Essays
Live Life Without Regret
From around the web….
A 450-Year History of Blogging
Brennan Kenneth Brown https://brennan.day/a-450-year-history-of-blogging/
“In his 1574 A Regiment for Sea, William Bourne describes how, with a line tied to it, a log was thrown over the side of the ship, and the length of line was measured “while someone turned a minute sand glass” or in some cases “spoke some number of woordes [sic]” in order to measure the ship’s speed.[2] (The length was eventually counted by literal knots tied in the line at regular intervals; thus, our equally iconic term “knots.”) Recordings of the log-derived information, eventually replaced by the “chip log,” a weighted wooden quadrant, were entered into what would come to be called the “log board.”
— Janet Sorenson, “Logging-In: The Ship’s Log as Medium””
Winning The Trade Deadline Doesn't Matter
Trades at the Major League Baseball deadline do not make champions, championship teams are built during the off season and through development of young players. Good teams that need one or two players at the deadline and get them can make themselves a great team.
By most measures, the Chicago Cubs became a better team at this year’s deadline by getting the players they needed. The problem is, the Cubs needed too many players at the deadline, and didn’t make their lineup more reliable.
A Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
Nikhil Suresh https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
“Unfortunately, we live in a dark timeline. All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in22 We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there’s nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway., but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. Even if you grant that AI tooling accelerates specific workloads, the method and scale of the current investments is senseless. Frequently the failure is not related to AI itself, but rather that companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively, and as I have remarked previously, AI projects are subject to all the failure modes of normal projects plus you can get everything right and then still fail because of the method’s novelty. Very few companies are so good at shipping software that they can afford the extra risk profile.”
Only You Can Change You
Roadtripping In A Hyundai Tuscon
Looking In The Mirror
A Method For Quoteblogs
Among the many RSS feeds that I subscribe to there are a few that contain posts that share other people’s writing. I find the posts valuable because they provide me links to articles to read that I may not otherwise find and tend to be thoughtfully curated.
I want to provide my own “quoteblog” posts and landed on a method for creating them using the knowledge management app I’ve been developing for myself with Claude.
My reading flow starts by reviewing articles collected and presented by Feedland and River5 using RSS. I click articles with interesting titles and then send them to Readwise Reader using an extension, later I read them and highlight portions of the article that I like. Copies of the article highlights are downloaded to Obsidian and accessible to Readwise, which sends me random highlights of articles I read in daily emails.
The dashboard of my PKM app has a widget that is a list of the recent articles with highlights. Claude wrote the code to use the Readwise API to access the recent articles and display them in the widget. The article titles in the widget are links to the article highlights in Readwise. The articles roll off the widget over time but I can pin them to access them later via a Pinned Highlights page.
My quoteblog posts originate from the highlights I store in Readwise. Readwise provides the ability to tag articles, or what it calls documents, and tag individual highlights. I give the source article of the quotes a “blog-post” tag and the highlights to share a “quote” tag in Readwise. Claude then wrote the code that reviews the articles that I pinned looking for ones with a “blog-post” document tag and when it finds one, it puts thee article title, author, and source URL in a markdown file. Highlights that have a “quote” tag are then added to the markdown file.
For now I am not automating the publishing of the quoteblog post to this site. For now I am going to manually create my blog post in Obsidian, copy and paste the source of the quoteblog created from my highlights, and then do some light editing before publishing. The first of my quoteblog posts is Independent Food For Thought.
Independent Food For Thought
Two articles I think are worth reading on this, the 250th birthday of the United States because they describe how far we have come, yet still the same, while fighting against what we tell ourselves is the norm of civilization.
America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Report Says About Who We Are
Derek Thompson https://www.derekthompson.org/p/america-1926-an-absurdly-deep-dive
“In other ways, the America of 1926 was another world—practically another planet. Roughly half of the U.S. still counted as rural, and tens of millions of Americans had no indoor plumbing or electricity. Thick smoke from oil lamps filled their homes, and they emptied their bladders and bowels in old-fashioned chamber pots. Women had only voted in two presidential elections. Millions of children still worked for pay. Of the nation’s 27 million households, only 11 million had a phonograph, to listen to music, or a car. The first movie with sound would not come out for another year.”
Democracy Is Bullshit
David Pinsof https://www.everythingisbullshit.blog/p/democracy-is-bullshit
“So what is democracy? It is a key that perfectly fits the lock of group mode. It is a system that brandishes a fearsome weapon before our eyes—the coercive power of jails and cops and militaries—and tells us we cannot control it, and cannot defend ourselves from it, unless we band together into huge, lumbering groups. It is a system that pries power away from the hands of individuals and tosses it to mobs, cliques, unions, religions, interest groups, ethnic groups, and grotesque agglomerations of all the above called ‘political parties.’ It is a system defined by the crushing hopelessness of individual toil and the awesome power of collective synchrony.”
People are wonderful. I love individuals. I hate groups of people. I hate a group of people with a ‘common purpose’. ‘Cause pretty soon they have little hats. And armbands. And fight songs. And a list of people they’re going to visit at 3am. -George Carlin
“The purpose of a group is to increase the power, status, and resources of the humans inside it relative to the humans outside it. How do we know this is true? Because over evolutionary time, the groups that reliably fulfilled this purpose became our ancestors.”
“Monarchy is rule by monarchs. Oligarchy is rule by oligarchs. Democracy might seem like it’s rule by the ‘demos’—by the people—but it’s not. Or at least, not by individual people. Democracy is, instead, rule by tribes. Yes, it’s time to switch from ‘groups’ to the more pejorative ’tribes.’ The most cohesive, well-organized, well-funded tribes, bound into supertribes called ‘parties,’ are the ones who rule. It’s a tribeocracy. And given the well-documented ethical and intellectual downsides of tribalism, that is a very bad thing. It’s hard to think of a worse way to run a society than to systematically take power away from wonderful individuals and wise crowds so we can give it to mean, dumb, incoherent, sanctimonious tribes.”
“But there is a worse way to run a society, called autocracy, which leaves us with an important question: Why are democracies nicer places to live than autocracies? The main reason is that democracies are multitribal while autocracies are unitribal.”
A Look To The Future With AI In It
Read a really good essay titled After AI Takes Everything written by a software engineer based in Singapore who goes by Airing. The link I am providing is to a copy of the essay I have in Readwise that includes my highlights. If you work in IT or know someone who does that is worried about what AI is doing to their future I recommend that you read the essay.
A part of the essay I find most relatable is the following:
The threat to the job, the cultivation of the ability, the survival of subjecthood — all of these anxieties collapse, when gathered, into the same thing: we are afraid of losing our sense of value. Afraid that one day we will wake up and find we are no longer useful to this world. Being laid off is just the outer shell of that fear. The core is older: a person’s deepest fear has never been having no job. It is the suspicion that one is no longer worthy.
What will enable one to survive the AI revolution is their own sense of value as a human being. Consequently, I think what employees need to be sensitive to is the degree to which employers actually value them. If an employer treats their employees as a cog or as nothing more than a cost that employer will be eager to replace you no matter what. I would find another job. In fact, this is the primary reason why I decided to retire as what remains left of my life is too precious to be un-valued.
Oh, and by the way, I think this sense of value as a human beings is the core of Pope Leo’s encyclical.
Android 17
Google has released Android 17, and I just initiated the process to download and install it on my Pixel 10. 9to5Google has a video overview of all the changes, which are mostly cosmetic. For the last several years the Android version upgrades have not included significant functionality additions, rather they include UI and general performance improvements. Functional additions to Android come in the Quarterly Point Releases (QPR) and we expect QPR1 to Android 17 in the fall, timed with the release of the Pixel 11.
Also included in the Android 17 download is the June 2026 Pixel Drop that adds features to Pixel phones. Most useful to me is App Bubbles, which provide users the ability to add applications to the floating “bubble” that appears on top of all screens and apps running on the phone. We previously had this ability for text messaging conversations and I think of it as a multitasking feature that enables me to quickly switch to a task that I have pinned to the display.
One use that I have for app bubbles is for quick access to RadarScope while there are storms in my area to quickly see the current weather radar. To “pin” an app to the bubble tap and hold the app’s icon and tap Bubble at the bottom of the context menu. Note that this feature does not appear to work for all apps, particularly ones that have custom context menus. For example, tap and hold the Gmail icon and you do not see a Bubble option instead you see options to compose new email or open an Gmail account.
Wear OS 7 is also coming for the Pixel Watch and as I am less enthused about that release I am not go to force it to be installed on my watch.