Lmst

Brian Kerr boosted:

https://stamm.bandcamp.com/album/cleaner-cuts music for the first snow of the season

By which I mean: Emerson’s “Experience” is worth visiting if you haven’t yet, or lately.

Project Gutenberg HTML/ebook/other (free) → https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2945

Standard Ebooks has beautiful ebook version(s) (free) → https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ralph-waldo-emerson/essays

Also if you need an intro to the chamber of commerce in a small city in Australia, LinkedIn has your shit. Let me know.

The rest of that paragraph:

> “The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new and very unlike what he promised himself.”

It is in this spirit I proceed. What a pleasure it is that we can operate as individuals, together, and that things turn out new and very unlike what we’d planned.

I was (re-re-)reading Emerson’s ‘Experience’ at the time I deleted LinkedIn’s ‘Experience’. Emerson wrote:

> “The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked-for result.”

This ‘unlooked-for result’ is the thing. The blue websites don’t help—haven’t helped—can’t help. If it’s blue, ya blew it.

What motivated this, in part, is my discovery that deleting all of the ‘Experience’ section from my LinkedIn profile confounded the commercial dragon crawling around beneath that thing. I stopped getting the touts and messages that I previously ignored—but it was nicer to not get them in the first place. The ads changed from reasonably targeted to absurd (e.g., chamber of commerce for a tiny city I’d never heard of; car-wash point-of-sale systems; onsite IT for regions other than my own).

The changes I’ll make are to (1) discontinue posting links to bluesky (I never really engaged there, it was rotten from minute 1; I regret creating the account in the first place) and (2) discontinue posting links to LinkedIn (my current/prospective clients aren’t there [and have never been, in the 20 years I’ve been consulting]; people I want to keep up with otherwise I can do so otherwise, over cups of coffee or in glowing rounded rectangles or various backchannels).

Thinking this weekend about where and how I want to spend my time online in the new year.

I am pleased (approximately) with where the blog/newsletter has wound up, particularly the twice-monthly schedule. Which increasingly feels like I spend one and a half weeks listening, participating, reading, fretting, and then a day or two editing down to a short, no-horseshit reading length. Then I read my email. I value everyone who responds or replies, because that turns me toward the next topic.

It has been raining forever and a bunch over here; yesterday (Saturday) and today (Sunday) are the warm, clear Gray Maybe days in-between. Saturday was a lot of running around, errands, shopping, etc. When the mind wanders, let your feet follow. Doubly so if you are accompanying an eight-year-old around town. Sunday is some work outside on the house and in the ground. Ideal time to dig a hole if you need to.

We’ve arrived at:

https://mastodon.social/@koyalong/115696337646305266

The year has been a difficult walk but this is an indicator to me that we’re getting close to the end of the thing.

Brian Kerr boosted:

"Get the fuck out of my light cone", as the meanest thing a physicist can think of to say

@ike

I recommend that! I deleted the ‘experience’ section a while back and that was a big, immediate improvement. For whatever reason, that stopped 100% of spam and weird requests and stuff. I still post blog links there since some people read along that way. But it wouldn’t be a loss to stop doing that too.

Brian Kerr boosted:

Seriously, there ought to be a central place where every time an open source project either adds "AI" integration or code generated by "AI", the repo is forked from the last commit before infection so that someone can someday resume from that point.

(I'd have set this up already but I'm at an energy low and will be for a while yet.)

Brian Kerr boosted:

I have never wanted to order mealworms by mail more in my whole life.

Lunar halo was so huge and bright last night.

@phire

Out of This Furnace by Thomas Bell

https://upittpress.org/books/9780822952732/

Brian Kerr boosted:

If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times: repetition is the very soul of the net.

Brian Kerr boosted:

this is a time where we’re saying “shop small” and it’s extra important at a time where economic tightening means more people have to shop really carefully on price and time. So those who can afford to shop the local book, toy and grocery store, or buy music on bandcamp and support on patreon, etc., make a big difference!

Brian Kerr boosted:

I would not have guessed this was possible!

Vladan Majerech has found a one-dimensional spaceship in the Game of Life: a pattern just one cell high and 3,707,300,605 cells wide that, after 133,076,755,768 generations (during which it is not confined to the one-dimensional line, of course) recreates the starting pattern but translated two cells to the right.

https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?&p=222136#p222136

@jnl

In case this helps, I am familiar with the (sigh) ‘shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin’ discourse as applied to the cryptocurrency grift, not the ‘AI’/LLM grift.

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