Category: Writing

I went down to the UPS Store and had my fingerprints taken. It was an odd experience, both psychically and physically. They have a presumably high tech scanning system that was repeatedly foiled by its inability to present a reasonable UI to the worker, the legal requirement that they, not I, place my own fingers awkwardly on a sheet of glass, and the need to take an oddly large number of scans. And then doing so at a place where most people drudge to ship packages or check PO Boxes, like some secret alternate existence of the same liminal location, a dual place like The City and The City. Some privatized privacy pryer. Records collected for you wholesale.

Anyhow, weird experience, and only the first two of the seven labors of Callimachus. Next up: traipsing to an unmarked door in the first 45 minute window in the first week of the new year where I can prove an absence through historical reckoning. Bureaucracy is a sort of magic spell. A recipe of labors. Let’s keep cookin’.

Inputs

1: On the ocean of recommendations, I watched Saltburn. Which I’m very glad was via streaming, alone, and not among others or in a public viewing.

I have a significant level of empathic twinge to me, so watching awkward takes a lot of effort. I must have paused the movie two dozen times, screwing up the nerve to delve further into the experience. Mostly that’s Barry Keoghan, who is insanely talented and yet makes me uncomfortable to watch, just from his sheer force of presence.¹Or sort of anti-presence? He’s got a way of being the polar opposite of a person, in that he feels like a negative space occupied by a character. It’s mesmerizing and uncomfortable and incredibly effective. Add to that Richard Grant, who in my mind only ever plays someone on the verge of or actively experiencing a manic episode, plus the weight of posh judgment throughout and the aural distance of the accents, and it was beautiful, uncomfortable, and an experience to behold. Also, as everyone recommends, go in cold.

2: Caught the latest edition of Why Is This Interesting, which covers AI and Chain Of Thought Prompting vs Standard Prompting, in which an AI is given a more thorough instruction set to follow through rather than asked an open prompt, leading to it showing its work and more accurately arriving at an answer.

WITI looks at it through the lens of Japanese hospitality and the culture of “omotenashi”, which involves “(B)ringing your full, authentic self to serve a guest and doing so in a humble, non-ostentatious way. It is about a lack of pretense and showing no expectation of reciprocity.” The article points to a Nikkei article about the practice and how it can inform AI.

I tend to think of it more along the lines of being asked, as in educational settings, to show one’s work. While that instruction in school can feel like an imposition, an extra weight of baggage around providing an answer to a problem, what it actually does is flense open the work of arriving at that answer, so that logical or mechanical inconsistency can be seen in situ rather than obfuscated beyond the veil of the result.

Beyond this, it focuses the attention on what is often the more important result in many situations, understanding how to draw a conclusion from inference, logical reasoning, and specific effort to find a result, rather than the sheer value of the result itself.

Regardless, that AI models drawing from neuronal connection and trained on human outputs find benefit from human tasks of stepping through problems is a curious insight.

3: Bowl Week continues apace, so watched a bunch of background football with no rooting interest nor emotional attachment besides the general ennui of watching the denouement of another season of college football. It’s the end of a number of eras, the ellipsis to close out the year, and the victory lap before the victors take their lap. Here’s to college football. May we enjoy what remains before the curtains fall and the band plays us out.

Projects In Progress

Webapp: Still poking at headless CMS systems, seeing if I can make ’em bark.

Notes:

• 1
  Or sort of anti-presence? He’s got a way of being the polar opposite of a person, in that he feels like a negative space occupied by a character. It’s mesmerizing and uncomfortable and incredibly effective.

So far, liking the new format. Feels more flexible for the very open nature of my days these…days. Yeah. Anyhow, onward!

Inputs

1: First up, this Twitter thread from @patio11, about gumption, operations, and institutional helplessness (my summary, not his).

Patrick talks about the nature of strategic thinking and the nature of organizations to not actually act from a strategic mindset from an instinct towards safety, an assumption of a lack of agency, and the ways in which large institutions turn any decision into the problem of an entire committee, to both ensure no credit goes below a certain level and that no blame rises above it.

I’ve sat in these same meetings, asked these same open questions, had these same teeth-grinding revelations. It’s somewhat cathartic, while simultaneously being maddening at the ubiquity of incentivized inaction.¹Which also led me to this important tweet: https://x.com/patio11/status/1739810622357844021?s=20 and then to cold emailing a director at a company I’d like to work for who’ve had a job opening for a role I’d be a great fit for open since at least October out of, honestly, who knows, but I’m betting the same weird culture around hiring that has seemingly poisoned the entire working world lately.

2: I watched this documentary a while ago, but got to recommend to a friend²Hi Casey! with a shared interest in the wild history of Apple: General Magic.³That link goes to Kanopy, which is a favorite streaming service of mine, in that its content is parceled out via your membership to your local library. Support local libraries! This is the kind of great shit they do! General Magic itself was a sort of external spinoff operation of Apple during the Sculley years, who were given the rein to try new and inventive things, which resulted most obviously outwardly in the Newton, but also to “USB, software modems, small touchscreens, touchscreen controller ICs, ASICs, multimedia email, networked games, streaming TV, and early e-commerce notions.” It was an experiment involving some of the most weighty names of the personal computing revolution, including Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Joanna Hoffman, and Tony Fadell.

Watching the documentary, you get a real sense of the vision of Silicon Valley and the giant dreams colliding with economic realities. It’s an inspiration filled with lessons and admiration for those willing to do the wild, necessary things to move the world forward, inch by inch.

3: Caught the finale of Slow Horses season 3, which felt slightly abrupt but entertaining throughout and climactic at multiple moments. One thing among many I’ll praise about the show is that it refuses to be too precious with any character, which doesn’t allow for the sort of psychological safety built into most shows, where one never really believes the stakes because it’s not going to end in the ultimate consequence for the characters involved. Slow Horses is happy to kill off whoever it needs to to make clear that such safety is an illusion, one that kept alive by the work of imperfect people making hard choices in a messy world.

Projects In Progress

Webapp: Put some work in researching headless CMS systems, because I am all too generally eager to not only reinvent the wheel, but to drag things along the dirt my entire life rather than try someone else’s interesting round contraption. And I’m trying to fight that. So, yeah. Checking out Strapi, among others, and I’m intrigued, if curious about how things fit together. The work continues apace.

Other: I’ve put the rest of my creative outputs on a bit of a back burner, which is not overall great, but is keeping them simmering to hopefully, eventually, coalesce into a more interesting stew. Or at least less of a pot full of bits and liquids rather than a soup.⁴And of course now I’m wondering what the dividing line is between some junk in some liquid and a soup. Is it seasoning? A minimum amount of simmering? Surely it’s not soup if I just throw scraps of meat and vegetables into hot water. There’s got to be more of a transition point than that, right? But where is it?

Notes:

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  Which also led me to this important tweet: https://x.com/patio11/status/1739810622357844021?s=20 and then to cold emailing a director at a company I’d like to work for who’ve had a job opening for a role I’d be a great fit for open since at least October out of, honestly, who knows, but I’m betting the same weird culture around hiring that has seemingly poisoned the entire working world lately.
• 2
  Hi Casey!
• 3
  That link goes to Kanopy, which is a favorite streaming service of mine, in that its content is parceled out via your membership to your local library. Support local libraries! This is the kind of great shit they do!
• 4
  And of course now I’m wondering what the dividing line is between some junk in some liquid and a soup. Is it seasoning? A minimum amount of simmering? Surely it’s not soup if I just throw scraps of meat and vegetables into hot water. There’s got to be more of a transition point than that, right? But where is it?

I wrote a bit earlier about the existential weight of fear and the mental anchor that is the ever-present search for safety. It was a balm, but definitely not a cure, for the condition to get some of that out of my head. I suppose we’ll see where we go from here.

Inputs

1: I read a fantastic biographical piece from Lauren Thiesen over at Defector today, about the work to change one’s name, not personally, but outwardly, legally, and officially as the world ties it to documents and databases.

In my time in management, I managed an employee through the work-located aspects of a gender change and learned an awful lot about how the larger world makes such things difficult, on top of all the other inherent difficulties involved. Many people, upon updating their gender identity and shedding a dead name, do so by changing their employer entirely, such is the psychic weight of trying to move a machine that large.

To my employee’s credit, and to the credit of my former employer and their coworkers, it was an experience that went remarkably well. For all the pains involved in the process, my team was incredibly supportive of her and it turned into an opportunity to grow and bond as a group, as people shared their personal experiences with family and friends who’ve undergone gender transitions in their lives. I was, and remain, so proud of all of them, and of my employee herself, for their work through the process.

2: Read through Kottke’s 52 Things list earlier, and some days before, the list it was inspired by, Tom Whitwell’s “52 things I learned in 2023“, which has been running since 2014 and is always a remarkable collection of interesting insights about the world at large, from any number of angles¹I mean, by definition, no more than 52 angles, but go with me here.. I actually tried to keep my own list of such things at the start of this year, in inspiration, but it fell off hard. However, rather than bury it in shame, here’s what I had going:

1/12 – Chuck-E-Cheese still used floppy disks to update their animatronic shows through this year (2023) (https://www.tiktok.com/@showbizpizzaman/video/7186009974852586795)

1/16 – By ionizing air using lasers, lightning was able to be directed to hit specific locations. The idea itself stretches back to the 1970s (https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/lasers-used-to-guide-lightning-strikes-to-a-safe-target/)

1/30 – The Texas Two Step is a technique by which a company tries to avoid liability by splitting off a portion of itself liable for legal damages into a different company. Johnson and Johnson failed to accomplish one when defending against lawsuits for asbestos in their baby powder. (https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-01-31-johnson-texas-two-step-bankruptcy/)

2/6 – Chock Full of Nuts is called that because it was the coffee served at a lunch counter called Chock Full of Nuts, whose specialty was a “Nutted Cheese Sandwich” made from raisin bread, cream cheese, and walnuts. The sandwich was chock full of walnuts. Via Adam Conover (https://www.tiktok.com/@adamconover/video/7196808838689885483)

4/1 – Pizza Rolls were invented to capitalize on a wave of American interest in both Chinese and Italian foods, and originally came in pepperoni, sausage, lobster, and shrimp flavors (https://www.snackstack.net/p/pizza-rolls-and-the-meaning-of-midcentury)

I’m gonna see if I can do better this year, and grace you all with a What I Learned in 2024 list that’s actually got 52 items in it.

3: After watching the three NFL games last night²The NFL would conquer the entire calendar if they could. Santa and Jesus are no match for the shield., I officially won one of my fantasy football leagues and made the finals in the other. One more week to go and we’ll see if I can make it to the promised land. Go Team Calvinball!

Projects In Progress

Webapp: Took some time today to try and figure out how to put in a CI/CD workflow via GitHub to the site. It, as most programming exercises go, did not work at first attempt. However! I’ll be working through some additional guides and hope to have a Hello World standing by EOD. So, progress? Kinda?

Notes:

• 1
  I mean, by definition, no more than 52 angles, but go with me here.
• 2
  The NFL would conquer the entire calendar if they could. Santa and Jesus are no match for the shield.