Cory Doctorow doing what he does best: nailing it:
We’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job
Indeed. And:
It’s one thing to hear implausible stories of AI’s triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI’s critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?
The panic around AI and the generic, overbearing boycott doesn’t do us much good, either. AI is a tool. It can be used for bad, it can be used for good, but most of all - it needs to be used. It doesn’t work on its own.
I was looking into this post about Emacs as a comics reader, and I thought it would be nice to use Emacs as a quick way to check my desktop screen captures I take through the day so I know what to delete. Of-course, Emacs has an answer: the built-in image-mode already does a fine job at going through images in the same folder, scaling the images to fit in the frame or see at scale, and even animated gifs. All out of the box.
A Note from Our Executive Director: 2023 and my personal quest for software freedom
I’ve had to decide to make an unfair moral choice: do I maximize my chance of surviving with my heart condition, or do I allow installation of proprietary software in my body?
This is a fascinating story from a FOSS activist who had no choice but to have a proprietary heart monitor placed. No one (doctors, techs, hospitals) was able to “log in” and get the data they needed for her heart.
The Pixel 8 Pro can now read body temps, if you swipe it across your face arstechnica.com
Look, I’m not saying it’s not nice to have your phone do that for you, but, aren’t there enough things that our phones do for us? There aren’t even phones at all anymore.
The last week has been meh.
The weather makes me think I’m in London, even though I’ve never visited. It’s been endlessly gray, and I don’t remember the last time we had a sunny day.
There’s work. Nothing too bad in that department, but it’s been a lot of the same in different ways.
My insomnia has been hitting me hard this week, costing me two days of exercise. It makes me feel more like an ooze or jelly than a person 🥱, and I hope to make up for it today. I want to visit a local gym again, and if they work out their prices for me, maybe I’ll have a place to run again. I miss it, but not to the point of winning over the motivation to run outside in the cold and dump gray.
Even my journal is waiting for me to finish the last couple of pages so I can start a fresh Notebook (I finally got a Leuchtturm 1917) 📕, but there was nothing worth writing about.
I’ve made a couple of changes to my Emacs workflow recently (see the posts from the last couple of days; they are a bit scattered around). The biggest change is switching from weekly files to two project files, work and personal, and scheduling those for a range of days instead of a specific time during the day. So far, it’s been working quite well. I’m going through my Emacs settings again, and I think that maybe this time, I’ll finally get to upload it to GitLab to share with other folks. About time after what, five years now?
I do have a couple of ideas that I’m working on, but the meh kept getting in the way, you know?
Soup. My brain’s telling me I need to make some good hot soup 🍜. Not a bad idea.
“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et dis-tinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl 📚
Good morning 📷
Tried to write an org file and push it to my repository instead of using my wiki, but I ran into an issue with Denote. It doesn’t populate the list of notes (dynamic blocks) as it should. It seems Denote doesn’t “see” my org files at all. Unfortunately, I can’t look into this now because work. bleh.
Sometimes I can’t sleep. Or rather, I can’t go back to sleep. This has been a constant theme in my life for a couple of years, and this morning, I realized it’s a problem I need to address.
Quick math estimates roughly 30 to 60 million adults develop chronic insomnia in the US alone; this is based on several online sources that say roughly 10% of adults develop chronic insomnia, while a couple of research papers point to Manifestations and Management of Chronic Insomnia in Adults, which says “Approximately 40 to 70 million Americans are affected by either intermittent or chronic sleep problems, representing approximately 20 percent of the population.”
Most people usually fall asleep later than they should. This YouTube video from Health Triage speaks about an experiment where it was found that a group of people without technology and other modern interruptions would go to sleep before 10 PM, getting about 7.5 hours of sleep; this is in contrast to the little over 5.5 hours of sleep people in the US get, on average.
I counted at least six posts in this blog discussing lack of sleep. My journal and personal notes triple this number easily. On average, I have one sleep-deprived day a week, often two. Because it happens so often, I’ve also developed an unhealthy habit of “forced” sleep when I wake up because I know what lack of sleep leads to. This doesn’t help.
Being sleep-deprived sucks. I start my day at the same hour, but pretty soon (an hour or so), I hit a mental “soft cotton” cushion, which makes everything murky and slow. My lack of motivation to tackle projects, which is already lacking in general due to what falls under the umbrella of ADHD (interesting take in this study), turns into active resistance. For example, I need to argue with myself for 10 minutes just to be able to open an email.
In addition, I become more irritated by sudden noises or bright lights (similar effect to having a hangover). I avoid communicating with people and want to be left alone (being “grumpy”). Besides being rude toward people close to me, this also affects my ability to communicate at work. If I push myself (which I must), I often forget facts, misspell or mispronounce words, or even blank out mid-thought. Besides work and personal connections, I also don’t exercise or go for walks when I don’t sleep (I often exercise as soon as I wake up from a nap though), which in turn makes me feel lazy and guilty, another life “feature” I struggle with more often than not.
Because of the negative effects and how long this has been going on (the definition of chronic insomnia, for example, calls for at least three months of continuous issues; I’m probably somewhere in the 2-year mark at least), this is something I need to address head-on. I can’t just keep venting about it and hope it will disappear.
I’m aware of CBT treatment (some of this I’ve been doing with therapists) and sleep hygiene, the latter of which I don’t do well enough. I’m capable of falling asleep pretty fast, thankfully, and I should go to bed earlier, but I don’t. This is probably the first thing I should start doing immediately.
Other sleep hygiene-related things include drinking non-caffeinated tea at around 19:00 as a symbol (the last drink of the day) and possibly as a placebo. I should exercise at noon instead of afternoons (mornings are too busy) and finish by meditating for longer periods. Living in NYC means noises from inconsiderate jerks can and will happen (fireworks, motorcyclists revering their engines, construction noises), but I found that I can fall asleep despite those most of the time.
I’m also going to seek out a “sleep doctor” who might help me shed more light on this problem. Possibly looking into some homeopathic medicine as well, as it usually comes without side effects. For now, I’m going to try to nap… and edit this post when I wake up.
I feel much better now after a nap. Napping is not always an option, and it doesn’t always work. I’ve had days when I napped twice, even three times throughout the day. It’s a skill I’m developing (I keep waking up and convincing myself back into sleep if I can).
The research I did earlier into sleep centers did not yield good results. The few places I found have bad reviews. Generally, I’m trying not to look for a therapist for help since this is an option I’ve applied in the past a couple of times, and I know more or less where it leads.
This is one of those things I have to take the long-term approach, mixed with other areas of my life. Sleep hygiene should be a routine that ties into exercise, eating, and even social habits. On my wiki, sleep is one of the four elements of life, even though I still need to put that article up.
Does anyone on Windows want to try out Arc Browser (Beta)? They opened it up for today. I’ll need your email address.
Piracy, preservation, and the devs who don’t mind if you have to pirate their game
“The video game industry started essentially mimicking Hollywood,” says Cifaldi. “There’s basically five companies that own everything now. That sucks in a lot of ways”.
It’s no longer about stealing (how can you steal something you can’t really own is another problem), it’s about losing games that won’t exist without piracy.
It’s been too cold to spend time outside for the last week or so, and I managed to give myself a light case of cabin fever. I did go on a small self-date yesterday and worked on a new project in one of my favorite local cafes/bars, but that was it for the outdoors.
At home, I added another day of exercise last week because I was too restless. It helped. I also got deeper into Fallout New Vegas, which I somehow skipped when it came out. It’s a good game, but it still suffers from some familiar open-world annoyances like obnoxious invisible walls, and the combat system is too basic, but it’s still a lot of fun.
It seems I’m done paying some of my student loans (hooray!), at least the private portion of it. I say “seems” because I still can’t believe it. I’ve been paying them for so long (even though unemployment and lack of financial stability) that not paying them seems unreal.
I’m also itching to try DnD once again, bring the gang together, and see what we can do about it.
Couldn’t handle it anymore. Braced the cold and went for a self date, treated myself to a vegan burger and a couple of drinks. Good times, glad I went ☺️
But... Why?
Last week, I stopped in front of a place I must have passed a hundred times before in my neighborhood. In front of me was a closed fence leading to the backyard of a building, and inside it, a smokestack that I assume belong to a heating furnace of some sort.
Two thoughts collided in my head at the same moment. The first is how I had passed this place so many times before without noticing this tall smokestack; the other is that I had to take a picture to convey what I saw in my mind.
This is not the kind of picture you put on Instagram because Instagram is a social place for the masses, and the masses expect pictures of smiling babies and cute cats. Who wants to open their Instagram and see… this?
The fact remained that I took this picture to express an idea, and as a photographer and a person, that’s the point. The why might be more elusive, depending on who you are and what goes on inside your head at the moment (I am reading Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl 📚 right now). Not every photo is meant to bring smiles, even if “the people of Instagram” (who are just an idea I have in my head as guilt) say otherwise.
Who was I, though, when I took that photo? Not the same person who passed this building 99 times previously, if to judge from the fact that I didn’t even realize this structure existed. At that time, I was a descendant of holocaust survivors and a Jew. Tomorrow… who knows? But a part of me will always be in this picture. After all, it’s just a smokestack, and it’s just a fence; It’s me who made it into something else and then into this picture.
This was originally handwritten in my journal and converted to a post
To continue the whole “why do I care” and me writing things down and explaining is a personal life goal (I need to write about that as well), consider yesterday’s virtual meeting at work.
It went as expected. My supervisor was a bit late, as they usually are, because of back-to-back meetings they have (I guess this happens when you’re on the top of the food chain for IT).
I had a couple of issues I wanted to bring up, but what matters here is an issue that concerns information security for our institution. More specifically, I found technical information that should be internal on our public-facing website instead. While no patients were exposed (it would have been much worse!), that information belonged in our intranet, meant for our users only, not everyone on the World Wide Web.
The people in the meetings were unaware of this issue, which I knew beforehand, which is why I wanted to bring it up to begin with. Writing information and putting information into the right place is my job, but this particular article pre-dated when I started my role.
The obvious question: why bother?
I could have easily ignored it, and if something had gone wrong, I’d have the lack of knowledge around me as CYA ammunition; after all, no one told me this was a problem, so why would I know?
But, see, the problem is that I care. And no, this is not a compliment, trust me. When you run into people who roll their eyes at you and sigh or joke about “always with the questions!” about me, it’s not a quality you’re proud of. Caring is not enough. I also like it. I’m passionate about it. It’s what I do.
If I were to use this energy in my own projects (which I do when I can), I would enjoy it more because there would be less friction from other people (delays, disagreements, etc.). as long as I didn’t dig holes in the ground and fall down the cliff like the coyote in Road Runner.
Sometimes I wonder though, if I should care less and keep quiet.
A comment from 2025-01-19: I believe that seeing potential problems and “caring” is one of the things people like about my work. The other part is that with this “caring” comes organization and instructions they didn’t have before.
Microsoft complaint #1204:
On a Mac, Outlook is a second-class citizen.
Something as simple as having dark mode working with the system theme is not working right: the reading pane remains harsh white when everything else is black.
Apparently, there’s a little icon that must be turned on for the reading pane to also work in dark mode. Otherwise, why would it work as expected? 🙃
- JTR;GBM
Ye Olde Blogroll - Blogroll.org blogroll.org
Reader: blogroll.org
Someone brought this great website again (I forget who), and I’m thankful. A human-made list of human blogs. Awesome.
Dark City, 1998 - ★★★½
He can tune!
Dark City has been a favorite of mine when it came out, and after I watched it again, I can see why. It's dark and melancholic with a shred of hope and a lot of revenge kind of style. Beyond that though, it's one of those "what if" movies that gets some of those questions stuck in your head after the credits roll, like, maybe there *is* someone who keeps misplacing my hot sauce in the fridge??
This movie fits well with Donnie Darko and perhaps the original Matrix for a good reality-doubting weekend (more recommendations are welcome). If you're more into questioning-reality-god-complex movies, I also recommend The Truman Show, one of Jim Carry's best performances ever.
More random thoughts: Jennifer Connelly is absolutely stunning here in a very Who Framed Roger Rabbit style. I also think it's about time I get myself a duster coat. And when was the last time I went to the beach here in NYC?
A walk in the neighborhood with my camera 📷. These photos came so different, it’s hard to believe the locations are minutes apart.
