news

I have to restore entries from a backup that is not entirely reliable in the date/time that the entries were posted. The good news is that I have a backup.

I have posts in the pipeline, I need to make time to polish and publish them. Stay tuned to this channel.

It's been two months since my last update. I've been busy. I guess. Or lazy. Hard to say.

I do know that I'm struglling again with motivation. I don't seem to be able to move like I used to. I'm a bit stuck behind the screen. I tend to lose myself in Youtube (mostly Shorts) or doomscrolling Reddit. I am aware of these habits and I have a bit more power to disengage with them and for this I am grateful. Else I'll lose myself.

My best friend told me recently he's lost desire to do anything but watch Youtube. I hear him loud and clear. I've been able to remove myself from social media¹, but I haven't been able to kick the Reddit habit. There's a lot of utility in Reddit and Youtube, and they are designed to keep you on that site. Much like AI chat is designed to keep you engaged and on that site. Our shorter attention spans are klilling us slowly and we don;t even notice it.

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1. I recognize that Reddit is often referred to as social media, though I don't agree with that, it's more of an unstructured message board. Now that I wrote that, social media is a collection of unstructured message boards… fuck.

Here is an article posted on the Seeker. I beleive that there are three camps regarding AI and AI Use.

1. The first is that AI is cool and the greatest thing ever. I find that these people have the talent to create on their own, but for some reason find this better.
2. The second is that AI is terrible and should be called out as such on sight. I find that these people cannot see any benefits to using AI and that it's terrible for everything. People, the planet, resources, etc.
3. The third group has really bad FOMO. They love, hate, or are indifferent to AI but are so afraid if being left behind (posisbly again) that they latch on to the technology.

I see a need to be familair and loathe to use it. I see the merits for AI and I also see that people shut off their brain when they use it. I am requently reminded some variation of this image back in the 90's:

Shamelessly stolen from here

And as I type this out, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht on the latest Diggnation video podcast are espousing Apple for not jumping on the AI bandwagon early enough (rather, at all). :(

This story from The New York times comes to us via Kottke.

I was able to read it, and you may not because of a paywall. The page is beautiful in design and interactivity. The basic premise is that policy has driven carmakers from producing vehicles for the lower 40% of americans, though the same metric applies to us in Canada. I'm not seeing a new vehcile anywhere near affordability for me, and even used is our of my budget and I make a fair amount of money for my area. The article is worth reading/experiencing if you can.

In Kottke's comments, I see people holding onto their aging vehicles and really digging the lack of screens on their dashboards. I have one of my two dream vehicles, a Honda Element. This SUV was more expensive than it's counterpart the CR-V and aimed at my generation of adevnture seekers. I would not have been able to afford it even in the year it was made. I expect that this could cost upwards of $60,000 if made today.

I reflected on if the high cost of vehicles would encourage more people to use public transportation. With little reflection, I realize that cost-cutting public transport over decades resulted in lower service and higher costs for riders. The city where I live has reduced hours and routes for the city bus compared to my youth.

Maybe ride sharing is the answer. For myself, I endeavour to keep the Element on the road as long as possible. I need the versatility and space. I would like to convert it to Electric if possible. The technology exists and I am skilled and foolinsh enough to make the attempt.

I really want to stop talking about AI. I really want the bubble to pop.

Here is an article about how students are effectively being trained to write worse to not get flagged as AI generated. This is beyond ridiculous.

On sify.com we have article about humans needing to clean up AI slop. How quaint. If we need to clean up the slop, how is this worth it, especially since our next generation of humans is writing worse?

Thankfully Kagi is here to help us (for the time being) determine what is generated by AI and what isnt. The site seems to be geared towards kids, though I have the thought that everyone could benefit from it.

I like art. I do not consider myself an artist. I have pencil drawings and small pieces of art hangin in my walls from friends (and my kids) who are artists. They create art. I know what I like and I really like art that has a retro look and feel ot it. Yesterday when I was reading my RSS Feed, I came across this post. I'm not sure of I came to it via HackerNews or Kotke.

Regardless, I really like the artwork here. The artwork for the people specifically hard form the late 80's and early 90's, though my tastes tend to go father back. I had a "vintage" mac and I played briefly with hypercard. If my childhood home had a Mac instead of an IBM clone, I would have been completely enthralled with hypercard. From what I gather, it was a pretty robust system.

Blog.to is reporting that trees are being removed from a local park and I can see both sides. I can see the need to prevent flooding and the construction is reported to help with that, though cuting down trees is universally a poor idea. The Independent review is a great idea and may bring about a different way to resolve the flooding problem and keep most, if not all the trees from being cut down.

A post by the BBC about older technology for staying warm. The Elizabethan period had some ideas for staying warm in winter without current conveniences. I won't spoil the article, go on and read it for yourself.

I have a few links that I'm going to share today.

First a post written by Ars Technica titled Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life and found via slashdot. This is great, really great. I dislike Bose. I love that Bose is doing this and I really want all manufacturers to open source their older hardware. I understand that sometimes this isn't possible. Open-sourcing a phone that has iterative upgrades doesn't make sense in the hardware-as-a-service / you-don't-own-anything-anymore model that we find ourselves in. It seems to me that corporations are more concerned with profits over a sustained environment.

I found via Hacker news about the EU banning destruction of unsold merchandise speaks of a different kind of nonsense. Why is this even a thing? I had known of tech companies destroying unsold product (see the ET Atari cartridge fiasco) and product that was nearly perfectly functional but returned or replaced under warranty as shipping it back becuase descrution was cheaper than shipping and repairing but I was completely caught unaware by unsold and new merchandise being destroyed. I can only assume that this is because sales targets were not reached and a tax write-off is preferrable to actualy selling products in a secondary market. It could also be that they decided after production that artifical scarcity is valuable in word of mouth virality for the next season of products. Finance is a funny thing.

This is a topic that I have experience with. I have in the past attempted suicide… A few times. I had issues with low self-worth and codependence. These issues were bleeding all over the place and kind of it contirbued to who I am now. The last attempt was the closest I came to success, I had the motiviation and the plan. I was talked down. I am grateful for being talked down. I am grateful because that low was the solid foundation I needed to rebuild myself.

Techdirt posted this article and I recalled that one of my kids was chtting with Character.ai. I had spoken with them before when news broke a couple of years ago that a mom was suing Character.ai for her son's suicide, allegedly aided by a Character.ai personality. Sure, that was likely the trigger. Still, the thoughts of suicide likely existed well in advance of AI's involvement.

I can only speak for my experiences. My self worth was low, low enough that I convinced myself that death would actually be a benefit for my monkey sphere. I sat with those thoughts for decades with minor attempts until that summer morning when I made too much noise and was talked out of it. I had tied my self worth to validation of others and in my weakest moment, I almost gave in to my ego.

I had not intended to share this much and wanted to direct you to the article.

Ai is pretty shitty and I don't know many people who love it. Still, it seems to be the latest scapegoat in a long line of scapegoats for personal decisions. The thing about suicide is that it's mostly a solitary act. Mostly.

I have long thought about going back to the way things were. It could be that I'm really close to level 50 and a half-century of existing living on this planet. It could be nostalgia, it could be overwhelm, it could be a rampant ego. Back in my day! things were different. We didn't have the Internet growing up. My family were early adopters, we had dial-up in 1994 or 1995. 14.4kbps. That kind of speed was pretty quick but nowhere near acceptable today. I have more bandwidth than I need now, and I often think that 10Mbps is enough for most things. Though my internal network is 1Gbps for wired devices. I see literally no need to upgrade to 2.5Gps or higher.

Anyway, I have been thinking a lot about going back in tech use. I am more aware of my reddit and youtube habits and find myself stopping and doing something else instead of refreshing the page or closing the apps and then opening them right back up. Digg is back and I really missed it. I like that it's smaller than it was and part of me really hopes that it stays that way. Reddit is large and full of nice and not so nice people. My tech use started with stopping to journal and collect notes on my iPad. I have moved to a small sketchbook for daily notes and a proper journal for journalling. I still make digital notes for side jobs where applicable, and I'm using this platform instead of social media to share with whomever happens to read this.

My partner and I have been casually looking into less smart phones as she's not keen to continue giving her information to Google and I'm not keen to stick with Apple. I still enjoy my apple devices, despite being less enamoured with the company and the not quite honest portrayal that they are privacy focussed. I am really annoyed that my carefully ripped CD collection is not available on my iPhone becuase some of the content is region locked. This lead me to two devices, one from a small Brooklyn firm and a seemingly Polish firm who both make distraction free handsets. There is trepidation in moving away from Apple, even though I am familiar with the alternatives. When my iPhone is no longer supported with maintenance OS updates, I will put more effort into finding an alternative handset.

I am qutie comfortable in linux and am anxiously awating the release of the Steam Machine to replace my laptop-come-desktop setup that I use when at my desk. I want the capability to move it to my TV for gaming which will be a minor task, as all I would need is power and HDMI in both places, easy for someone with my skill and knowledge. Some research needs to be done to manage music and video.

I am working toward moving back to my iPod for music and am also considering a dedicated MP3 player, though I prefer to use AAC for music. Another alternative is to use my recently brought out MiniDisc player. That is really cool tech too. I have enough MiniDiscs to have variety and found a seemingly decent app for putting music on it quicker than manually recording from the CD player. Though analog recording method has a certain appeal to it. It's similar to making mixed tapes back in the 80s and 90s.

When my iPad battery and support finally die I will have to find another way to get my RSS feeds. Perhaps I'll hack my Kobo with KOReader or pick up a second hand Kobo specifically for RSS feeds. I had the thought that I would go back to digial nottaking and get a Remarkable or Kobo Clara Colour as a notebook/eReader/RSS device. This seems less likely as my Kobo can be made to do two of these tasks and I already am making notes on paper with success.

In writing this I almost forgot the point. I wanted to share an article via Kotke with a theme that has been popping up in my various feeds.