The Art Of Not Asking Why

I gave up on The Last Girl Scout 📚. It started out OK, but it quickly became too “cute” for me with “Sugar” here and “Honey” there every time the two transwomen (which is important to mention in the context of the book) talk to each other. I’m not that kind of person and not that kind of a reader.

I’ve had my MacBook Pro docking station for a while, but this morning I was thinking that the term “docking station” is a bit vague. Wikipedia doesn’t help much: “Because a wide range of dockable devices—from mobile phones to wireless mouse—have different connectors, power signaling, and uses, docks are unstandardized and are therefore often designed for a specific type of device.”

This is why I couldn’t find a simple “docking station” for my MacBook Pro when I was looking for one about a year ago. It was (and still is) a long list of USB hubs, aluminum brackets, cables, and other things in between.

I found a MacBook stand in the end, which is a simple metal bracket. It’s a nice sturdy stand that holds the MacBook safe next to my PC. Here it is with the MacBook connected to everything I use daily:

The MacBook is connected to a KVM switch, which allows me to switch to my PC (the monster you see in the background) at any moment with a keyboard shortcut. I use it for gaming (Windows) and networking/private browsing/productivity (Linux). The KVM needs HDMI and USB connections, which you can see on the left. There’s also a small case under the HDMI cable to hold it up straight since it’s heavy and needs support in this position.

The MacBook needs to be connected to power to work with its lid closed (docking mode). I was concerned about the battery at the start, growing up at an age where keeping devices with batteries connected to power at all times is a bad idea and even a fire hazard, but the MagSafe connector (lower right) is a sophisticated chip that knows to turn off the power automatically, designed to work like this. This is why the LED is orange: the battery is never full when it’s like this; it keeps the battery at around 75-80 percent. I’ve had the Mac for a year now, and the battery can still hold a charge of about 10 - 12 hours of work.

The MacBook Pro came with USB Cs, and I had a perfectly working USB-A 4-port “dock” (see?), so I’m using a metal USB-A to USB-C converter. On the other side, I have cables for my Android phone if I need to load files on the Mac, and these days, a Wacom tablet for drawing. The charger for my Apple Watch is connected to the remaining USB-C port. I charge the watch daily whenever I take a shower (the Watch can take water no problem, but showers work as a good reminder to charge it)

I use the Mac remotely about once every two weeks. When I do, I carefully remove all the cables and place the Mac in a plastic shell (with stickers, of course) that goes into my backpack. I usually don’t even bother taking the charger with me, even if I’m going to stay overnight.

The MacBook is the best device I’ve ever had for work/life balance. It can run whatever I need for work (these days, it’s mostly Microsoft Edge) while providing me with classical music (IDAGIO), Signal (to chat with friends), WhatsApp (to chat with family, sometimes work), and all the other necessaries, from email to Photoshop, and of course, Emacs to bridge both worlds.

A few quick updates:

• Insomnia has been hitting hard for the second week in a row. My days have two parts: a small one from around 4 AM to 8 AM, and then after I get to sleep again, 9 AM to until 3 PM or so when I crash and take another 20-minute nap until later.

• There’s a lot going on out there. Some good, some bad, and too much to express, especially in my state right now. I’m aware and am following with interest

• Work’s been taking extra of my time with projects, and that was before the whole CrowdStrike thing. Yeesh. Between that, other hobbies, and trying to shove some exercise when I’m not a zombie, there’s little time left for other things

Hope everyone else’s doing alright, these days are a crazy ride.

This, in a nutshell, was the problem Friday, and it still carries on to next week in some places:

Crowdstrike : its fine u just have to manually visit the PC boot it into safe mode and remove a sys file

US Organization with 50,000 pcs and a completely outsourced IT department in Bangalore : what

— Hammancheez (@Hammancheez) July 19, 2024

Not only hundreds of computers stopped working because of CrowdStrike, to fix those, you had to manually get to the computer.

Not only do you have to get to these hundred computers with an IT department that has 10 or so people on call, but many of these computers are locked away in offices you don’t have access to or belong to people who happen to be in a different state or a different country.

Not only many of these computers were impossible to reach, but there were computers IT didn’t even know they had in their inventory until they got BSOD, and users who work have been remote since 2020 or were forgotten in the basement next to their red staple called the helplines until those collapsed.

Not only IT have computers they didn’t know existed, but management was (and is) in full panic mode and wanted a full report of inventory (how many computers you have vs how many are fixed) ASAP. Because IT can’t give them such a report because they don’t even know how many computers they have or are affected, management demands that IT keeps reporting every few hours for a meeting that goes for an hour between all IT departments in an organization while they are running around fixing issues.

The technical issue is always just the tip of the iceberg.

At least at my organization, most managers are IT folks themselves and have known the people they work with for years, even decades. They trust each other to do their job, and it shows. And I have to say (I wish for the day I wouldn’t have to say this and it will just be normal) that the few women who lead IT groups through all this did an amazing job. They led by example and came up with ideas that helped everyone. Happy to be working in a place like this.

Had a couple of things to go over this morning, but the CrowdStrike ordeal kicked me to work in high gear. The memes on social media are awesome though! Should collect them in one post when I get the chance.

I love @jthingelstad’s blog gardening idea and I think I’m going to utilize it soon. I have posts going back about five years now (this and my older blog), and this will be a good way to get them all in here and clean them up. Good stuff.

Blog Gardening thingelstad.com

Reader: www.thingelstad.com

The other day I wrote that indie blogs are doing fine in response to what happened to blogs on Hacker News. Now that I let the grump out, let me share some of my methods for finding these blogs.

First thing first: don’t use Google. Indie blogs and personal websites are not usually optimized for SEO and Google’s shenanigans (and if they are, they can’t compete with big companies with a budget and marketing teams that do SEO all day). I use Kagi (work is Bing, which is not much better than Google, but that’s why it’s for work), and it’s excellent. Among other things, It has a “small web” toggle that allows you to reach places you won’t usually find with a regular search.

Indie blogs are like good spots in town. Sure, they’re on the map, but you need to ask the locals to point them out. In terms of indie blogs, this means other bloggers. The biggest contributions to my RSS feeds are from other blogs I follow, where one blogger mentioned another as a comment. I then do a quick test (more on that later) and if I find that the blog’s good, it gets added to my list.

Next, there are places on the net dedicated to indie blogs. I’m biased, and I love mine, so I’ll point to it first: Micro.blog. You can read more about Micro.blog in the About section of this blog, but the gist is that the guy who made it is all about the indie web and reviving the good old blog culture. The Discover part of Micro.blog is curated by a human, each post usually has a blog attached to it. Spend some time there, and you’ll probably find one or two places you’d like. Also, while I’m here, blogrolls. Micro.blog recently re-introduced those, and quite a few members of the Micro.blog community (this blog included) have some interesting links to suggest.

Speaking of blogrolls, some of those exist on the net. One of the famous ones is Ye Olde Blogroll. It is a bit too noisy for my taste and not organized as well as it could be, but put some time into it, and you’ll find something. There are a few more, but I can’t find them now, and I’m running low on coffee, so check @amerpie’s comment below. There’s also People and Blogs by Manu, which is quite nice, though it tends to be a bit too tech-leaning (more on this later) for my taste at times. Give it a try.

Indie social media is a thing, and you should use it. Mastodon is an excellent place to start because it’s pretty easy to build columns based on your interests. Then all you have to do is go fishing: once a week I find someone mentioning a post they write (or someone else’s post) in my topic-related columns.

The last tip I have is a bit of a catch. Write an indie blog yourself. If you’re reading this post and have read this far, you’re probably interested in indie blogs (I know my deductive reasoning is excellent, but thank you anyway), and the best way to find blogs is to become a blogger yourself. How is a different topic, but in a nutshell, start by writing something simple and mundane; never start with something big and “important” because you’ll get stuck in the not-good-enough cycle. Trust me, I got stuck in it many times.

This leads me to my two main guides for adding a blog to my RSS list. These might sound harsh, but hear me out. First, I try not to add web developers or other techies whose job is IT in general. This is because their blogs tend to be more about what they do for work and less about their lives (in general! This is not true for everyone, hence why this is a guide, not a rule), and their lives are actually what I’m after. I talk to enough IT folks every day the way it is. Second, I don’t generally read bloggers who write less than once a week unless they are very consistent and have been around for a long time; otherwise, chances are I won’t read more from them in a good while, if at all.

I hope this helps! Live well, and may your RSS list prosper.

It feels like everyone’s screaming constantly, and for a guy who lives in NYC of all places, I don’t like much noise.

I spent some time on my Mastodon filters (I don’t use other social media really so the rest is not a problem), uninstalled anything NYT-related from my iPhone and Mac, and sat down to listen to some Tchaikovsky for the fairy tales music.

People lost the ability to talk to each other. Everything is cranked up to max volume, everything is loud, everything is the end of the world, and there’s just so much mental bandwidth a guy can take before he becomes numb, you know? I don’t want to be numb. It’s not the time and the place to be numb. I have to be smart about what and where I spend the energy I have.

Personal blogs, as in actual personal blogs written by real individuals, exist. I find them all the time. I just don’t use Google to look for them, is all.

WTF happened to blogs | Michal's corner mpmisko.github.io

Reader: mpmisko.github.io

My attempts to learn how to draw turned into attempts to learn how to sketch, which turned into attempts to learn how to visually break things down into shapes, which turned into learning how to use the Wacom tablet Nat gave me, which turned into how-to Inkscape tutorials.

Let me give you an example. In Inkscape, you can turn on the pressure input for the Pencil tool. With this on, Inkscape detects how hard you press your stylus on the tablet, which translates to line thickness. This makes drawing feel more fluid. However, when you turn this option on, the Pencil tool does not let you choose a “stroke” anymore but just a “fill.” This makes sense: when you use pressure, the lines you draw are indicated by pressure, not by a shape (which consists of fills and strokes in Inkscape).

I was going nuts for two days because fills and strokes in Inkscape are everything I learned - when I was working with a mouse. In other words, drawing in Inkscape with a tablet is a different animal than creating shapes with Inkscape. It’s almost like using a different program.

It took me two paragraphs to explain this to you, and I’m sure some folks are still stretching their heads. Now imagine trying to convey this without having an idea of why Inkscape behaves the way it does. And I didn’t even tell you that the tablet’s range of motion is very different than that of a mouse, and learning how to scroll with it is also an entirely different skill to learn… but you get the point.

I’ve tried to sketch in a notebook too. “What’s the problem,” I thought, “just break it down into shapes.” Ha. Haha. You think you know how to draw a circle until you actually try to draw one by hand. Draw it fast, and it looks like a broken egg on a good day; draw it slow, and it picks up bumps along the way. I’m learning that I should probably learn how to draw circles and squares by hand all over again. Needless to say, breaking things down to shape, a whole ordeal by itself, will have to wait a bit.

I think this is the problem I always had with drawing. You see, I’m a visual person. I love visual aids. I love symbols. Our brain sees symbols and not what the objects are, which means when I want to draw something, what I’m visualizing is a concept that doesn’t exist. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that learning to draw means learning to see all over again. It’s a long process, and it requires patience. Who has patience when all you need to do is to ask your AI program of choice to draw a house to get one? Not me. But I’m working on it.

Any radio station that has this sort of image featuring its programming is going to have me listen to it.

In this case, WFMU, a nutty station from NJ, because of course.

I’m trying to figure out who made this image for them. If you have an idea, let me know.

I’m confused about this (not sure I’m the only one):

The left parties won the election in France, it seems like, and now Macron needs to work with them – I thought he was on the left as well? Anyone has a 101 on French politics and can explain it in bullet points 😅

Macron, who has vowed to remain in office until his term ends in 2027, now faces the challenge of cobbling together a government from a disparate group of parties that have little in common besides their desire to keep the far-right out of power. That scramble will unfold with less than three weeks to go before Paris hosts the 2024 Summer Olympics.

www.wsj.com/world/europe/french-election-results-2024-4fc64d09?mod=hp_lead_pos1 wsj.com

#france #macron #politics

We sat across each other at a local bar with good beer, good sandwiches and good spirits. I wanted to talk to Nat about AI and how I use it in my more creative endeavors, where I have a choice to matter.

Nat hates AI with passion and “out of principle” (he draws by hand and writes fan fiction) like many other folks out there, but unlike them, he can separate me as a person from what I do and how I do it. Also, his opinion is way more important to me, naturally.

The big argument is that AI destroys the planet (because of the power the servers of big companies have to draw) and that it rips artists off because it creates work like they do without them getting a dime or even credit. Those are true facts and I don’t have answers to those.

Most people who use AI tools today use the Cloud and the big tech that comes with it. The more they use it, the more the big tech behind it grows and draws even more power from the grid, creating more emissions. As well, most AI for imagery creation is based on scraped information from thousands of people and artists, and it’s impossible to give them credit even if we want to, let alone compensation.

In general, AI takes an existing problem we have as a society and puts it on steroids. Many companies not only use AI as a tool, they’re starting to force its usage, directly or indirectly, by preferring it over hiring more human help instead.

These problems are not going away.

Meanwhile, there are good uses for this technology. In my case, it enhances my photos (which I took, meaning they’re my original work) and makes them better.

For example, in one of my recent “doors” photos, one of the doors had a big ugly sign on it. Removing it with Adobe’s AI took me a few seconds, and the picture looks better. The door part in the photo now has a small part (say roughly 10% of it) that is fake, but the work as a whole is still mine. Further, Adobe’s auto-fill uses my photo to “rebuild” the door, so in theory, there’s no theft here since the pixels it uses come from my photo, not someone else’s (at least not the way I understand how this particular tool is used).

In my opinion, this is an ethically acceptable use of AI. I would do it on my own without AI, but because it would take more time and effort, I wouldn’t bother with it every time. So, in this case, AI is an enabler, something that enhances my original work. I still contribute to Adobe’s AI though, and the first two problems I raised are still there.

I can’t make this argument when I create “original” art from scratch using AI. In that case, there’s very little - if at all - of my own work involved. And while I use my own desktop for it (Stable Diffusion is not based on a cloud server), as Nat pointed out, it doesn’t mean that those inspired by what I created will follow suit and use the same tools I use. While this makes it “less” of my problem (I can’t be held responsible for what other people do with their tech), I am part of it because I’m part of a movement that inspires people to do more AI-related work, not less.

This bothers me, so I picked up a “how to draw” book yesterday. It’s not my first attempt to learn to draw, and it probably won’t be the last.

I suck at drawing. I can’t even sketch. AI gave me the option to express what’s on my mind in a way that has been impossible for me before. But perhaps now that I’ve seen what I can create with help, I may have more motivation to bridge this gap, or at least attempt to.

Maybe I can learn to draw the same way I use AI in some of my photos: in small fixes. The drawing as a whole would still be AI, but something like a facial expression or something in the background would be something I draw myself—at least for starters. Approaching it like this in small steps might slowly help. After all, no one knows how to draw at birth; it’s something you got to learn.

Well, we’ll see what happens.

And still more doors of Hudson, from when I was around yesterday without my camera. I took these with my phone. 📷

Our vacation in Hudson is coming to an end. It went by faster than I imagined, and I slept more than I thought I was capable of - more than 7 hours a night so far. Back to noisy NYC tomorrow.