiB
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| Dispatch #22 (December 2024) | 2024-11-25T10:44:53-05:00 | false |
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Thanksgiving in NY
Thanksgiving. No commercialism or materialism. No overt religiosity. No stress about getting the right presents. No pressure to find a cool party like with Halloween. The weather of late fall, the natural rhythms of harvest and feast before the winter, the pleasure of a holiday devoted to the concept of being grateful. The football, the family, the food. The after-meal nap. The wonderfully laidback nature of the whole affair. My favorite holiday.
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Lost notebook
- DF article
- Airtag + holder
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Studio updates
- Effects: Roland SP-404
- Beat: Novation Circuit Tracks
- Chords: Sequential Prophet Rev2
- Melody: Novation Bass Station II
- Run the two synths into the Circuit, and then run that into the Roland for effects
- Bass Station II much more approachable
- Next up: mixer + midi interface + build a workstation
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Rucking
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Neuse River Trail -- gorgeous, no traffic lights
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House projects
- Broom hooks
- Car shelf storage
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Theme: small, steady improvements bring deep satisfaction
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- Limit my self to one record a month
- First up, J Dilla's Donuts
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"daddy has five pilanos"
This Month
- Adventure: celebrating THREE YEARS of Nev; Greensboro for Christmas; Mexico to ring in the new year and celebrate our five-years anniversary
- Project:
- Skill:
Reading & Listening
- Fiction: Graveyard of Demons, Larry Correia
- Non-fiction: Title, Author
- Music: Donuts, J Dilla
Links
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Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business
Large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT and Claude.ai are whizzy and cool. A lot of people think that they are going to be The Future. Maybe they are — but that doesn't mean that building them is going to be a profitable business.
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I could go on about all of these things, but I won’t. Instead I will say that I am so incredibly proud of Ella. I am lucky to be the dad of such a smart, creative, hilarious, curious, and yes obnoxious girl. I hope this is but one of many many many many many many creations that leave her head and make their way out into the world. I love you so much, Ella.
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Stinky Gifts From Your Idea Kitty
Your mind will never improve at finding good ideas; that cat will always deliver 90% crap. What changes is you. You somehow teach yourself to sort and salvage. You learn to forgive yourself faster, to bury the dead, and to pay proper respect to Nature's harsh whims. You name this new feeling "intuition" and "taste" and sometimes "luck".
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Signls (pronounced signals) is a non-linear, generative MIDI sequencer designed for music composition and live performances, all within the terminal. It allows you to create complex, evolving musical patterns using a grid-based approach. You can place nodes on the grid, and these nodes can emit signals, relay them, or trigger MIDI notes. There are 9 different types of nodes to explore, each with its own unique behavior.
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Is there really a way to push back on the complexity of the web?
I don’t think everything should be a React app! I want more things to be like Flickr used to be, and GitHub used to be. But at the same time, I don’t see an obvious way out of the current dynamics. Yelling is popular but the track record isn’t very good. Being quietly annoyed about the web’s descent into complexity, my preferred approach, doesn’t work very well either.
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A friend calls this turtling. Pulling your head inside your shell and hiding. It’s quite comfortable here.
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Getting Stuff Done By Not Being Mean to Yourself
Yesterday, I finally realized that this method would never, ever work. I was shocked. But it never, ever has. I’ve been after myself on this score for, what, like ten years? Had it ever worked once in that time, I asked myself. No! I said immediately.
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MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia
Today marks two years since I first set up an e-ink display in my mom’s apartment to help her live on her own with amnesia. The display has worked extremely well during those two years, so I’m sharing the basic set-up in case others find it useful for similar situations.
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Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right.
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It's the “1998” of the AI Revolution. So Why Can I Safely Ignore It?
I don’t say all of this to revel in my curmudgeonly Luddism. I say it because I’m living proof that you can be a fulfilled, modern, very online, technical expert & creator and completely sit out this hype cycle. Seriously. You can just not use any of these generative AI tools.
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I think this - be it romanticized fantasy or actual historical fact - is what a lot of us programmers, deep down, desire from our professional life. Sadly, we're not celebrated geniuses working at the research department of a telecomms monopoly during the rise of an empire. We're instead doing yet another customer checkout form for a mid-sized e-commerce site, helplessly watching our profession slowly, as Marx put it, "sink into the proletariat". Meanwhile, we secretly feed the little part of us...
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Hobby is capitalism’s word. It’s a crumb from capitalism’s table. Capitalism is happy that you have a hobby, especially if it can sell you HO-scale train sets to complete it, but that hobby can never be taken as seriously as what capitalism might need from you. (Oh, and that thing capitalism might need from you? Well, design is your passion, so they don’t really need to pay you adequately for that, do they?)