It’s like breadcrums. Or bookmarks. But raw-er. These are a quick capture of my journey through the web. I often think of things from weeks ago that I want to refer to. And I’ve found that I haven’t kept the tab open. So it’s impossible.
The practice:
The points are to capture it, but include some minimal friction so that I actually stop and notice what I am doing here. Describe it in my own words so that I might remember it better later. And then I’m free to close the tabs, with hopefully somewhat less risk. I hope.
Another thing to note, I may filter out the things that I am already familiar with. For example, if it’s something that I think I would be able to find on vague memories alone, I may fool myself into thinking that I don’t need to do this stuff. I am probably mistaken, but nonetheless I persist.
Later I plan to add daily posts of yesterday’s crumbs and an RSS feed. In the mean time cmd/ctrl-f is the way. Below is the last 100 days. For all of the years, see 2024. That’s it, just this year so far.
description: Expensive chocolate bars.
comments:
The Nicaragua one is good.
I’m looking forward to trying some others.
tags: chocolate
description: A cake recipe.
description: Still being updated, even just now.
description: It’s lenses (macro, microscope, telephoto), filters, grips and stuff.
description: I’m just referring to the self driving car part here.
tags: self-driving cars, norms, social, predictability
description: Applications of not inconveniencing other people.
description: Where to find this artist’s art
description: My aunt’s recordings on LibriVox
description: It’s my decay.
comments:
description: Ten things to make forward progress.
comments:
I’ll rewrite them in my own words:
1) Remain skeptical, always.
2) Face the evidence with eyes staunchly opened wide.
3) It is too easy too quash thought, vigorously avoid doing that.
4) It is far better to argue rationally with opposing views that to shut them down with authority.
5) It is always possible to find a different authority; authority is a dime a dozen.
6) Power is not an effective way to suppress opions, the power is then bound up in suprressing opinions.
7) All opinions were once rare, strange, or weird; don’t worry about it.
8) Relish active argument, it’s more interesting than silent agreement.
9) Be rigorous about the truth, it’s far easier than the alternative.
10) Ignorance is not actually bliss.
see also 10 commandments for living virtuously.
description: Some basic things to think about and possibly orient towards.
tags: democracy, Matthew Yglesias, manifesto, life lessons
description: It’s another prediction market
tags: prediction markets
description: The world sucks but we don’t tell the future generations that right away.
tags: poetry
description: An article that suggests extending prediction markets beyond just elections.
comments:
Prediction markets are a source of information that may or may not represent some truth about the state of the world including the future state.
Beware Campbell’s law or maybe Goodhart’s law.
Didn’t they used to be for more than just elections? I remember the 2000s. Maybe there is some critical mass necessary. I don’t recommend jumping to this conclusion.
tags: Vitalik Buterin, info finance, prediction markets, Campell’s law, Goodhart’s law
description: Starch and cream cheese are secret ingredients?
description: Negotiation anecdote and article recommendation.
description: Molly White’s recommended follows.
tags: blogroll, Molly White
description: A national wakeup call.
tags: Nixon, Hunter S. Thompson
description: 1970s residential towers in the Bronx.
comments:
Dystopia/cyberpunk vibes.
See also Waterside Plaza for more
tags: architecture, dystopia, tower blocks, cyberpunk
description: First part is about a goverment radio comedy, like a police procedural but bureaucracy.
comments:
tags: writing, bureaucracy
quotes:
“‘Action forms’ aren’t explained so I assume this is a well-understood term of art, like saying ‘spreadsheet’ or ‘email’.”
“high-frequency bureaucracy”
description: Not exactly a prediction market, it’s forecasting aggregation?
tags: prediction markets, forecasting
description: An article about what’s next, whether that’s more tribalism or improving the other mechanisms of democracy including real discourse.
description: Prediction Markets for Trump Presidency
description: Photographer
tags: photographers
description: They make the Anjunadeep house music.
comments:
See also their Anjunadeep YouTube Channel.
description: They make the Pop Ambient releases.
description: About picking the right words.
tags: writing, translating, Homer, The Odyssey, Emily Wilson
description: Some concrete usages of currently available tools.
description: A take on the state of current internet interactions and or the socials.
comments:
Coherently expresses many things that I have been noticing over the years.
Makes predictions. Several are redundant, a couple are obvious but they are concrete. None of them really surprise. Some anti-predictions would be helpful here too.
tags: internet, ai, social media
quotes:
description: public domain drop of art from the met
tags: art, public domain
description: Excellent pastries in and around Denver.
description: Another great bookstore in Boulder. Smaller size, I think, unless I missed something. But great beautiful books. New books. At the west end of the Pearl Street Mall.
comments:
description: Mostly new books but some used books. On the Pearl Street Mall, downtown.
comments:
Beautiful books, this shop is sensational.
Also some great chocolate bars to pickup too. Pricey.
I bought a few books here.
description: Somewhat idiosyncratic bookstore away from downtown.
description: I’m just remarking on the bit about why actually performing the act is important to humans.
comments:
1: For humans, to perform the act of demonstrating affection and support takes time and thinking. It takes awareness of the other’s needs and desires, and forming the right words and doing the right acts. It’s costly to put in that time and effort. So that is the purpose of doing it. It’s a demonstration that you value the other person enough to take the time and put in the effort which is not avoidable. If you make a substitution by have an algorithm do those things, it’s kind of cheating, or shortcutting anyway, and not a real demonstration of how much you value it. The receiver needs to be able to distinguish between the truth of the information you are conveying vs not, so skipping the performance of truth is a clear signal. Similarly it cuts both ways; if you perform your truth and the intended shrugs, well, now you know. Move on.
2: Yikes. We’re in for a ride, aren’t we? But then again, what exactly are we 1000x’ing the production of? Mined ore, widget manufacturing, stock trades? I assume it all maps onto money at some point. What of flourishing human life, how much money is that?
tags: signaling, performance, information, truth
quotes:
“1: A remarkably large amount of life and media is like that, we need something to have definitely performatively happened in order to move on, but all we really want most of the time is the short summary of it.”
“2: Yes, horses were plowing fields 200 years later. Do you now want to be the metaphorical horses in the future? Do you think this next transition could possibly last 200 years, even if it went painfully slowly? Even the similarly slow version now, if it happened, without the feedback loops AI enables, would be more like 20 years at most, time moves a lot faster now. The idea that things in past centuries took decades or centuries, so they will again now, seems quite foolish to me even for non-AI technologies.”
description: It’s Emily Wilson’s substack. She translated The Odyssey a few years ago.
comments:
I recently found a used copy of her translation of The Odyssey, and it feels weird to say this, but I’m super excited about it. Moreso than I thought I would be before picking it up.
This edition compares translations, which is super intereting.
tags: The Odyssey, Emily Wilson, Homer
description: Talking about some of the features of windows.
tags: design, architecture, home
description: Forcing all pegs through the money hole could be why America has so much of it.
tags: money, America, america is a death cult
description: It’s a theory of how a business subsidizes different products on offer.
description: Scifi reading recommendations in the comments.
comments:
Added a couple to my to read list: Roadside Picnic, about stalking the zone, and Permutation City about the mathematical universe.
another source: SF masterworks list
Also added some more Vinge. And Infinite Detail.
I had better get reading.
tags: reading, science fiction
description: Online dictionary of sorts.
comments:
See also wiktionary obsolete word senses
See also A dictionary of archaic words, by Halliwell, which is a 1989 reprint of an 1850 book.
tags: dictionary
description: An editor.
tags: editors
description: Browser support database.
comments:
As usual, iOS is lagging in affordances for things that it does support such as links to highlighted text. I could make the bookmarklet but it’s annoying to navigate to them. So I made a shortcut which is cool I guess.
A random link to demonstrate.
tags: web development, tools
description: What if you could have your own home bioreactor?
tags: oblique strategies
description: Step through yt vids in small increments.
description: a writing exercise
description: what it says.
comments:
It’s in the profile.
description: Mexican soup
description: Notes from this book.
description: Notes from making a life one’s own, for the last 18 years.
comments:
Several of these resonated. Revisit this.
Maybe I should do an annual life lesson.
tags: life lessons, make it work for you
quotes:
“Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality.”
“The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living…”
description: It’s nonstop botany talk in diverse locales.
description: The first segment is about our new wide bandwidth planet scale communications paradigm, and BlueSky in particular.
tags: internet, communication, many to many
quotes:
“Though, I do find Bluesky grating for the same reason I find Portland, Oregon, kind of grating. A sort of ragged tweeness that permeates the whole place and makes it feel like a millennial retirement home.”
“We are experiencing a shift in communication as existential as climate change with ripple effects just as varied and unpredictable.”
description: Questionable taste in Iowa.
description: It’s search, but with AI. 🤮?
description: A Sumerian God.
comments:
Similar to Herakles.
In my modernity, I always keep forgetting how intertwined, borrowed, co-evolved, and derivative all these human stories are. What’s popular is copied and tweaked or randomly mutated and may become more popular still.
description: Annual field recording at the same location. In Iceland.
description: Bridge in the Alps.
comments:
Preeeettttyy
This bridge focused wiki is also cool.
description: A list of smol search engines, not based on the biggies.
description: Looking closely at the text in the apple store, text which you are not actually meant to examine.
quotes:
“Apple profits off of the complete and utter obfuscation of emptiness”
“I had been airlifted into a surreal parallel universe”
description: A forum. About making pizza.
description: It is a list of active and good forums. A long list.
comments:
A little hard to determine which forum is right for me.
Except for pizza, and bread.
description: Wandering Berlin today, about high trust societies.
comments:
tags: high trust society, safety net, Berlin, Germany, america is a death cult
description: Grab bag of random things people say and Zvi’s reactions and analysis. He does this every month or so. He’s kinda rationalist about it.
description: Where unicorns start and end.
tags: unicorn startups
description: Something different and often useful on the fifth of every month.
description: NYC water source repair and upgrade this winter.
tags: infrastructure, tunnels, led rope lighting
description: web version of the Oblique Strategies deck
tags: oblique strategies, art, randomness
description: Streeetched tunes
description: A looong list of reading options.
description: Shadow library.
description: Photos of isolated houses in Italy.
tags: photographers
description: Online store, based in Brooklyn, NY.
description: A few illustrator sometimes sell original and prints here.
description: What functions does a primary computing device provide?
description: Apple/Adobe ProRAW format and it’s relevance and impact in iOS photos
tags: Apple, iPhone, photography, iphonography
description: How to get more photo like photos out of the iPhone 16
tags: iPhone, photography, iphonography
description: Examples of computing problems, but irl.
comments:
There are some good exercises for the reader here.
Goodhart’s law: when the measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
tags: exercises, computer science, irl
quotes:
“The strong version of Goodhart’s law: as we become too efficient, the thing we care about grows worse.”
“As an exercise for the reader, you can think about how the strong version of Goodhart’s law would apply to other efficiencies, like the ones in this list: personalized medicine, reducing slack in supply chains, raising livestock, etc.”
description: Photobooks and Artbooks store.
description: ancient ish history blogger
comments:
Maybe too much niche for my interest level, but certainly interesting enough to keep a link around.
Copious references, citations, and pictures of sources.
description: Commentary on how the top social platforms are just absolutely have an insatiable appetite for your attention and time.
tags: social media, appetites, attention economy
description: Onigiri tips
comments:
See also Just One Cookbook onigiri recipe.
description: Rendering technique to give objects fur etc.
comments:
I am confused about which parts of these videos are rendered and which parts are video capture. I assume that the park bench scene, stump forest scene, and interior desk scene are real captures and the animations are rendered over/in them. But I’m not 100% sure.
Not a lot of comment traffic, so maybe this is not that exciting. It’s hard to keep track of the state of the art at the moment. There have been quite a few tech demos, but idk what’s really commercial yet. Well this is release on PS5, so I guess that counts.
tags: computer graphics, photorealistic, video games, Bodycam, Unrecord
description: Some recommendations for things to watch in here.
description: Some thoughts from Jonas on how they kept up the habit. It’s a developers blog.
description: from Kottke
comments:
description: Ellington’s instrument was also his band, and he worked to maximize their already existing strengths.
tags: leadership, advice
description: Public domain art at The Getty.
description: A different aspect of Francis Bacon.
description:
tags: corporations, moral, social contract
description: The section on participating more, lower your barriers to engaging.
comments:
I think it’s a good idea, but I don’t think Robin’s recollection of back in the day is accurate for a complete context.
But algorithms, yeah, we shouldn’t forfeit our own agency to them.
tags: connecting, internet, sharing
description: I haven’t read it yet.
description: It’s week notes.
description: If you are dealing with the Mossad, it’s already game over for you.
description: Someone else’s collection of public domain resources.
description: A whole lot of public domain ish media. Variable quality.
description: It’s the comments section on a tongue in cheek commentary about how the software industry has changed but is still the same.
comments:
When everything is bespoke, of course it’s all unique and not very interoperable. I don’t believe it will be this way forever. Think standard fastners, standard bicycle parts, standard electrical grid. The current software standards are at the communication layer: networking (sort of ok), email and some sms messaging. These are the older parts of the stack.
It’s related to other folk programmers posts.
description: The post offers a framing device, a theory, to make sense of American two-party democratic politics in general, and the one or two conceptual steps necessary to do beyond just voting.
tags: politics
description: An update on the Voyager 1.
description: A list of sites to find blogs at.
description: Sonification of the (very old) data from very bad solar storm in the 1850s.
tags: space weather, sound
description: Field recording from an ice cave.
description: It’s a 4 panel comic of an interview with a fish.
comments:
Seems related to our information environment. Not sure that’s intended by the artist.
We swim in a sea of information at all times, we don’t even notice it.
description: JeffTK’s recipes
description: 50 popular and successfull recipes from the last/first 10 years of NYT Cooking
description: Warning, spoilers. It is a recognition and description of the AIs in Gibson’s Neuromancer.
tags: Gibson, Neuromancer
description: Aphrodite presided over politics, business, war, human relationships, and nature.
comments:
description: The author’s thesis is that devs spend wasted effort adapting their apps to Apple’s annual hardware design changes instead of making the app that they really want.
comments:
It does seem like there is a lot of overfitting necessary to make the visual design of things look right on each pocket computer model.
I’m not saying that we should make a fixed standard for pocket computers, but maybe some standard tools for families of devices? Surely design can be made to flow for that and look good and not all samey.
See also the folk programmers post. We don’t know what we’re doing.
tags: folk programmers
description: The M1 is only 4 years old.
description: No. 8 is about the lamposts. They have a decoder ring.
comments:
I wish they had included a picture of the plaque.
This is one of those secret keys of knowledge that if you know to notice, you notice more. Related to On Looking.
tags: NYC, New York, Central Park, On Looking
description: Small bottle opener sharpish edged thingy. Keychain tool.
description: Big skyscraper in the distant background of close urban housing.
description: That minimalist simplified phone screen list look.
comments:
dumbify app 5$
small phone. matte screen protector
SocialFocus Safari plugin 12$/y after 3$.
UnTrap for YT, Safari plugin 12$/y after 3$.
SocialFocus and UnTrap have a 3rd partner app by the same developer: DumbPhone, 3$ one time.
Those three apps come in a bundle for 6$.
description: Type words to select emojis and press enter to get them on the clipboard.
tags: single use websites, emoji
description: How to write blog posts so it’s easier for people to be interested and read them.
description: In this last chapter of the video, Nick discusses the headier bits.
description: The thesis is that organizing people into a managerial machine is more effective than maximizing individual potential. The average is easier to lift a small amount and sum over many people in order to achieve more than it is to have a single or a few outliers pull the average up by their efferts alone.
tags: Francis Bacon
description: Database of geodetic markers.
comments:
If you need a random nearby-ish destination, this is one possible source of those.
Scroll down in the pop up.
Use the passive info page to get a text log about the marker.
description: A geography consultant blogs about his epic roadtrip. And donuts.
description: It’s a recap of Giles’ vacation trip to Tuscany.
comments:
Sounds like a nice trip.
It’s got a good balance of description and highlights without drowning in details.
Unexpected focus on geothermal features.
description: Bing has a cache alternative to the now removed Google Cache.
comments:
Another place to look if the Wayback machine fails to have a copy.
By induction, there are several sources for caches. If one isn’t helping, then try another.
description: What it says on the tin.
comments:
There are only 5 suggestions. Not what it says on the tin. The other 5 will come later in part 2.
Finding the truth (‘truth’) can be kind of like a puzzle game. Don’t play it with people who aren’t fun? But do engage. It’s easier if it’s not a war.
A group of experts is more likely to be right than any individual. Be more skeptical of the individuals than the consensus.
Put percentages to what you believe. This forces you to examine it a little bit more. Maybe to start to articulate why you believe it at that level and seek supporting or better yet contrary evidence.
Our memories are weak. Remember that. Ha.
Prefer sources of information that admit, advertise even, there past errors.
tags: disinformation
description: Best of Home Shopping Network of the internet
description: September 14, 2024 weather forecast for the state.
description: A bit of background on the blaze star. From NASA.
comments:
Basic, but useful. Aimed at lay audiences.
The artists rendering makes it look rather larger than it will actually be.
description: Timelsapse view of a fire behind downtown LA, in the hills, from earlier this week.
description: A ‘chef-y’ vegan mushroom barley soup that looks great.
comments:
This looks really tasty!
Pity about the sound, but it’s ok.
There are some things I would do differently next time. Roast at 400 F. Remember to toast the barley, since he doesn’t put that in the text version. He says to cook the mushrooms in the broth too but I didn’t do that; try it next time.
description: Comment about the book ‘Metaphors we live by’ by Lakoff and Johnson
description: A long article about using Google Docs to publish things.
tags: archiving, publishing, raw notes
description: weekly walk notes
description: It’s a tutorial for using a generator to make a page or post in Jekyll.
description: It’s brown rice that barely tastes like brown rice. Also it cooks faster.
description: It’s Japanese rice.
description: Part two of landscape photobooks.
tags: photography
description: A 30 minute, one pot, meaty spaghetti. The webpage.
description: A 30 minutes, one pot, meaty spaghetti. The video.
description: Some recommended bread making books from bread focused online shop.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
tags: art, space, photography, astrophotography, astronomy
description: Contemporary illustrations and stuff.
tags: art
description: A random online person takes a deep look at what it will take to get to the moon soon. They have doubts.
description: Every scene or frame in the movie is redone in watercolor.
comment: I haven’t watched it yet.
description: All of the categories in the Dewey decimal system.
tags: hacks
description: Blog post on how a Googler is using AI (the chat bots) recently.
comment: I’ve read some of it, I guess I’m starting to grok it.
description: It’s a list of places to buy really good, the best, milk. For making cheese.
description: It’s a quick tutorial for how to speedrun through making something anything.
