Notes

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power"

There is something to be said about the connection between ChatGPT, John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment and Dan Dennett's response to it, but I'm not totally clear what that would be. I'm leaning towards Dan Dennet being wrong, though.

It's that time of the year in Montreal, when you have to alternate between wearing your winter coat and spring jacket several times in the same week.

If I have learned anything from the Trump tariffs imposed yesterday it's that we've obviously all been underestimating penguins. Sneaky little devils.

I saw my first cyber truck the other night, "in the flesh" so to speak, and I was unprepared for the level of revulsion I would feel.

I have downloaded an app called "Buy Beaver" and I can't believe it's come to this

I can't be the only one who often catches himself saying "When I graduate" when I mean to say "When I retire", right?

Barcelona: Noisy, gritty, vibrant. Surprisingly many vermouterias. Seville: Beautiful, charming, fun. Surprisingly few barbers.

There is a glut of vermouterias in Barcelona, many of them with their own house blends and...I kind of love it?

Oh man, Daniel Dennet died? He's my first introduction to the philosophy of consciousness. I found he struck a good balance between scientific realism and the desire to preserve the reality of our personal conscious experience.

Weird how I literally just learned that I apparently share a birthday with both Emily Dickinson and...Ada Lovelace?

To some extent, the contrast between the IndieWeb and standard social networks mirrors the contrast between Linux and, say, Windows or MacOS. People keep asking when the former will become mainstream and it's kind of the wrong question to ask, because going mainstream was never the goal. The masses were never the target audience.

I'm kind of impressed with Github Actions. Easy to use, very composable.

So, I've ditched Netlify, opting instead for a raw nginx on a relatively modest VPS. I had heard some horror stories of people being charged thousands of dollars over a denial of service attack.

So far so good. I no longer have to worry about running out of build minutes either.

TIL that the maxim "My country, right or wrong" has a second part: "If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right"

Wow, the Brontë family was kind of cursed, eh?

Try as I might, I simply cannot seem to get the hang of that "food flip" chefs on TV do when they're frying something.

Good article. I find myself becoming more sympathetic to this point of view the older I get. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/06/the-perils-of-innovator-mindset

Some days I think I'm a Sans Serif soul and other days I think my soul is full of Serifs. It's like Jekyll and Hyde, but which is Jekyll and which is Hyde?

I classified a lentil curry recipe on my website as "easy" and a friend of mind disagreed, pointing to the chopping it required and it never occurred to me that the necessity of chopping would disqualify a recipe from being easy, but here we are. And I guess that makes sense?

Pistachios. The clams of the nut world.

I think I need to read some of this person's stuff. She apparently recreated Around the World in Eighty Days with 8 days to spare.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly

I just read a quote that said that the brain is "a machine for jumping to conclusions" and I don't know why but this feels so true.

I did a zoom presentation today and one of the audience took a screenshot of me talking. I looked pretty crazed. I'd be fucking terrified of me.

Does anyone else imagine that the earworm currently ringing in their head as they walk on the sidewalk is actually part of the soundtrack in the movie of their life?