Dispatch #22 (December 2024)

By David Eisinger · View original post

I lost my notebook. I’ve been keeping a Bullet Journal-style notebook for the last several years. It’s got everything in it: my daily log, journal entries, short- and long-term todo lists, all my upcoming events, meeting notes, woodworking plans, everything. And I lost it. I brought it to a 1-on-1 meeting with one of my guys at a local bar, and then rushed out to make it to daycare on time, and somewhere along the way, I misplaced it.

Once I realized it was missing, I retraced all my steps from that evening, thinking maybe I’d left it on top of the car, but no luck. I was on grief stage four, wallowing in depression, when I stumbled on an article on Daring Fireball that’s really about Trump’s victory, but that uses his father’s lost wedding ring as a framing device. It hit … hard.

But that story ends on a positive note, and guess what? The next morning, I got an email from a kind soul who found my notebook on top of a parking meter, and got it back that afternoon. The first thing I did when I got home was to order an AirTag and a little holder to attach it to the wire binding. Never again.

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We ventured to upstate New York to spend Thanksgiving with my sister and her family. Ended up skipping the Troy Turkey Trot – it was miserable out, though I wish I’d just gone for it. It was a perfect way to usher in the winter. Sarah Beth & co. were wonderful hosts.

I loved this quote from Freddie DeBoer about what he’s thankful for:

Thanksgiving. No commercialism or materialism. No overt religiosity. No stress about getting the right presents. No pressure to find a cool party like with Halloween. The weather of late fall, the natural rhythms of harvest and feast before the winter, the pleasure of a holiday devoted to the concept of being grateful. The football, the family, the food. The after-meal nap. The wonderfully laidback nature of the whole affair. My favorite holiday.

I’ve outgrown the music setup I built a few months ago, and ordered a three-tiered rack to hold my synths.

This has been a ton of fun – I can play chords on the Prophet with my left hand, melodies on the Bass Station with my right, drums + sequencing with the Circuit, and then the SP-404 at the end for effects. Next up: build a simple workstation, add a mixer and MIDI interface to drive more instruments.

Random small stuff:

• I biked the Neuse River Trail with a friend – gorgeous, safe, no traffic lights. I need to make this a regular thing.
• I’ve been walking in the evenings after my family goes to bed as a way to stay off my phone, and I started carrying a backpack with a 20-pound weight in it. This has had surprising benefits – all my back pain is gone, and I can carry a toddler for miles.
• I added spellchecking to this site, and wrote a post about it. It’s funny to see the patterns in my writing, like my tendency to smash words together.
• I ordered a record player on Black Friday after nerding out about them with my brother-in-law. I’m going to limit myself to one record a month. First up: J Dilla’s Donuts.

This Month

• Adventure: celebrating THREE YEARS of Nev; Greensboro for Christmas; Mexico to ring in the new year and celebrate our five-years anniversary
• Project: music workstation
• Skill: subtractive synthesis (read the Bass Station manual, learn all the knobs)

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: Graveyard of Demons, Larry Correia
• Non-fiction: Dilla Time, Dan Charnas
• Music: Donuts, J Dilla

Links

• Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business

  Large language models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT and Claude.ai are whizzy and cool. A lot of people think that they are going to be The Future. Maybe they are — but that doesn’t mean that building them is going to be a profitable business.

• Ella’s First Website

  I could go on about all of these things, but I won’t. Instead I will say that I am so incredibly proud of Ella. I am lucky to be the dad of such a smart, creative, hilarious, curious, and yes obnoxious girl. I hope this is but one of many many many many many many creations that leave her head and make their way out into the world. I love you so much, Ella.

• Stinky Gifts From Your Idea Kitty

  Your mind will never improve at finding good ideas; that cat will always deliver 90% crap. What changes is you. You somehow teach yourself to sort and salvage. You learn to forgive yourself faster, to bury the dead, and to pay proper respect to Nature’s harsh whims. You name this new feeling “intuition” and “taste” and sometimes “luck”.

• Signls

  Signls (pronounced signals) is a non-linear, generative MIDI sequencer designed for music composition and live performances, all within the terminal. It allows you to create complex, evolving musical patterns using a grid-based approach. You can place nodes on the grid, and these nodes can emit signals, relay them, or trigger MIDI notes. There are 9 different types of nodes to explore, each with its own unique behavior.

• Is there really a way to push back on the complexity of the web?

  I don’t think everything should be a React app! I want more things to be like Flickr used to be, and GitHub used to be. But at the same time, I don’t see an obvious way out of the current dynamics. Yelling is popular but the track record isn’t very good. Being quietly annoyed about the web’s descent into complexity, my preferred approach, doesn’t work very well either.

• The Cleanse

  A friend calls this turtling. Pulling your head inside your shell and hiding. It’s quite comfortable here.

• Getting Stuff Done By Not Being Mean to Yourself

  Yesterday, I finally realized that this method would never, ever work. I was shocked. But it never, ever has. I’ve been after myself on this score for, what, like ten years? Had it ever worked once in that time, I asked myself. No! I said immediately.

• MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

  Today marks two years since I first set up an e-ink display in my mom’s apartment to help her live on her own with amnesia. The display has worked extremely well during those two years, so I’m sharing the basic set-up in case others find it useful for similar situations.

• Wind the clock

  Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right.

• It’s the “1998” of the AI Revolution. So Why Can I Safely Ignore It?

  I don’t say all of this to revel in my curmudgeonly Luddism. I say it because I’m living proof that you can be a fulfilled, modern, very online, technical expert & creator and completely sit out this hype cycle. Seriously. You can just not use any of these generative AI tools.

• On Working With Your Passion

  I think this - be it romanticized fantasy or actual historical fact - is what a lot of us programmers, deep down, desire from our professional life. Sadly, we’re not celebrated geniuses working at the research department of a telecomms monopoly during the rise of an empire. We’re instead doing yet another customer checkout form for a mid-sized e-commerce site, helplessly watching our profession slowly, as Marx put it, “sink into the proletariat”.

• How many hobbies is too many?

  Hobby is capitalism’s word. It’s a crumb from capitalism’s table. Capitalism is happy that you have a hobby, especially if it can sell you HO-scale train sets to complete it, but that hobby can never be taken as seriously as what capitalism might need from you. (Oh, and that thing capitalism might need from you? Well, design is your passion, so they don’t really need to pay you adequately for that, do they?)

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