-
§ It is now autumn. Welcome to my autumnal blog.
Inspired by Matt Kirkland and the fact that a perk of my job is that I can now visit a ridiculous number of local parks and museums for free, I’ve put together a bucket list of places I would like to visit before winter:
- The Botanical Gardens
- Holden Arboretum
- Shaker Lakes Nature Center
- Penitentiary Glen
- Lake Metroparks Farmpark
- The Fairport Harbor Lighthouse
- The Natural History Museum
§ I’ve been listening back to some old Vergecast episodes and landed on one where they discussed the big Reddit blow up as it was ongoing. Looking back on it all now, it’s clear that Reddit unequivocally won.
If you were to have asked me at the time, I would have predicted that either Reddit would make major concessions to developers or a serious platform competitor would emerge. Neither of those things happened. I don’t love this outcome but I think it has something to teach us about platform stickiness.
§ The state of third-party calendar applications is dire. Apple’s default calendar app is good for casual use but as soon as you need any additional features, settings, or customization the only apparent alternative available is Fantastical.
Probably most people just use Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook? Those aren’t what I am looking for either, though. I would love to see a new entrant into this space. No need for buzzy AI features. Just a solid, well designed, service agnostic calendar app.
§ Stable Audio from StabilityAI is impressive! A while ago, I found Riffusion which uses Stable Diffusion to generate images of audio spectrograms. Stable Audio, in contrast, uses a more traditional technique.
We’ve come a long way. Generated songs no longer sound like they are being played over an underwater gramophone. Still, anything with vocals is weird and inhuman but that is at least half the fun!
§ I saw my first spotted lanternfly this week. So far we’ve been able to largely avoid them in northeast Ohio. I’m worried that might not last too much longer.
§ I bought two pairs of pants a couple of months ago that I still haven’t worn because I didn’t realize until it was too late that they didn’t have a coin pocket.
I have been carrying AirPods in that strange little fifth pocket every day since 2017. It has become an integral feature of my wardrobe in a way that I had not consciously appreciated until it wasn’t there.
§ After the grave state of affairs last week, I am rewatching Utopia (2013). The writing is smart, the cinematography is excellent, and it has the best soundtrack since Twin Peaks, composed by Cristóbal Tapia de Veer of White Lotus fame.
§ I used Blender to animate a 3D model for the first time since college. Blender is still wacky and unintuitive but nevertheless I able to get everything working pretty quickly. Sometimes a ten second animation can communicate an idea more effectively than any amount of drawing and writing ever could.
§ I saw Alice Longyu Gao live on Saturday. The day before the concert her tour car and was stolen along with all of her equipment although you never would’ve known watching her show. It was great!
§ Links
-
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, The Verge:
At its fall hardware event Wednesday, [Amazon] revealed an all-new Alexa voice assistant powered by its new Alexa large language model. According to Dave Limp, Amazon’s current SVP of devices and services, this new Alexa can understand conversational phrases and respond appropriately, interpret context more effectively, and complete multiple requests from one command.
I wrote about how bewildering I found it that no major company had integrated large language model technology into their voice assistants back in January. January!
It’s the APIs that are key, says Limp. “We’ve funneled a large number of smart home APIs, 200-plus, into our LLM.” This data, combined with Alexa’s knowledge of which devices are in your home and what room you’re in based on the Echo speaker you’re talking to, will give Alexa the context needed to more proactively and seamlessly manage your smart home.
The big difference between conversational AIs like ChatGPT and traditional voice assistants is that the later has to interact with the outside world. If the new Alexa can’t turn on my lights and set timers that will be a regression. This sounds like it will use a ReAct pattern, which is a smart approach, but only time will tell how solid it actually is.
Ultimately, I think the reason that more companies haven’t yet introduced LLM-backed assistants is that they are an expensive replacement for a technology end-users have traditionally gotten for free. Amazon seems unsure about how they will handle that.
Limp said that while Alexa, as it is today, will remain free, “the idea of a superhuman assistant that can supercharge your smart home, and more, work complex tasks on your behalf, could provide enough utility that we will end up charging something for it down the road.”
Ironically, the two uses of the word “super” in the previous quote don’t inspire much confidence.
-
Architecture is a public art, a vernacular art, and a background art: it is created by a huge range of people, and experienced involuntarily by an even wider one. This means that we need architectural styles that are as accessible as possible, to the full range of people who live with what we build, and to the full range of builders who create it.
We enjoy creating things we can inhabit. We build blanket forts as soon as we can crawl. Later, we graduate to making treehouses and stick tepees in the summer and igloos in the winter. Failing that, we build things we imagine we could inhabit: Lego towers, sand castles, doll houses, vast Minecraft fortresses…
Once we reach adulthood, architecture—building structures—becomes inaccessible to all but the select few that have chosen it as a profession.
I’ve spent this summer building a small greenhouse in my backyard. It has been immensely satisfying to simply open its door and watch the way sunlight plays over its interior. To cheer it on as it withstands heavy wind gusts. To shelter under its roof during rainstorms. To know how to repair it because I put in all of the screws to begin with.
But my little greenhouse is also totally prohibited! I didn’t obtain a permit from my city before I started construction. At any time my local building department could mandate that I take it all apart and then fine me for the trouble. Of course, building codes and permitting serves a valuable function. Nonetheless, we need an outlet for amateur architecture because the desire to build doesn’t die after childhood.
-
§ My reMarkable tablet is seeing less use each week. I am now back to primarily using a physical notebook. I went with a nice large A4 spiral bound notebook which I have been using in “landscape mode.”
I appreciate being able to physically collage elements together. Paint samples and printed Fusion 360 renders can live inline with my notes. I can draw on top of them, highlight sections, and cross things out.
Paper preserves history. The digital note taking dream is that everything is infinitely flexible—you can move, erase, replace, and rewrite losslessly—but maybe that is a detriment to creativity. When looking back at old digital notes, only the final result is visible. The iterative process leading up to it is lost.
§ Apple’s “Wonderlust” event was on Tuesday. Some brief thoughts:
- Apple Watch Series 9 recognizes a new “double-tap” gesture which is almost identical to the “select” gesture on the upcoming Vision Pro headset. I find this fascinating—the iPod click wheel, two finger scrolling on the mac, slide to unlock, pinch to zoom—Apple has a long history of introducing ubiquitous gestures. “Double-tap” is the first new multi-platform gesture in a long while and the first one that isn’t mediated by a touchpad or screen.
- USB-C is long overdue. I am super excited it is finally on the iPhone.
- Titanium seems great but the new colors couldn’t be more boring.
- The new action button on the iPhone Pro models is alluring and will probably be the single largest factor temping me to upgrade.
- The Pro models will be able to capture 3D Spatial Videos for the Vision Pro. Very cool but a lot was left unsaid. What is it like to view these videos on the iPhone itself? Will it be able to capture Spatial Photos too? How much depth data can you actually capture from two lens' so close together? I wouldn’t be surprised if next year’s iPhone 16 features a new camera arrangement for more robust spatial image capture.
§ My Keurig has been dying a slow death. I hit a breaking point this week when I realized it just really isn’t the right tool for the role it serves.
Most of my single-serving caffeine consumption comes from my espresso maker. The Keurig’s primary job is to fill up two travel thermoses each morning, a task that requires four K-Cup pods to accomplish. As I was waiting for one of those K-Cups to sluggishly brew, it finally occurred to me that brewing a traditional pot of coffee would be easier, faster, cheaper, and far less wasteful.
After spending an afternoon reading up on reviews I ultimately decided to get Oxo’s 8-cup brewer.
The coffee it makes is actually good.
Previously, I often wouldn’t finish my thermos full of Keurig coffee. It served more of a utilitarian role. The coffee it produced wasn’t bad, by any means, but it absolutely wasn’t good. By comparison, the coffee that the Oxo makes is cleaner, smoother, and is far less acidic. It is actually good! I’ve been finishing my coffee on my drive to work and then wishing I had more!
On Monday, I got a call from the dealership. I assumed it was to tell me my car was ready for pick up.
Nope.
They successfully replaced the BECM, the reason my car was in the service center to begin with. During reassembly, however, the technician broke a dozen of the bolts that attach the battery assembly to the underside of the vehicle.
The technician was calling to tell me that, for not entirely convincing, warranty-related reasons, they will need to order replacement bolts directly from some central General Motors parts center, which could take a while. At least they replaced the blown tire on the loaner car.
I was able to pick up my car, finally, on Friday. Wow! After almost two weeks of driving a big gasoline-powered SUV my tiny plug-in hybrid feels unbelievably nimble. It is good to be back.
§ I desperately need some good TV show suggestions. I’m wallowing in the depths of Hulu right now and it is getting bleak. Seriously, send me an email.
§ I am now officially a source behind some hard hitting investigative journalism.
§ Links
- Same.energy and River
- An interview with Coolmath Games. “I’m, like, in the scene now. I have a lot of connects who do other social media stuff. I’m friends with Axe Body Spray and C4 Energy and like, TRUFF Sauce, Heelys—”
- A literary history of fake texts in Apple’s marketing materials
-
§ I saw the Cleveland National Airshow for the first time in… 15 years? I really don’t consider myself to be an airplane guy but let me tell you: aerobatics is exhilarating. It just is.
§ I met with a group of engineering students who I will be advising on a large interactive project. Something along the lines of Daniel Rozin and Peter Vogel. It is all in the very early stages but I can’t wait to see what they end up creating!
§ Joining some photo sharing sites, years after leaving Instagram, has been a surprisingly fulfilling experience.
I capture a lot of images—and I am proud of some of them—but they get lost in a monolithic photo library filled with momentarily useful screenshots and pictures of plants for use with Apple’s Visual Lookup feature, which I employ constantly.
I’ve tried creating a separate iCloud photo album for my favorite shots but that never seems to stick. The social aspect of sites like Flickr and Glass, while not particularly important to me in its own right, has a knock-on effect of making me more mindful in my curation and editing process.
§ The great thing about running this website is that I can use it as a hub for everything that I post online—as they say, “publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere.”
In that vein, I set up a new photography page on this blog. It is its own little thing so you won’t see new photos pop up in the main feed. You will have to subscribe to its dedicated RSS feed if you want to stay up to date as I post new stuff.
§ After reading all of the above, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I brought out “the big camera” for the first time in a few months. The picture quality is unquestionably better than my iPhone but it is also distinctly less convenient.
A standalone camera that automatically syncs with Apple Photos would go a long way towards alleviating that inconvenience.
Not too long ago Apple began offering third-party device manufacturers access to their Find My network so this idea isn’t totally outside the realm of possibility.
§ Huh, my car trouble last week was because of a BECM issue after all. I am very thankful I was able to get this all sorted out before my warranty expires.
Finally, to put a bow on this whole saga, I got a flat tire while driving down the highway in the loaner car. At least I still know how to change a tire despite not having done it since high school.
The dealership promises that my car will be ready for pickup on Monday.
I miss living somewhere with functional public transportation.
§ Links
- Manuel Moreale’s new People and Blogs interview series is delightful. So far, he has interviewed Manton Reece and Rachel J. Kwon.
- A list of browser-based single use tools
- A living web
- Gossip’s web
§ Recipes
- Tumeric rice
- Fair warning: this website is really rough. It crashes Safari on my phone unless I use an ad blocker. The recipe is great, though!
-
§ We have secured a wedding date: July 13, 2024.
§ It’s Labor Day weekend which means it is time for the county fair.
✓ Delicious milkshakes
✓ Adorable baby goats
✗ Pigs in tiny cages with names like “Porkchop”
§ The neighborhood park recently got pickleball courts installed. As someone who
- enjoys playing badminton and
- has never been remotely interested in tennis
I am curious to see where pickleball falls between the two. One of these days I’ll purchase the equipment necessary to find out.
§ I watched The Peripheral after seeing how angry John Gruber was when he learned Amazon had canceled the show’s second season.
Set in the year 2032, the restrained near-future speculative technology is the most interesting part. The glut of guns and violence would have benefited from a similarly disciplined approach.
§ Jury Duty was exceptional. I am sure all of the praise it has received will make it temping to create another season but I think that would be a mistake.
One of the actor-jurors, Edy Monica, also directed and starred in the short film Nicole which is excellent in a sort of Ryan Trecartin type of way.
§ On Friday morning my Chevrolet Volt suddenly stopped working. The battery indicated that was fully charged yet displayed zero miles of available range. It was extremely loud and there was a concerning sluggish quality to each acceleration and deceleration.
After I coaxed the car back home I tried restarting it and, suddenly, everything went back to normal? Bizarre.
It could be a BECM issue? If so, it is comforting to know that BECM issues can occasionally cause a sudden, random loss of propulsion altogether. I have 5,000 miles remaining on my 100,000 mile warranty so good timing, at least?
After calling—eleven—local dealerships I was able to find one with a loaner vehicle available—a 2018 Equinox.
The shop won’t be able to look at my car until next week though. To be continued.
§ I set up a Flickr account. No guarantees I’ll stick with it but it is great to see that it’s still going strong after all of these years.
I also started a Glass account which is the new hotness. It has much more of an Instagramy social focus which is a bit of a turn off but the interface is totally fun and modern.
§ Links
- A collection of anthropomorphic objects
- Singapore in color
- The great dissolve
- TextFX
- Matt Webb’s PartyKit sketchbook
§ Recipes
- Fresh mint ice cream
- I zested individual chocolate chips with a microplane before learning the correct method to add flaky chocolate shavings to ice cream. This wasn’t quite as tedious as it sounds but it was close.
-
Matt Webb continues to write the internet’s most thought provoking meditations on AI:
If we are going to have AIs living inside our apps in the future, apps will need to offer a realtime NPC API for AIs to join and collaborate […]
You create a “pool” or a cursor park or (as I call it) an embassy on the whiteboard. The NPCs need somewhere to hang out when they’re idle. […]
NPCs can be proactive! The painter dolphin likes to colour in stars. When you draw a star, the painter cursor ventures out of the embassy and comes and hovers nearby… “oh I can help” it says. It’s ignorable (unlike a notification), so you can ignore it or you can accept its assistance. At which point it colours the star pink for you, then goes back to base till next time. […]
Cursor distance = confidence. When an NPC wants to be proactive, it can hover nearby. It can be pushy when it knows it can help. (It can remember not to pipe up again if it is banished.) There’s a lot of resolution to explore here.
Visual interfaces need a ‘suggestion language’ which is as good as ghosted text is for autocomplete.
Chat is a language model’s terminal interface—a critical affordance when low level input is required but a poor choice when discovery and intuitive ease of use is a priority.
-
§ I visited “the smelliest food festival in America” and purchased a handful of different garlic varieties that I’ll try planting in the fall.
I made a revised prototype of my Technic / Tinkertoy inspired modular architecture building blocks this time using strut channel nuts embedded between two layers of 3/4” plywood.
I also placed an order for a Shopbot component that will increase my cut area from 2x4’ to 4x4’. I can’t wait.
§ I watched From which has big Haven vibes.
One of the primary differences is that Haven has more of a “monster of the week” structure which is to its benefit. The show-runners are able to take their time to draw out a compelling central plot while each minor story arc provides a drum beat that keeps things interesting on a week-to-week basis. Watching From, I found myself feeling frustrated by extended character-building storylines, looking instead for resolution on the show’s central mystery.
Ultimately, I recommend watching From if you enjoy mysterious location-focused shows like Lost, The Leftovers, and Haven. From might not be quite up there with the best of them but it is nevertheless a solid addition to the genre.
§ I finally had to fill my car up with gas for the first time in nearly two months. During the time that elapsed I used 7.27 gallons of gas and drove 2,190 miles for a total of 301 MPG. Not bad at all!
I realize that I am way off from my initial goal of “no more gasoline before Thanksgiving.” I am sure that if I were to only use my car for my regular commute to and from work I could have accomplished that goal—a majority of my gas usage came from out of the ordinary trips, drives out into the country, a trek across the state, etc.—that just isn’t particularly feasible though. A lot of the fun stuff here requires a bit of a drive! I’ll be totally satisfied if I can maintain an average around 300 MPG.
§ I guess there was a tornado in Cleveland Thursday night? I slept through it.
Possibly related: I’ve definitely caught a cold.
§ Links
-
§ We harvested five pounds of produce from the garden this week, nearly all of which were tomatoes. The san marzano, while still suffering from blossom end rot problems, is our heaviest producer by far.
§ My barber casually referred to my collection of random interests—building a greenhouse, growing and preserving food, making bricks, etc.—as “prepper stuff.” My reaction was to distance myself from the characterization but, thinking back on it now, I don’t know if I can pinpoint exactly what exactly I felt was so wrong about it.
I guess it is the popular association of peppers with end-of-the-world disaster scenarios, weapon stockpiling, and distrustful “every man for themselves” worldviews. Self-sufficiency is great, it is the underlying motivation that can cause problems.
I am fascinated by how things work. Bread making isn’t some innate ever-present skill. It is an arduous process that had to be invented, iterated, perfected, and passed down through generations. I am not going to grow wheat and then harvest, thresh, winnow, and mill grain every time I get a craving for fresh bread. Understanding the process, however, gives me a unique appreciation that I do not think I would otherwise have.
§ I have been enjoying Dark Noise, a white noise “sound machine” application.
The killer feature is the ability to create custom sound mixes. So far, I have make myself two primary mixes: a sleep mix and a mix to play during the day as I work. My sleep mix includes sounds like “rain on tent,” “windy trees,” and “crickets” while my daytime mix has “birds,” “wind chimes,” and “creek.”
As someone who likes to have audio playing in the background throughout most of my day, I am surprised I hadn’t given Dark Noise a shot until now.
§ I’ve only recently learned about the pawpaw tree which grows “the largest edible fruit indigenous to the United States.” It is native to Ohio and its fruit is said to taste similar to a banana or mango.
They ripen only during a short window of time in late September and early October. I’ll need to try to track some down then. If it tastes good I may try to grow one next to my maypop, another surprisingly tropical midwestern fruit.
§ I got a long-neglected Shopbot CNC machine up and running at work.
The cut area is only 2x4’ which is extremely limiting compared to the 4x8’ machine I’ve used in the past. Regardless, there is something deeply satisfying about drawing something on a computer and then watching as a robot cuts it out for you in real time.
§ Links
§ Recipes
- Tortilla Española
- This was pretty good but not quite as flavorful as I expected. It’s missing something but I can’t put my finger on it.
- Braised chicken with coconut milk, tomato and ginger
- It can’t compete with my other favorite braised chicken recipe but this was still delicious.
- Tortilla Española
-
§ The soil in my yard is something like 80% clay, 20% large rocks. The process of creating my hügelkultur left me with plenty of each.
The rocks were easy. I was able to add them to the dry stacked walls that define my garden beds.
The clay is the hard part. In the past I’ve collected it, along with all of my other unamended soil, in an unceremonious pile in a back corner of my yard.
I’ve always been interested in learning how to extract and purify the clay for pottery making, though, which is exactly what I tried this week.
It wasn’t as difficult as I anticipated it would be and the result was a large ball of clay that was, to my eyes, nearly indistinguishable from professional earthenware.
The plan now is to process the clay into bricks then use those bricks to make a small kiln.
§ I took Friday off to look at wedding venues. We have a date or, at least, an array of possible dates orbiting mid July of next year.
§ I didn’t know it was possible for blossom end rot to manifest inside of tomatoes. Like, the outside looks totally fine and then, once sliced, you’ll notice that the seeds are covered in a black goo.
I noticed this happening with my San Marzano tomatoes. After throwing out at least a dozen fruits with obvious exterior end rot, I finally picked a few nice looking ripe fruits but then only noticed the gross center after slicing them.
This is mostly annoying because I originally intended to can these tomatoes whole which I now won’t feel confident doing until I can resolve this issue.
§ I’ve been playing the New York Times Mini Crossword. Full-sized crosswords have always felt like too large of a commitment. Their bite-sized counterparts fill a nice sub-ten-minute niche right next to Connections.
§ I’ve been evaluating Lego’s new(ish) Spike robotics platform. I am inherently suspicious of proprietary systems like these although, after a couple of hours fiddling, I am beginning to warm up to this set. There is enough modularity and flexibility built in that I don’t feel pigeon-holed into particular pre-defined projects.
§ Links
- 54 years later, the world is finally ready for Turn-on
- A very long piano
- Oscilloscope Music
- The uncoloring book
-
§ Fresh peaches might be the best fruit. The key is to pick them ripe which makes shipping them next to impossible. This means you will need to find them locally. Now is the time to find for your local orchard. I promise it will be worth it.
§ I harvested all of the garlic that I planted in early May. I now realize that spring was the wrong time of year to plant garlic but, nevertheless, I am happy with my eight small, though well developed, bulbs.
§ I’ve embarked on a huge deep dive on modular architecture this week starting with Lego bricks and culminating in a prototype that aims to answer the question: “Can you build a house using enormous, wooden, Technic-style, 2x4s?”
§ Cabel Sasser wrote a fascinating post about the challenges that arise when designing public artworks.
This has been one of the most unexpectedly interesting facets of my job designing exhibits for an interactive museum.
some designers are amazing at imagining things, but not as amazing at imagining them surrounded by the universe. […]
It almost seems like there’s a real job here for the right type of person. “Real World Engineer”? Unfortunately, the closest thing most companies currently have is “lawyer”.
The challenge—and the fun—comes from the reality that the public will always interact with your work the way they want to. Your job is to guide their experience through thoughtful design, without the luxury of direct instruction.
§ Infinity Pool was wild. With Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, and Brandon Cronenberg you just know you’re in for quite a trip.
Brandon Cronenberg’s previous film, Possessor, had similarly striking visuals but ultimately didn’t stick with me as much as I expect this film will.
§ One of our quails was attacked despite being in a coop that we reinforced with two layers of 1/2” hardware cloth. It was all very upsetting. For now we’ve moved them into the greenhouse. While it isn’t ideal, in terms of heat, as far as I can tell it is basically avian Fort Knox.
§ Links
-
Google plans to overhaul its Assistant to focus on using generative AI technologies similar to those that power ChatGPT and its own Bard chatbot, according to an internal e-mail sent to employees Monday […]
As part of the move, Google is reorganizing the teams that work on Assistant… The move will involve eliminating dozens of jobs, Axios is told, out of the thousands of employees who work on the Assistant
Google Assistant isn’t as embarrassing as some of its competitors. Still, it was shocking to read that “thousands of employees” work on Assistant.
I’ve long bemoaned the fact that Google, Apple, and Amazon haven’t incorporated generative AI into their legacy “AI assistants.” Microsoft replaced Cortana with Bing AI a couple of months ago but I am not sure anyone ever used Cortana to begin with.
This is clearly a step in the right direction from Google. Apple and Amazon appear to be on a similar path themselves. It will be interesting to look back at the state of the assistants this time next year.
-
§ Our first red cherry tomatoes have ripened. They are a few weeks behind our crop from last year but no less delicious. We’re still waiting on the yellow and black cherries.
I also ate my first home grown summer squash of the season. The plant has been uncharacteristically prolific but, for whatever reason, many of its smaller fruits are suffering from blossom end rot. I tried supplementing with calcium and we will see if that helps.
§ OpenAI took its AI detection tool offline due to low accuracy. This isn’t surprising—I’ve seen a number of stories about professors rejecting student essays after they were inaccurately flagged as being AI written.
I suspect OpenAI primarily developed its AI detection capabilities for internal use, to avoid “model collapse” by filtering today’s AI generated content out of future training runs. When used this way, an overzealous classifier is totally fine. Sure, you might filter out some genuine content but that isn’t a huge deal. When the same classifier is used as the sole means to judge the authenticity of student work, however, false positives start to become a lot more impactful.
§ We got a new stove! It is a lot like our old stove except, in this one, the oven actually functions properly. The burners supposedly have a higher BTU rating too but that hasn’t had any noticeable impact, in practice.
§ I started digging a hügelkultur which I have been mistakingly calling a hinterkaifeck.
You might recall that I have been spending the summer sawing down a lot of tree branches and overgrown bushes.
The volume of branches this has produced has been challenging. Sure, making a wattle fence has been great fun but that only uses so much wood. I’ve started to annoy my city’s garbage collection service with the bags upon bags of sticks and leaves I’ve been attempting to throw out each week.
So, hey, maybe a hügelkultur would be perfect. You just bury some wood in the ground, plant things on top, and, as the wood breaks down, it feeds the growing plants above with a continuous supply of carbon.
§ Links
§ Recipes
I tried making cheese with raw—scratch that, “pet”—milk that I purchased from a local Amish grocer.
I spent a while trying to decide between a queso fresco and a farmer’s cheese before I realized that they are essentially the same thing. Mozzarella felt a bit too ambitious as an entry point.
The whole process was not as difficult as I expected. Warm up the milk, add acid, wait, scoop out the curds, drain. That is really it.
I also made ricotta with the leftover whey. I still have so much more whey left to use, though. I’ve read that you can use it in place of water in bread doughs. It is also supposed to have some unique qualities when used to soak beans. Some people make whey lemonade.
This whole experience, while fun, makes me disinclined to ever want a dairy cow. At more than seven gallons of milk per day, I would need to get way more into dairy before that ever became anything more than burdensome.
A goat on the other hand…
-
§ Each of our pepper varieties—jalapeño, cayenne, poblano, banana, and Hungarian—are all growing fruit.
Thanks to some early pruning help from the local deer population, two of our cherry tomato plants are still a manageable size. The San Marzano, however, is as vigorous as ever.
I don’t even know what to say about the blackberry. It has already totally outgrown the patch I planted it in last year. I am both proud and overwhelmed.
Our purple passionflower, which I had thought hadn’t survived the winter, has come back with a vengeance. There are shoots popping up as far as four feet away from the original plant. Researching more now, I see that it is considered invasive in some areas.
Humid weather earlier in the week gave way to a violent, cathartic, storm Thursday night complete with thunder, lightning, and hail. Relentless sheets of rain flattened our young, top heavy plants.
By the next evening, just about everything was able to perk itself back up. The only casualty was a large, fruit bearing stem of one of the cherry tomato plants.
§ I rode an e-bike for the first time. As an exercise device it was, of course, less effective than a traditional bicycle. As a means of transportation, however, it might be unbeatable.
The experience considerably expanded what I can see as a viable car-free commute. Unfortunately, my current commute would be upwards of an hour each way. Even on an e-bike that is not exactly viable.
§ After some struggle, I’ve finally made a breakthrough on my capacitive touch wall mural music sampler project. The turning point came when I decided to stop using MIDI altogether and instead use the Touch Board as a basic USB keyboard.
This was all made possible by finally finding an application I had been searching for this whole time—a simple, keyboard focused, sampler app.
The next step for the project is to start prototyping its physical design.
§ I’ve been playing Connections, the latest Wordle-esque puzzle game from the New York Times. The goal is to categorize a four-by-four grid of words into four separate groups based on their commonalities. Sometimes the solutions are straightforward—flute, clarinet, harp, oboe, all musical instruments—but often there are a few words included that make things a little more ambiguous. Each game takes less than five minutes to complete and it isn’t ever difficult enough to be frustrating but never so easy that it feels mindless—a tricky balance to strike for a game of this kind.
§ The Queen’s Gambit was captivating and further evidence for my theory that limited-run series’ are always better than their indefinite counterparts.
§ Links
-
It is not the most creative name they could have chosen, but Meta released a successor to their open source “Llama” language model yesterday.
Meta:
We’re now ready to open source the next version of Llama 2 and are making it available free of charge for research and commercial use. We’re including model weights and starting code for the pretrained model and conversational fine-tuned versions too.
Unlike the original Llama release, Meta took the extra step to license this new model for commercial use.
As Satya Nadella announced on stage at Microsoft Inspire, we’re taking our partnership to the next level with Microsoft as our preferred partner for Llama 2 and expanding our efforts in generative AI. Starting today, Llama 2 is available in the Azure AI model catalog, enabling developers using Microsoft Azure to build with it and leverage their cloud-native tools for content filtering and safety features. It is also optimized to run locally on Windows, giving developers a seamless workflow as they bring generative AI experiences to customers across different platforms.
Just unbelievable positioning from Microsoft. Now, not only is their infrastructure powering all of OpenAI’s models, they are now working with Meta to support the leading alternative to OpenAI.
-
§ My makrut lime plant has started growing a handful of tiny little fruits for the first time. I originally bought the plant for its aromatic leaves that are frequently used in Thai cooking. In my decidedly non-tropical climate I never expected to actually get any fruit. Exciting!
§ The Exploratorium Cookbook is such an unbelievable resource for building interactive educational experiences. Given my field of work, I am both shocked and a bit disappointed that I hadn’t heard of it until now.
A crucial detail is that the book doesn’t prescribe regimented, step-by-step projects. Instead, it sticks to cataloging broad concepts and suggests ways one might go about presenting them.
The way the book is structured as a series of numbered “recipes” reminds of the sequential architectural and cultural “patterns” from A Pattern Language. I wonder if they both could be used in tandem…
§ I have been working with MIDI this week, prototyping different approaches towards creating a capacitive touch wall mural that acts as a musical sequencer / drum machine.
It has been frustrating to learn that microcontrollers with great capacitive sensing capabilities, like the ESP32, are unable to send MIDI messages over USB. As I wait for a purpose built device to arrive, I’ve been using an old Circuit Playground Express which, frankly, doesn’t work particularly well for this use-case.
If you ever find yourself in a similar position, using MIDI in uncommon ways, I can’t recommend the application Midi View highly enough. It displays all of the information sent by connected MIDI devices in a straightforward, no-nonsense interface.
§ After resisting for a while, thinking it was just another quirky comedy, I started watching Beef. It’s much better than I expected! It helps that the episodes are short enough that the drama isn’t too heavy and the comedy isn’t too cloying.
Honestly, it may have been the title cards that first grabbed my attention. It turns out, the wild, maximalist, Egon Schiele-esque imagery was painted by David Choe, one of the show’s lead actors.
§ Does CVS employ cashiers nowadays? Surely they must, if only to approve alcohol sales, but I am not sure I can recall the last time I saw one. They have leaned heavily—more so than any other store I’ve visited—into self-checkout kiosks. The truth is that the future will almost certainly look less like Amazon’s fully autonomous corner stores and more like this.
§ Links
- Wild Heart Homestead
- Post-photography
- PlayHTML
- Virtual theremin
- Johnny Cash sings “Barbie Girl”
- The codex community corpus
§ Recipes
- Ginger-teriyaki beef kebabs
- I still unintentionally overcook my beef but I am gradually getting better. This recipe was delicious, especially with fried rice. I make it twice this week.
- Lemon butter feta chicken pasta
- This was one of my favorite meals in quite a while. Cream + chicken broth + lemon juice are a great trio.
-
The thing that I think made the internet such an interesting place in its early years was because it didn’t feel like a controlled environment. The chaos was everywhere. It was messy. It was grimy.
[…]
I will not say that this was perfect, but the chaotic effect was interesting, and interesting was often enough to continue using, because it meant there were always new surprises. For lots of people, chaos often breeds new ways of thinking.
[…]
Threads threatens to be social media’s Disney World.
Disney World has its place but I am more interested in the ragged edges, the avant-garde, social media’s… Chicago? But also the contemplative, slow, and deliberate—Lancaster?
Long live the open web.
-
§ I touched a floppy drive for the first time ever.
A lot of my new job, at the moment, involves contending with a huge library of interactive Adobe Flash programs.
As with floppy drives, I had never worked with Flash before although its legacy has always loomed large in the Creative Coding circles I frequent.
There is something beautiful about it: an accessible way to create programs that are self-contained, cross-platform, multimedia, and interactive.
I still really need to find a good, modern debugger, though.
§ Going from working in a single-story building to somewhere with four floors has had a dramatic impact on my “flights climbed” Health metric.
§ Apple’s marketing stunt worked, I watched Silo.
Some details of the environment were great—I really liked the computer interface design—overall, however, the artificiality of the set was a bit of a turn off.
I kept finding myself imagining what the actors were experiencing as they were filming each scene. How big was the set? How immersive? Was it just an enormous wall of LCD screens? Watching the later seasons of Game of Thrones was a similar experience.
Despite finding the design slightly off-putting, the story itself was original. I found myself genuinely surprised by the ending of season one and am sufficiently interested to see where the writers take the show from here.
§ By and large, the new season of Black Mirror feels silly. It also doesn’t seem particularly concerned with technology—you know, the reason it was named “Black Mirror” in the first place. An interesting choice.
§ The day after Meta launched Threads, their Twitter competitor, I finally got an invite to Bluesky.
Frankly, I am not sure I see a future for Bluesky once Threads enables support for ActivityPub, the underlying protocol behind Mastodon (and this blog). Effectively everyone already has an Instagram account which means they now automatically have a Threads account too. If you don’t have an Instagram account you can join any Mastodon instances and will still be able to communicate with anyone on Threads.
Bluesky, in comparison, will look insular—even after it leaves its long invite-only phase.
§ Caroline and I took down a large, ungainly juniper bush in our front yard. This gave us two things: a bunch of wood that is naturally rot-resistant and room to start growing a patch of watermelons. In the past, we haven’t had much luck growing pumpkins, America’s second favorite oversized cucurbit. We are hoping for better luck with watermelons and their shorter growing time.
§ Our quail all managed to break loose from their enclosure in the middle of a rain storm.
Frankly, I am not entirely sure how long they were loose for. It wasn’t until I spotted Tumbleweed’s unmistakable dusty orange plumage as she was looking for shelter under a backyard tree canopy that I realized what had happened.
Take a moment to picture me, frantic and soaking wet, chasing five small birds around my tiny, unfenced, yard, attempting to catch them with a cheap Amazon.com butterfly net.
Miraculously, I was able to round them all up and return them back to safely of their enclosure.
§ Links
-
Madhumita Murgia, Financial Times:
Greg Marston, a British voice actor with more than 20 years’ experience, recently stumbled across his own voice being used for a demo online.
Marston’s was one of several voices on the website Revoicer, which offers an AI tool that converts text into speech…
Since he had no memory of agreeing to his voice being cloned using AI, he got in touch with the company. Revoicer told him they had purchased his voice from IBM.
In 2005, Marston had signed a contract with IBM for a job he had recorded for a satnav system. In the 18-year-old contract, an industry standard, Marston had signed his voice rights away in perpetuity
The problem isn’t AI here. The problem is that it is possible—and, apparently, standard—to sign vital rights away to companies.
Not having full license over your own voice, as a voice actor, is ridiculous. It is unconscionable that we have allowed conditions to develop such that it has become an accepted part of the occupation.
Pavis [a lawyer who specializes in digital cloning technologies] said she has had at least 45 AI-related queries since January, including cases of actors who hear their voices on phone scams such as fake insurance calls or AI-generated ads.
Okay, AI voice synthesis companies definitely hold some blame here. Generating a new, a non-specific, synthetic voice is one thing, cloning an individual’s unique voice is something else altogether.
-
§ It has been a bit of a hectic week.
I started my new job which has been great but, you know, it’s a new job with new routines, procedures, and coworkers. I have a new Outlook account. I configured all of the shared calendars. I know where the mail room is.
All of this means the garden has begun falling prey to nature’s entropy.
I think we will all pull through.
§ Fluctuating with outdoor temperatures, my car gets anywhere between 30 and 45 miles of pure electric driving before switching over to its gasoline engine.
My new job is closer to home and the parking garage has EV chargers. The last time I filled my gas tank was June 25th. Barring any unexpected road trips, my goal is to make it last to Thanksgiving. Stay tuned.
§ Season two of The Bear feels less electric than the first season.
The first season was chaotic, stressful, and claustrophobic. Watching it was, at once, both exhausting and energizing—like the feeling in the air walking home from a late night concert.
Season two has space, tenderness, non diegetic music… It no longer feels cramped, shoulder-to-shoulder, to the tight confines of a hot kitchen. We follow characters as they leave Chicago and experience the wider world. Although the story is driven by an impending deadline, it feels like we do more waiting than rushing.
The Bear continues to be a special show to me, but, now, I think it is more about Chicago nostalgia than unique story telling.
§ Links
§ Recipes
- Rosemary sea salt caramels
- Cooking is art, baking is magic, candy making is an unforgiving science. Timing is critical and temperature variations of less than 5 °F can be the difference between soft, chewy caramels and a non newtonian amorphous gloop. My candies fell somewhere in the middle. I need a better thermometer.
- Authentic(?) chili con carne
- Birria tacos are an essential companion here
- Rosemary sea salt caramels
-
Google is no longer working to build an augmented reality hardware platform. They will be shifting their energy towards creating AR software instead. It is hard to believe this wasn’t at least partially prompted by the Vision Pro.
Hugh Langley, Business Insider:
Google killed off a project to build a pair of augmented-reality glasses it had been working on for several years.
[…]
The glasses, known internally by the codename Iris, were shelved earlier this year following layoffs, reshuffles, and the departure of Clay Bavor, Google’s chief of augmented and virtual reality, according to three people familiar with the matter.
[…]
Since shelving the Iris glasses, Google has focused on creating software platforms for AR that it hopes to license to other manufacturers building headsets… One employee described Google’s new ambition as being the “Android for AR“
Of course they should build “Android for AR” and sell it to whoever is interested but they shouldn’t let that get in the way of developing great first party applications for all headset platforms.
The advantage of giving up on the hardware market is that they don’t have to weigh direct competition as heavily in their decision making.
Meta, especially, must be thrilled.
-
§ I will be starting my new job next week. There is no denying I will miss these past few weeks of vacation but, at the same time, I can’t wait to see what comes next.
On a related note, I am not planning to post daily articles until I get settled into my new routine. I will, of course, continue publishing weeknotes each Sunday.
§ I saw Ari Aster’s new movie Beau Is Afraid.
Wow, now that is a movie!
Is it the best film I’ve ever seen? No, but it’s inventive and strange, deeply discomforting and hilarious.
I wasn’t blown away by Ari Aster’s two previous films, Hereditary and Midsommar. They felt like well-executed examples of generic horror movie tropes.
Beau Is Afraid is an entirely new idea. It is Ari, like the titular Beau, leaving his comfort zone.
§ More movies —
After finding Synecdoche, New York way too depressing, I watched Wes Anderson’s two animated films: Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, looking for a change of tone.
Previously, my primary association with animation was movies and television directed at children. Without consciously intending to, I consequently viewed it as a less serious medium.
I failed to appreciate that animation gives artists an enormous amount of control and the freedom to create exactly what they imagine, unbounded by the typical constraints of reality. When you give this technology to a filmmaker as precise and detail oriented as Wes Anderson, the results are spectacular.
§ My san marzano tomato plant, which I am growing for the first time this year, has a distinctly different growth pattern than any other tomato variety I’ve seen before. It is super dense and bushy with very few suckers. Comparatively, my cherry tomatoes are almost lanky and sparse.
Spider mites have been an absolute garden menace this year. I’m not sure what prompted their sudden invasion.
§ Old honeysuckle blossoms are great for cyanotype printing.
§ Links
§ Recipes
- Caldo verde
- A new favorite. It’s very similar to kapusniak, another beloved rustic potato soup, but lighter and simpler overall.
- I made a few alterations: I used a mix of both leek and onion and added some lemon juice at the end. I also couldn’t find the special Portuguese sausage the recipe called for so I substituted it with chorizo. I’ll be on the lookout for proper linguiça moving forward.
- Cajun gumbo
- I definitely burned the roux. I realized it early on but, for whatever reason, decided to just keep going. Big mistake. I ended up letting it simmer on the stove all afternoon—like five hours—and that helped reduce the bitterness. It still had a distinctly burned flavor, though. I’ll try making this again another time. If I hadn’t burned it at the beginning I think it would have been amazing.
- Caldo verde
-
Apple today announced the availability of new software tools and technologies that enable developers to create groundbreaking app experiences for Apple Vision Pro — Apple’s first spatial computer.
[…]
With the visionOS SDK, developers can utilize the powerful and unique capabilities of Vision Pro and visionOS to design brand-new app experiences across a variety of categories including productivity, design, gaming, and more.
This is all a part of Xcode 15 which you can download today.
Playing around with the visionOS simulator is fascinating. It already exposes a lot of the final operating system—including first party applications and design elements—that I hadn’t previously seen elsewhere.
The new Reality Composer Pro application is also more powerful than I would have expected. It feels like a stripped down version of Unity3D. I hope Apple continues development on it. I would love to see it eventually become a full-fledged 3D development environment.
-
It is important to begin by noting that I am not a vegetarian—I eat meat.
Still, there is something undeniably strange about eating meat nowadays. I think it stems from the fact that most of us are completely disconnected from the production of the meat we consume.
Plus, we eat a lot more meat than ever before.
In 1960, Americans ate an average of 28 pounds of chicken, per person, each year. In 2022 it was more than 100 pounds.
More than 70 billion chickens are slaughtered annually. To put that number in perspective, it is estimated that 100 billion humans have ever existed throughout the entire life of our species.
Again, I don’t mention all of this to be preachy or judgmental—I eat meat and I don’t raise the meat that I eat myself. All of this is to say that there is a serious cost to the ever-increasing quantity of meat that most of us consume.
Jonel Aleccia & Laura Ungar, AP News:
For the first time, U.S. regulators on Wednesday approved the sale of chicken made from animal cells, allowing two California companies to offer “lab-grown” meat to the nation’s restaurant tables and eventually, supermarket shelves.
[…]
In a recent poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Half of U.S. adults said that they are unlikely to try meat grown using cells from animals. When asked to choose from a list of reasons for their reluctance, most who said they’d be unlikely to try it said “it just sounds weird.” About half said they don’t think it would be safe.
[…]
It could take a few years before consumers see the products in more restaurants and seven to 10 years before they hit the wider market… Cost will be another sticking point… Eventually, the price is expected to mirror high-end organic chicken, which sells for up to $20 per pound.
There are still big challenges that need to be solved before cultivated meat can become mainstream. Consumer acceptance and cost are both particularly salient. At least now regulatory hurdles can be checked off of that list.
-
The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has spent the last month touring world capitals where, at talks to sold-out crowds and in meetings with heads of governments, he has repeatedly spoken of the need for global AI regulation.
But behind the scenes, OpenAI has lobbied for significant elements of the most comprehensive AI legislation in the world—the E.U.’s AI Act—to be watered down in ways that would reduce the regulatory burden on the company
The Time article above contains the entirety of a previously unreleased document OpenAI wrote for E.U. officials.
Here is the thing, I agree with Altman that E.U.’s AI Act was too broad. That isn’t where I take issue with this.
The problem is that Altman has been spending his time publicly lobbying for regulation when it would hurt his competitors while privately pushing for the opposite when it would affect him.
Again, an obvious push for regulatory capture.
OpenAI has pledged not to compete with other companies in the event they get close to surpassing their capabilities. The fear being that competitive “race dynamics” would lead to unsafe development and deployment practices.
From OpenAI’s founding Charter:
We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project.
This was again emphasized in the GPT-4 technical report:
One concern of particular importance to OpenAI is the risk of racing dynamics leading to a decline in safety standards, the diffusion of bad norms, and accelerated AI timelines, each of which heighten societal risks associated with AI.
There is the straightforward way to honor this promise: keep chugging along for now and, if a company later comes along and laps OpenAI, give up the fight fair and square.
I think Altman’s actions these past few months has demonstrated he is taking another, less charitable, approach: if OpenAI can bog down competitors with arduous regulations they will never have to give up their lead.
So sure, you could say that this is consistent with their stated views on AI safely—they naturally trust their own development safeguards more than they trust others—but it is also hypocritical and dishonest.
subscribe via RSS