Short Topical Writings Categories
Forgive Yourself For Your Misadventures
November 25, 2024Someone said this to me a while ago, I wish I could remember who, but it’s helped me deal with a lot of adverse circumstances.
A lot of us are going through hard times right now, and I’m sure a lot of people, like me, are feeling helpless. But there is one thing you can do for yourself pretty easily, even when you can’t seem to change your situation:
You’ve got to forgive yourself for your misadventures.
That one piece of advice has helped me a lot. Because even when you can’t change a negative circumstance, it’s all too easy to internalize it: blame yourself, think you somehow deserve it, Identify with it as if it’s a part of you.
This advice has often helped me reframe things so I don’t take them personally, making it easier to carry on. Something really bad happens? It’s not “me“. It’s…
AI Doesn’t Innovate
November 25, 20242024nov25 — I was really struck by this tagline on Canva's new 2025 design report, saying "motion elements, dreamy textures, and AI innovation" would shape new design possibilities.
As an AI skeptic—which is to say, I'm extremely optimistic about the things AI has proven it does very well, and the things it's given strong indications it's moving towards really doing well, but deeply impatient with all the hype about speculative functionality outside of those—this really put a fine point to me on part of the problem. Not with AI, but with what people expect of it, what they spend money expecting it to do.
AI DOESN'T INNOVATE. AI is specifically engineered NOT to innovate. It specifically attempts to create something that matches what it previously ingested. If it deviates from that, innovates, we call that "hallucination", and it makes AI less useful, not more. This is because AI is…
Kupietz’s Law Of Infoavailability
September 15, 2024Where technology is concerned: "Information needs expand to fill available bandwidth."
Where we used to have to fill in a one-page form, when automation arrived to make it quicker for us to fill in that form, very soon a ten-page form was required.
Reference: AI’s False Time-Saving Promise. Or Why AI Is Like The Vacuum CleanerBy Martin Gutmann, forbes.com, Nov 11, 2024. An article about how new "time-saving" technologies, such as vacuum cleaners, then computers, email, and now AI, increased workloads rather than reducing them.
Also tangentially related is Jevons Paradox, in which technology that increases efficiency creates an overall increase in resource consumption, rather than a decrease.
You’ll love this entry.
September 20, 2023I've finally nailed what bothers me so much about those Upworthy headlines. It's that they they tell you what to think about about the video, instead of telling you what it's about.
The most suggestive term in telecommunications
September 20, 2023The 90 days after the creation of a new area code in which either the old or the new code may be used to dial that area is called the permissive dialing period.
In Heaven, Everything Is Fine
September 17, 2023I have an idea about what happens after you die. I think when you go to heaven, St. Peter lets you in, they show you to a room. You take a sauna, somebody brings you a plate of cookies or a slice of cake. Then you take a nap.
Later on, when you're ready, they take you to a huge room, and everyone you've ever met is there. And everybody gets together and tells each other exactly what was going through their fucking heads. Then you all have a good laugh about it all. I see lots of back slapping and smiling eyes.
Wouldn't that be a great thing to look forward to?
Vocabulary: That Vu That Yu Du So Well
September 11, 2023Déjà vu: a false sense that something new has been seen before
Jamais vu: a feeling or impression that something familiar is unfamiliar or is being seen for the first time, like when you repeat a word so many times that it suddenly loses meaning and sounds alien
Presque vu: the illusory sense of having something on the tip of your tongue, or that a mental epiphany or breakthrough is about to occur
I wonder if the French have a word for the strange feeling that something wonderful has just happened, but you don't have any idea what?
Like Butter
September 11, 2023You know, it's funny... the other day I just plugged in a backup hard drive that I haven't used in about 4 years. I looked at all the stuff was working on again, none of which I have thought about since and most of which I hadn't even remembered, and realized, "Wow, that was a really long time ago."
So I think the frequently-noted sensation of time seeming to pass more quickly as you get older has more to do with how often we think of something. The more often you think of something, the more recent it seems; but be reminded of something actually relatively recent but which you haven't thought back on even once since it happened, and the full weight comes to bear of just how long it's been, just how much time has passed since things that were even far more recent than long-ago things that…
Man’s Fate: Stone antennae waving
September 10, 2023Link: A Geologist Investigates a Mass Extinction at the End of the Permian Period
A friend commented on the above as a warning.
Well, I do believe we need not to treat the world like an infinite resource, or to assume we can't push things past the tippng point, but the good news is, the Permian extinction event was both unusually catastrophic and very fast as these things goes... it took only about 60,000 years, or, roughly 12x as long as recorded human history. And whatever happened, it was very bad — the trilobites had ruled the world for nearly twice as long as the dinosaurs would when, in a geologic blink of an eye, they, along with 96% of the other plant and animal species living at the time, vanished forever. But despite it, 250 million years later, here we are, in full flower, and…
The Advice For All Seasons
September 10, 2023An Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be always true; in all times, and in all situations; in sadness, and in happiness; in adversity, and in prosperity.
After a lengthy period of debate amongs themselves, at last they presented him with the words:
"If you lived here, you'd be home by now."
Man’s Fate: The Beaked Shall Inherit The Earth
September 10, 2023I believe after humans wipe themselves out a generation or two from now, the eventual next dominant species on earth will be descended from corvids. Most people think it'll be cockroaches, but corvids are already as intelligent in some ways as human children and comparably good at problem solving, they have the biggest brain volume per body mass on earth except for humans, and, they can fly away from danger. Sounds to me like a recipe for success once the hairless apes with the guns are out of the way.
Linguistic Reminder: A Kudos For Your Many Agenda
September 10, 2023Remember: 'Kudos' is singular. 'Agenda' and 'data' are plural.
'Nachos' is also singular. There is no such thing as one 'nacho'.
The Common Sense Conundrum
September 9, 2023It seems to me that a frequent problem with most people's talk about "common sense" is not that it isn't really so common. It's that it isn't really sense.
Truth is Unknowable, Truth is Apparent
September 9, 2023Truth is unknowable, because we can only know with our minds. I mean, no, of course truth is knowable.
I'm sure, to an ant, truth is apparent: follow formic acid trails, dig in soil.
To us, probably the same—the truth of whatever is our own equivalent of formic acid and digging. Broader by comparison, of course, but equivalent in terms of being constrained by limits we know nothing about, out there on the impenetrable edge of our own capacities.
I wonder what an ant makes of the beach, the shore, the ocean. The sky.
An ant works in the daytime, but I don't think it questions where the light comes from.
What don't we do?
Humor: etruscanmingle.com
September 9, 2023Time to renew again, and I just can't decide. I really thought this was going to be the domain I sold for a million bucks.
What can I say? Everything was different before the pandemic. I thought they might be coming back.
Business Idea: The Behavioral Marketing Dance Club
September 9, 2023This originally was posted in my blog Sloth And Dignity.
I just had a great entrepreneurial idea. With things opening up again, this might just be the jackpot.
Open a dance club. But, the twist is, there's bouncers inside. Only good dancers will be allowed to stay on the dance floor. If you're out there, and you're not a visibly good dancer, you're just bopping your head or lazily doing the white boy shuffle... you'll get a firm tap on your shoulder, and be asked to return to the bar area. Eventually, you have a dance floor full of really great dancers, and a crowd of looky-loos buying drink after drink because alcohol happens to be an efficient solution to a number of the mildly uncomfortable aspects of that situation.
Once this gets some buzz, I'm telling you, it would be hot as hell. It checks every…
Conversation: Music And A Higher Power
September 9, 2023via text message, 2/28/21.
Me: "Sometimes listening to Bill Evans I get a flash that those 12-step people are right, like there’s something out there much, much bigger than me."
MMcC: "Oh yeah. For sure. I have more to say about that than I can text."
MMcC: "Some things are really only knowable because of him."
Me: "It’s amazing. I’ve been listening to him on Pandora all morning, and, you know, they won’t stick to a single artist, so it’s a lot of piano jazz trios, and every time they flip from him to someone else or back it’s like a night and day difference. I was having a daydream, what if I could go back to being about 12 years old, and I thought, I’d probably ask my parents to get me a bunch of Bill Evans records. And then I thought, could 12-year-old me even begin to really…
