Dispatch #31 (September 2025)
By David Eisinger · View original post
Big month! Nico took his first steps. Nev’s onto a new school (well same school, but moved from the 0-3 building to the 3-5). She seems to be taking to it pretty well, but keeps asking if she can go back to being a little girl, which is adorable and absolutely heartbreaking.
We spent a week with my family up in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The highlight was Nev running wild with a whoopie cushion, blasting strangers with fake farts and running away cackling “MY TOOTS ARE THE BEST.”
Next we spent Labor Day weekend up in Brooklyn for a high school buddy’s wedding. He owns and runs a music venue called Silo where they held the event. Super fun, but I’d say “I don’t live like that anymore” if I ever actually lived like that.
Finally, I just got back from a bachelor weekend on Lake Gaston. Now I’m just looking forward to ten days of treating my body with respect.
Half-marathon training is going pretty well. Managed to get about 20 miles in while we were at the beach. Felt great, though I’ve struggled to reach that kind of mileage in the weeks since. Need to buckle down in the remaining five weeks and I should be able to at least finish if not match my time from previous years. I’m eyeing some new shoes – maybe these? Running shoes are crazy these days, and I can’t tell if all these technical advancements really make a difference for someone of my ability. If you have any thoughts/recommendations, let me know.
I vibe-coded another tool called pgpull for pulling PostgreSQL data dumps from remote servers. ChatGPT did 98% of the work, including some nice fish auto-completion. It’s available on SourceHut.
This post about how much personal information EXIF data gives away led me to check the photos on this site. Despite removing almost all of the actual photo data, I was still including all of the metadata, which runs counter to the privacy preservation I’m going for. Adding -strip to the ImageMagick call clears it all out, and as a nice bonus, cuts the file size roughly in half.
This Month
- Adventure: taking the family to Copenhagen for about a week; looking forward to Lego House, Tivoli Gardens, and tooling around in a bakfiets
- Project: I had this idea to build a digital version of this fidget toy about a year and a half ago that never went anywhere; I’m gonna see if ChatGPT can help
- Skill: live recording (as opposed to sequenced) samples + bass lines
Reading & Listening
- Fiction: The Fox, Frederick Forsyth
- Non-fiction: The Book, Alan Watts
- Music: Getz / Gilberto, Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto
Links
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At the end of the day, we must remember that innovation is a bargain. We often consider what technology promises to enable for us, without considering what it will almost certainly disable. Most of the time, we fail to stop and consider the tradeoffs. Perhaps e-bikes may give us a metaphor to frame our thinking.
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“It Was Horrible”: Inside Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy’s ‘Mad Max’ Feud
That scene where you see Tom with Charlize on the bike and all the Vuvalini and the Wives behind, intermingled—that scene was probably the biggest change in seeing Tom really soften to Charlize in real life. We were all unprepared for how he performed that, and then I walked off and Charlize was walking back, and I said, “Geez, Charlize, that was amazing. Did a light switch go off? He was great.” She was quite taken aback by it, too. But it was great because that’s when you can see that Max and Furiosa really are a team.
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We must build AI for people; not to be a person
AI progress has been phenomenal. A few years ago, talk of conscious AI would have seemed crazy. Today it feels increasingly urgent. In this essay I want to discuss what I’ll call, “Seemingly Conscious AI” (SCAI), one that has all the hallmarks of other conscious beings and thus appears to be conscious.
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What to read? Big questions as filter and frame
Your favorite problems form a prism that separates incoming information into a spectrum of ideas — a frame that allows you to deliberately filter distractions, direct your attention, and nurture your curiosity.
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What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?
In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like Marcus seem increasingly moderate. Such voices argue that this technology is important, but not poised to drastically transform our lives. They challenge us to consider a different vision for the near-future—one in which A.I. might not get much better than this.
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I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them.
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Maurice Parker - Zavala Will Always Be Free
The way I usually explain it is like this. Imagine you made furniture your whole life, but your employer only gave you pallet wood to use and half the time needed to make a piece. You were good at it and loved furniture, but were unfulfilled at your job until you retired. Now you can make furniture using walnut and take the time needed to make something you are proud of.
