danott.website / thoughts

This is the test of the macOS Shortuts system. This is only a test.

I don’t want to hear another sermon on the importance of embodiment from men who can’t share a meal.

Seattle to Cincinnati. Grunge to Midwest Emo. This explains a lot about me.

The human machine has evolved to create content. This is our great task, to move beyond experiencing the moment, toward documenting a moment for others to feign experiencing it. And not just with written words. Images, videos, and icons are more efffective. The ancestors on the ofrenda have been replaced with memes on the mood board. Timeless classics give way to timeline scrollng. Forming infinite sources of meaning. Man’s search continues.

HTML’s H4–H6 tags should not exist. Why so deep? Why not H7? Anything demarcated deeper than H3 should probably become another document. Links are what make the web great!

I predict the rise of a “narcolepsy generation”. They’re marked by the belief that The American Dream is dead. And they’ve been culturally conditioned to be so awake to unbounded context that a dream state isn’t possible. They’ll oscillate between hyper-awareness and exhausted shutdown. This is observation, not judgement.

A “COLLEGE” sweatshirt that says “NAPKINS”. Inspired by my misreading of “HOPKINS”.

If we can thank the Lord for the McRib, and ask that he bless the meat to the nourishment of our bodies, surely we can thank the Lord for Claude, and ask him to bless the words to the edification of our minds.

My current theory is that LLMs are an accelerant and amplifier of the prompter’s unstated goals. A goal of just getting through the thing is rewarded with slop. A goal of doing the thing deeply is rewarded with more collected dots that may become connected dots. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Prompt slow to move fast.

Testing that my 404 page is setup correctly!

Napster disrupted distribution. AI is disrupting creation. With creation and distribution both amplified and accelerated, the next disruptions will be curation and sanitation. Curation as meaning making. Sanitation as separating the signal from the noise. And what one man considers noise becomes music to the next generation’s ears.

What are your ears itching for? Is it streaming on Spotify?

I want a sweet glass of Severance branded Lumonade.

Leadership vaporware.

Comparison destroys personality. I saw that on an Instagram story.

My tangential thought: comparison destroys personality, or reveals the lack thereof. When someone has not contrasts…are they just mimicry?

Shipping is more fun.

Do you wanna know what’s cooler than having two cars? Having a community you can rely on when you need to get somewhere in a jam.

There are certain people in my life, that when I see them embracing a fad technology, I feel instantly reassured that I made the right call by ignoring that fad technology.

Said “no way I could do that.” Heard “no AI could do that.” Either way, limiting beliefs.

Hover’s built in domain redirects were not working the way I’d like. I ended up routing all the traffic to my servers, and using a tiny Rack middleware to redirect everything to my canonical URL. Horray for simplified DNS.

Decentralizing the self.

The Boox Palma arrived yesterday. I am very into it after one day of usage.

Paying my car registration online finally happened. It’s been available for years, but never worked in my attempts. I just got back 2+ hours of my life. Hooray!

A watched DNS never propagates.

I’ve got some premature optimization on the mind. Right now I read and upsert a row for every single text file in the tree. This is fine while the data set is small. What happens as it grows? The performance time will grow linearly at best.

I could minimize the necessary upserts by only upserting files that have changed recently. I could get this list of files with something along the lines of.

find ~/textfiles -type f -newermt "$(stat -c "%y" /yolk.sqlite3)"

This would grab only the text files that have changed since the last time the sqlite3 database was written. This will work as long as the only thing that writes to the database is this upsert mechanism.

But thinking in fractal scenarios—that could change. If it does, it’d be easy enough to swap out a new source of truth in place of $(stat -c "%y" /yolk.sqlite3).

That’s probably a named concept waiting to emerge. Bash scripting resists named concepts.

I just deployed my bespoke personal website from my iPhone. I remember ideating about such a flow while attending a University of Kentucky basketball game back in 2007. The tools have always been there, I’ve just never sat down to do it. Building is fun.

Made mini pizzas with the kids tonight. Followed by a giant desert pizza with Nutella, marshmallow cream, Reese’s puffs, crushed orange mint, glitter sprinkles, and more. Turned out great.

I haven’t had a DNS propagation headache like this since 2005.

I envy Jay-Z and his meager 99 problems.

The Euchre’ish. Invite a few people over to play card games, eat bread, and drink wine.

The title of The Body Keeps the Score conveys the big idea. Our traumas are stored in our bodies.

In my mind, I recall the demo of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. I learned that the game freezes when you max out the score at 550,000’ish.

The Body Keeps the Score, and I am maxing out the available memory of the system.

TIL that macOS has a built in speed test utility: networkquality.

Something at the intersection of rails new --minimal and the new “solid” defaults is borked. Here’s what I’m seeing:

• The minimal flag excludes ActiveJob
• SolidCache has an ExpirationJob that relies on ActiveJob.
• So a fresh app deployed with kamal won’t boot properly

I like building tools. I like writing about building tools because I like the tool building. Once a tool is built, I don’t have much to say. Because the building in the fun part. The broadcast it carries is variable. But the building. That’s the good stuff.

“Unhinged” has entered the vocabulary.

I was forced to a decision today. Do I throw a list into ChatGPT and ask it to reverse the lines. Or do I figure out how to manipulate the text to reverse the lines. I want to know my tools. I don’t want to context switch between tools to do a simple text manipulation operation. Today I relearned that, of course, vim can do this. :g/^/m0 was the incantation. Which feels like magic only as long as I refuse to learn the grammer of vim. Vim is good. I want to manipulate text in Vim.

Visual Studio Code can open files with a url scheme. This could be handy for local development. vscode://file/Users/danott/path/to/file.rb

I must have been four years old. I cried and cried and cried when I realized we weren’t going boating. Rock the vote.

People who say “I’m an open book” are well meaning, but misguided. There is a boundary, and they’re putting the onus on the questioner to find it.

I think I’m mostly definitely done creating a micro blog out of a text file.

yyyy'W'w is my secret sauce for generating a “weeknote” filename in Apple Shortcuts.

A giant markdown textfile can be a micro blog.

What if he was just a Mandalor named Ian?

Eating buttloads of Indian food then doing hot yoga.

Authoring in plaintext just feels right. Why have we made computers so complicated for minimal gains to self-expression?

It turns out Dropbox is still good, actually. I’ve been blinded by git based publishing flows for the last several years. Being able to sync plain text files from iOS is opening up paths of thought about the publishing flows I’ve always wanted.

I believe this will work from both macOS and iOS.

I think I’m going to make the move from Bear to iA Writer. The years-old desire to be dealing with plaintext files and folders is finally winning.

Florida based Hunger Games fan fiction featuring Flatness Evergreen.

I was led to believe there would be many more food fights in my life.

It makes me sad that people who used to have thriving blogs have moved them to Substack.

You’ll make proactive changes. They’ll say you’re being disruptive. You’ll be responsive to challenges. Critics will say you’re reactive. There is a negative frame for every story. Find the positive frame.

This is a second take

This is a sample take

This is the body of the take. It can contain multiple paragraphs and markdown formatting.

Subheading

• Bullet points
• More bullet points

# Code blocks work too
def hello
  puts "Hello, world!"
end

I love people too much to settle for a relationship with the PR version of themselves. Love rejoices in the truth.

There is no collaboration software that can solve for a lack of clear vision.

A trampoline park next to the court house called “Trial & Air”.

Nobody knows what they’re building. We’ve become more focused on process and frameworks than what they are standing in as scaffolding for.

Business are like sports teams. Soloprenuer is playing golf. Some buddies are playing basketball. A few more buddies are playing baseball. A few more buddies soccer. American football has special teams, clear leader.

Is there a future where establishing an RSS feed is as powerful as establishing a mailing list? Instead of selling PPI, you sell airtime on your feed. All the reach without any of the PPI and data compliance risk.

I have an accumulation of great ideas. I pour them out, and peoples minds are blown. But I lack references.

Today’s example: “culture is the worst behavior that you tolerate.”

I must begin writing. I’ve got tired ideas from 2008 that still feel compelling. They’re not. Because they took up residence in my head, they clogged the port for new ideas. Sewed as seed, they might be bearing fruit. Sharing them now…the environment may not be hospitable for germination. Either case—brain as long term storage is a bad strategy. Write things down, free the brain up.

One problem with thoughts and prayers as defense mechanism is that neither is acceptable in our public schools.

Everyone is spending there time on wishful daydreams and the power of positive thinking. As for me and my house, we will take action and force decisions.

Poetry. I like writing it. I could publish it. Certainly I could publish it!

Jesus himself said “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. Go a different direction. The good life is within arm’s reach. Free your grip so you might grasp that which is truly valuable.

I’m having a mid-life focusing. Not a crisis. But a focusing in on what it is I really believe about the world. My mid-twenties self would not be pleased.

Chrono Trigger’s “New Game+” but for real life starting from middle school. Or maybe high school. Or maybe every day is a new day to start your New Game+.

It’s a slow RSS news day. Everyone is busy creating! Documenting has its time. But it’s secondary.

A game show where contestants have to guess what live performance they’re listening to based on only clips of crowd noise.

A dislike for baseball is not an interesting or original antidote. Fans understand the pacing, and don’t care if that pacing doesn’t feed your addiction to loud and fast entertainment. Go enjoy something and let the criticism for others’ enjoyments melt away.

I remember the importance of having something to look forward to. I’ve exercised this manipulation of myself to varying degrees at various times. As little as tickets to a baseball game. As grand as a Disney vacation. The size does not matter. Having a plan does.

Tinkering on the system to publish and utilizing the system to publish. They are definitely related, and impact one another. I’ve been running them in sequence. I want to pivot to running them in parallel.

Is there anything more refreshing than a well timed nap? Light shining through lulling into and outof concentrated rest. Bursting with energy into the second chance at the day.

Each time I find a hour to iterate on my personal website I freeze. The magnitude of existing commitments don’t align with my idealized future. I begin to wonder if mv site archive && mkdir site is the only path forward.

Remembering how much time in early computing was spent customizing icons, skinning applications, and overall customization. What a waste of infinite disposable time. But then again—what a joy of exploration, self expression, and tinkering with well defined systems.

Working with concrete has my hands feeling like the Freman. Moisture in need, indeed.

A preacher yelling. The tone lasts longer than the words.

What is said—church isn’t a building, it’s a people. What is done—church isn’t a building, it’s a broadcast. What is believed—church is information transmission.

Being a skeptic is tiring.

Capitalism has admitted defeat on Thanksgiving. Giving thanks for the intangible gifts in our lives cannot be monetized, so the seasonal shelves jump strait from Halloween to Christmas. Take or leave the dry turkey and family politics. Being thankful cannot be commoditized.