Hi! I'm Jack 👋

I asked Claude to summarize my recent blog posts. Here's what it came up with:

The overall picture is of someone deeply thoughtful about their digital tools and workflows, but perhaps caught in analysis paralysis about the "right" way to do things. Your writing suggests both technical sophistication and a desire for simplicity that sometimes conflict with each other.

Claude, when asked about me

That's no hallucination.

The mental overhead of "switching tools" is less than you think. Probably much less than the effort it takes to shoehorn everything into one tool.

If you honestly think that every person who is excited about AI is either a shill or a sucker, then I feel sorry for your world view.

If your idea of fun is finding ways to tear down things that people cherish, I feel sorry for your world view and we probably can't be friends.

The world before social media was bigger. I'd like to return to that world.

This isn't my usual style, but it's smooth and comforting today.

I continue to overthink everything related to my blog(s). I want specific things for specific posts, depending on my mood that day. It’s exhausting. The dream of course is to have One Blog. I have 4 active sites right now. That’s more than one, for those who are counting.

The new baty.photo blog I’ve set up for posts about photography feels like the right move. That one stays. I like using Ghost for that.

It’s the daily.baty.net thing that has me conflicted. I like how both the Tinderbox and (currently) Kirby versions work. They’re good for showing a rolling set of random stuff, separated by day. baty.net, running Hugo, is less suited for it. It’s a combination of long posts, short posts, and these daily notes. The daily notes don’t feel like they belong there, which is why I keep trying to move them elsewhere. Except I don’t much feel like maintaining two places. Both the Kirby and Tinderbox versions are custom and fairly complex to use and maintain. Do I really need more of that?

Thing is, none of this matters. Most folks visit via RSS anyway. And those who do actually come here, well, they don’t really care how it works. They just want to read the latest stuff (for some reason).

OK, it just happened again. I’m reading this and realizing it doesn’t belong in a daily note. It should be a separate post. In Hugo that means moving a file on disk and renaming it and modifying the front matter. Ugh, right? Using Kirby, I just toggle “Show title” and it does the right thing. Now what? Kirby isn’t static. It’s not difficult to host, but it’s not simple, either.

See how I am? Like I said, it’s exhausting.

(Originally posted on baty.net)

And then later, I moved back to Tinderbox and pasted this there.

The incessant hand-wringing over the "dangers" of LLM use has become so tedious. People who have no idea what they're talking about are pasting together bits from other social media rants and telling us WHAT WILL DEFINITELY HAPPEN if we continue to use LLMs. None of us have any idea what will happen, so please stop pretending that you do.

I'm finding that I have little patience for writing anything more than a few sentences. It makes putting together "real" blog posts too much work, so I post short bits here or on Mastodon instead. I don't know that I care.

Can you imagine what things would be like for me if I'd have just stuck with one or two approaches to everything. Given any task, I probably have 3 or 4 ways of doing it, each of them wildly different, but fully formed. This means I have a decision to make for everything all the time. It also means that I second guess every decision. Every time. It's kind of exhausting.

I was watching a video in which a long-time successful photographer was describing his motivation and ideas and creative approach and all I did was skip ahead and yell, "BUT WHAT CAMERA DO YOU USE!?" and now I'm disgusted with myself.

I'm thinking that sitting at a computer all day is bad for my health, mental and otherwise.

I imagine life without being able to consult my many deliverables from my phone and some unpleasant part of my personality sends a jolt to the pain and nausea centers, hitting the intersection of old work trauma and pigheaded nerd completionism.

Mike Hall - Seeking Friction

I know the feelings, but I'm learning to repress them. I've also been thinking a lot about the value of friction. What is just the right amount?

Since I'll be down to a single computer soon, I thought it would be fun to move things out of the ~/Sync folder, since I won't be needing that.

hahahahaha

Do you have any idea how many places I hard-coded that path? I knew there'd be some, but my life the past two days has been all about updating paths. In scripts, code, settings, symlinks, everywhere. It may have been a mistake.

Well, the Ghost blog is down this morning, so I have no choice but to dust off this here blog and do something with it while I wait.

But. With the social media system fragmenting and falling down, our inboxes choked with newsletters, search mangled by AI and the slopocalypse cresting the battlements, curation matters.

Warren Ellis

When I visit my blog, I want to see something. Something more than just an index of post titles. That's boring. Efficient, but boring.

I'm trying to reel things in a bit, blog-wise, so I'm focusing my blogging at baty.net for now. See you there.

I created a new, empty Tinderbox document today.

It's meant to be an antidote to the Emacs Fatigue I've been feeling recently. A nice outliner and map views, timeline views, fancy exports, smart agents, etc. I want it to make my notes more immediately useful. We'll see.

There's a difference between "having my notes in plain text" and making that text immediately useful. I focus a lot of attention on the former, when the latter is more important.

There's a new macOS email client in town: MailMaven.

I downloaded the beta and played with it for a few minutes. Looks fun, and really customizable. Thing is, I'm happy with reading my email in Emacs, or Apple Mail if I get all pointy-clicky. Is it possible my phase of futzing with various email clients is coming to an end? I kind of hope so.