Jack Baty Daily

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👉 Let's try journaling at Baty.net/journal for a while, shall we? See you there.

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Some days I wonder if I'm reaching that age where the world is moving faster than I am willing to travel. How long before I don't have the energy to keep up?

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It seems as if everyone is either wildly desperate for AI to succeed or absolutely convinced it will fail. I don't understand why more people aren't simply curious and following along.

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Baty.net: Back to Org-roam

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If a company decides that it prefers to have people come into the office to do some or most of their work, that is a reasonable decision to make. If, as a result, quality people don't want to work there, that is also a reasonable decision. We keep pretending that one or the other is correct for all cases and that's simply not true. We act as if every person can handle remote work. Or that they can't. It depends, right?

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While many wring their hands and whine about the failures of AI, millions are using it every day to do all sorts of useful, real-world tasks. They're just doing it instead of over-thinking it. I find myself in both camps.

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I know, I'll run about a dozen queries in ChatGPT and then write about my wide-ranging, conclusive proof of whatever I wanted to be true about it in the first place.

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I came this close to moving this blog back to Eleventy. I'm deep into Emacs this week, which means I want to write everything there. I started copying recent posts from Tinderbox and after about 10 minutes realized that I've got a pretty good thing going with Tinderbox and I should leave well enough alone. So, for now, 👋!

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I have anxiety around watching people who might suddenly embarrass themselves in front of a crowd, so I am unable to watch awards shows. I'm pretty happy with the set of Oscar winners, but can understand how some might not be. I've avoided social media since Sunday because I don't need to hear all the bitching about why the Oscars are terrible, stupid, biased, and wrong. I'm spending my mental energy celebrating the winners.

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Baty.net: Renumbering my index cards

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I’m just sitting here staring at my big, beautiful computer screen and wondering whether computers still make me happy.

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And remember, you can’t fail if you don’t try!

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This is what happens when you choose to use an SSG for your blog and then decide to make it “easy” to publish. 😆

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I went to bed late, so when I woke up and looked at my Apple Watch I was pretty excited that Alice had slept until nearly 5:00 am before begging to go for a walk. Then I glanced at my (analog) wall clock and realized the time had changed.

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I’m realizing that I never think about my single-user Mastodon instance at Masto.host. This is great, but I also notice that I don’t ever want to think about it. Considering a low crawl back to Fosstodon.

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If your only moderation rule is: “1. Must Possess a Sense of Humor” it tells me that there’s a good chance that the you’re a jerk that doesn’t like it when people react poorly to the stupid/offensive things you say. Just me?

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Our walk this morning was through 4-6" of fresh snow. It was lovely. Wet, but lovely. Alice likes to scoop snow into her mouth as she walks along.

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I like rubber bands, push pins, paper clips, and pencils and paper. They all work on their own with no help from other tools (maybe the need for a sharpener disqualifies the pencil, but I'll still allow it). I dislike staples because they require a stapler, need a second tool to remove them, and cause ugly, irreversible damage to paper.

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Sometimes I'm reading the Tinderbox forums and just have to stop and marvel at how ridiculously clever it can be. A simple example of how to automatically link based on tags. Oh and I'm also always impressed by how ridiculously clever Tinderbox users can be.

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A boring photograph shot on film is less boring. This makes no sense, but it's true.

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Baty.net: Roll-103 (Leica MP/HP5)

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Looks like Gowalla is back. Huh.

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I have Tinderbox configured so that each individual entry here is a new node, where the text becomes the post. This means that each node needs a name/title. With short-form posts, like this one, naming them becomes tedious. It's friction I don't enjoy. On the plus side, each node then also stands on its own in, say, the Archives.

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I've written 3 daily notes today, on three different blogs. You'd think that I only had two blogs, baty.net and daily.baty.net, but NO!, I have baty.net and three different versions of daily.baty.net that I constantly waffle about.

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I used to find Kevin Kelly's relentless optimism to be refreshing. Now, I just think he's delusional.

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What if I just automatically add a default title to each post using the current time? Nice to not come up with titles for everything. Then, on the Archives page, I could add an excerpt of the first, say 10 words to the listing. (UPDATE: Done).

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A roll of 35mm film is in the scanner. So far, the images from the roll are boring, mediocre snapshots. But, the fact that they are boring, mediocre film snapshots makes them worth the effort.

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I am working toward spending more time offline than on. It hasn't been easy. Worth the effort, if I can pull it off.

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I came close today, once again, to moving this blog back to either Drummer or Eleventy. I didn't have a good enough reason, so we're still here. For now.

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I don't know how to limit the things I pay attention to. My days are filled with seeing a link on Reddit or whatever and thinking "Oooh! I want to try that!" and then losing a day or three tinkering and then never looking at it again.

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I'm enjoying one of those days during which I try to decide, once and for all, whether I will be using Denote or Org-roam for my notes. And by "enjoying" I mean "suffering through". I like aspects of both of them enough that it's preventing me from committing to either of them "forever".

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Hard rain mixed with snow during my 3:45 am walk with Alice this morning. We cut things short because it was rather unpleasant. She's now curled up on a blanket on the sofa while I wander the internet looking for something to distract me from doing my taxes.

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Baty.net: An Arc browser boost for a better Twitter experience

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I just want to do the things I'm interested in the way I want to do them. Why is that so much to ask?

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Baty.net: A fix for backlink display with Org-roam and Doom Emacs

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I continue to struggle with deciding what to post here and what to post over on the main blog. At this point I'm basically just choosing one at random. That's probably fine.

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Increasingly, I find that spending time online has a diminishing, corrosive effect on my psyche. It's not good for me.

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Thank god everyone has an uninformed opinion about AI that they just can't wait to publish.

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I stand by my claim that "Permanent Waves" is better a better record than "Moving Pictures"

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I'm still undecided between Tinderbox and Eleventy for this blog. Tinderbox is currently the front-runner, but I can't seem to convince myself that it makes sense long term. I've had a good day in Tinderbox, so right now I feel like it's exactly what I need. But I've also had fun in Emacs today and want to standardize on it as my authoring tool. So, stay tuned, I guess.

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