I'll be hanging out exclusively at Baty.net for a while. Hope to see you there.

I brought the SL2 to my parents' house yesterday so I could document our Easter celebration. I took six photos. All of them were taken from the chair I was already sitting in. None were good. It seems I can't even be bothered to get out of my chair in order to take a photo.

Sold the Fujifilm 56mm f1.4 lens this morning. I'll miss that one, but with no Fuji cameras around it's not much use :).

Freddie deBoer asks a fair question:

Of course, none of this means that these LLMs and similar probabilistic AI-like models can’t do cool shit. They can do very cool shit, and I’ve never said otherwise. What we might want to ask is why so many people are so invested in believing that they can do more than cool shit.

So I spent a couple days moving Baty.net from WordPress to Blot. Now what? I won't need to worry much about it today, because it's Easter and I'll be hanging out with family most of the day, which is nice.

I missed posting yesterday because I became convinced that I wanted to move baty.net over to Blot, like this. After several hours of catching up by migrating posts from late 2022, I was into January 2023's posts when I ran out of steam and started wondering why I was doing it in the first place. Typical me, right? I'll probably finish migrating content today, then decide if I want to actually replace baty.net again. I swore I wouldn't. Again.

Baty.net: Blot is just right. (I told you!)

FYI I use ChatGPT every day. I just don't share every single conversation I have with it.

This is still happening:

6:00am: “Plain text is The Way!”
7:30am: “Plain text is unnecessarily limiting and living there is wasted opportunity!”
5:00pm: “It happened again today, didn’t it?”

Me, one year ago

OK so I don't think I can continue to stomach using WordPress. What I want is a simple way to post content to a blog, but I want to use Markdown. I want it to be like Blot. Hmmm.

I haven't been shooting much film recently. Hell, I haven't been shooting much of anything.

I thought I wanted to build a Hugo blog from scratch. No template, theme, or anything. That was a terrible idea. I'm much better suited to modifying something that already exists.

Ordered Tim (Wait But Why) Urban's new book, "What's Our Problem?". I'm looking forward to this one!

Wavelength needs a little work. I can't select text using the mouse on my Mac. I really need to search for messages. And I want emoji reactions to messages. Also, many of the groups I'm in tend to just reuse one or two threads, which kind of defeats the purpose. I have that in Signal already. It's a nice app, and it's early, but I'm eager to see improvements.

I wrote, in Back to Org-Roam, "Since moving this file into Org-roam, I’ve turned each book’s heading into its own node, making it easier to search for a book or to link between the book and its author note or a concept note". I've not used this a single time since then, and probably won't. Once again, "but what if?!" guides my hand and adds nothing.

I'm telling you, using the WordPress editor is the most frustrating experience. After selecting text, I often can't cut or delete it. Today, it became a game of whack-a-mole while trying to add a quotation with citation. The quoted portion kept reverting to a normal paragraph. I ended up with two quotation blocks, but when I deleted the empty one it also deleted the other one with it. I'm about ready to pitch the whole thing.

The best way to get approval is not to need it.

Hugh MacLeod

An email from LinkedIn. Subject: "People in the United States follow these creators." jfc.

I'm still wildly happy with Org-mode, but I'm noticing another bout of Text File Fatigue coming on. I may try riding this one out instead of changing everything for a week. The wiki may see a little love, though.

All the 'splaining in the world that ChatGPT isn't actually "intelligent" and that it's nothing more than a predictive text engine forming "statistical associations between terms blah blah" is just shouting into the wind. Normal people will simply continue using the tool to do all sorts of things, for better or worse. It's unfortunate, but they don't give a shit about the "how".

It feels like my whole life is nothing but a patchwork of kludges and workarounds for ideas I had one day and then abandoned later.

And I’m sort of sick of technology. I feel like it gets in the way too much. It distracts from real life. It just keeps growing until we forget who we are.

John P. Weiss, It's Not in the Stars to Hold Our Destiny But in Ourselves

I lost at least an hour yesterday to your April Fools "jokes". They are none of the things you think they are. They're not funny, clever, unique, or interesting. They are only a waste of everyone's time. Please stop.

Goodreads email, after I finish a book: "You finished reading Some Book. Now would you either give us some free content by writing a review, or for God's sake at least buy something!"

Welcome to stay-off-the-internet day. Although I do feel like the number of silly April Fool's jokes have diminished recently.

I spent a couple of days making fun things using Midjourney but then I wondered what it was all for and stopped.

Baty.net: Printing daily.baty.net

This is a little sad, but so common:

I just tell Siri to play something and she gets it right most of the time. Not always, and when she doesn't, I've learned it's pointless to keep trying. I just don't listen to what I'd wanted to listen to.

Dave Rogers, Life's little frustrations

I used to write poetry because I thought poetry was just random sentences with line breaks inserted in unexpected locations. I'm not sure I was wrong.

When is this silly mobile internet fad going to go away? I need everyone to get back to developing for where the web belongs, on the desktop in a real browser.