"Ethics don't scale up." (This is How We Get Moral AI Companies)

"That is the goal of all of life: becoming a Saint." (Josh Nadeau, Room for Good Things to Run Wild)

"And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild." (GK Chesterton)

The most exalted ideals are held in the modest structures of our lives: patterns that invite us to see, understand, replicate, and make new buildings that nurture life. (Pattern Recognition)

"Only by redefining leisure as no more than the absence of alienated labor has it been possible to so alienate us from our leisure that even our free time now becomes one more form of alienation, refined within an inch of its life, sliced and diced and parceled out into profit-generating chunks of captured attention. And now, it is with some horror that we realize—if we can—that even if we are quick to nod our heads in agreement, we are less and less capable of viscerally feeling the attraction of Marx's quaint vision of leisure as hunting and fishing and cattle-rearing and criticizing, not only because all of those activities strike us as far too much work, but because all of them require the sort of slow and luxurious attention that is itself no longer for us a simple pleasure but an offputting slog." (Alienated Leisure)

Fit check for my napalm era.

Burning tokens for the feeling of being in a sci-fi movie.

Trying to move this blog onto Github so that I can work on it remotely more easily, and, perhaps... agents? Who knows. Scaffolding, hooks, context: these are essentials of the agentic lifestyle.

Faced with the power to try almost anything, I struggle to think of anything worth trying.

In a blink of an eye, April. My interests wax and wane cyclically, some over longer periods, some shorter. Most recently: getting back into working with AI, which I had left off in November last year.

Back from holiday, feeling rested. Stepping away from work (even if work isn't busy) does wonders (although I always forget this after a few months). Have to find time to sit down to write and think about the year past and the year ahead, but I'm full-steam on trying to get personal photobooks done for 2025 and the past trip.

Toying with the idea of printing photographs at home, as a way of finding some terminus to the act of photography and to improve my ability to see. Plus, the possibility of using these as gifts for family and friends, as well as to produce zines/small runs of books (handbound?). There are many comments online that soberly remind me that it is more cost-effective to have them printed elsewhere, but I would miss out the immediacy, the experimentation/learning, the control, the process.

Testing this from my phone via Tailscale. I think it works? What a wonder, a sheer wonder!

Working on this photobook, I am anxious over whether it even matters, whether I should do it at all! Vanity of vanities. Still, I press on: sit with the feeling, let it wash over you, and do the work.

The struggle with having a space to speak is the temptation to do so indiscriminately, without the intervening space and time for chewing, digesting, fermenting, filtering.

Had Claude write a short .zsh script so I can log more quickly. I find that instead of developing more complexity in the blog templates/functions, I can just develop workflows instead.

Both children sick over the weekend, and largely stuck at home. Dashed expectations of what leave today would have looked like. Trying to focus on being present, but disrupted sleep is making it difficult! Still, managed to make some progress on the book project.

12:50 I sat outside, near the decommissioned yellow cable car, next to a group of colleagues over lunch. How many of such similar groups peppered the eateries across the island, with repeated dynamics, talking about travel and holidays, past and planned? An escape. The typical question: “So, do you have any travel plans?” And the anecdotes roll.

13:10 Zero Mostel Reads a Book. “The result, we think, is eloquent and amusing. We hope you like it. ... Published for the fun of it by The New York Times and dedicated to the American booksellers.”

(Some) vibecoding is coding in the ruins of a superior civilisation, begging the consolidated intelligences of the past to yield results that you don't quite understand. Counterpoint: but in reality, for most of us, technology is magic anyway, so we are always, already the recipients of technologies we cannot comprehend.

Resist the urge to make this more complex than it needs to be. Wisdom is in knowing the appropriate level of complexity and scale for the thing in front of you.