Finished reading: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton 📚

This book could easily be interpreted as a commentary on AI, especially some of the quotes from the character Malcolm, who is very critical of science and scientific progress.

Just take a look:

“Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don’t do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That’s the game in science."

“What advances?” Malcolm said irritably. “The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics … Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930?”

“Because there haven’t been any advances,” Malcolm said. “Not really. Thirty thousand years ago; when men were doing cave paintings at Lascaux, they worked twenty hours a week to provide themselves with food and shelter and clothing. The rest of the time, they could play, or sleep, or do whatever they wanted. And they lived in a natural world, with clean air, clean water, beautiful trees and sunsets. Think about it. Twenty hours a week. Thirty thousand years ago.”

Finished reading: The Grid by Gretchen Bakke 📚

Currently reading: Count Zero by William Gibson 📚

Finished reading: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow 📚

Good book, it’s really eye opening to see all the ways things have been enshittified.

Going to have to think some about what part I can help to play in fighting back against this.

After Iceland, we traveled to Oslo, Norway. Summers can be hot in Atlanta, so we wanted to visit another country with cooler temps. Norway is amazing! So much natural beauty and quiet.

We took a tour of the islands in Oslofjord (and learned it’s not technically a fjord because it was created via tectonic plate separation rather than glaciers). Here we learned about cabin culture in Norway: I think it’s around 80% of people either own or have access to a cabin. July is the main month for folks to retreat to their cabins where they enjoy nature and the nice weather.

One thing I found cool is that Olso’s public transportation (including the island hopping ferry boats) has been completely converted over to battery electric. Our guide told us that Oslo wants to be the quietest city in Europe. I think their work has paid off, Oslo was very quiet!

From Oslo, we headed to Bergen on the west coast via the scenic Bergensbana train.

The train route is famous for crossing the Hardangervidda mountain plateau where the landscape changes over to a more barren, mountain top plain (even though the elevation at around 1,500 meters is not extremely high).

In Bergen, our main event was a cruise through the fjords to the small town of Flam.

Flam is one of the more popular small fjord towns and is visited by cruise ships almost every day. The ships dwarf the town in both size and population.

From Flam, we took the train back to Bergen, traveling on the scenic Flam Line.

From Bergen, we headed north along the coast to the small island of Lilløy where we stayed in a converted boathouse.

Lilløy was my favorite part of the trip: we got to experience a bit of Norwegian cabin life, where we shared breakfast in the main house and cooked other meals in our small cabin.

This part of Norway is famous for rain, and it did rain almost every day while we were here. But the sauna kept us warm.

We had an amazing time in Norway! It was especially hard to leave behind the nature and cooler weather. We can’t wait to return someday.

Currently reading: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow 📚

The lunar landscape of Iceland

We traveled to Iceland for my sister-in-law’s wedding, congrats Ginny & McKenzie! I wanted to share a few photos from our time on the island.

Our rental car was a Chinese EV, a Hongqi compact suv. First time driving a Chinese built car!

The landscapes around our hotel were amazing:

We rode in buggies out to a glacier:

A nearby waterfall:

We spent our last night in Reykjavik, there was an interesting boat in the harbor. I looked it up and it’s powered entirely by renewable energy, turning seawater into hydrogen and using solar panels to charge its batteries:

Spur of the moment, we decided to take a whale-watching cruise at 9pm (it stays light until after midnight) and it was amazing!

We saw puffins:

And humpback whales “bubble feeding”:

We felt incredibly lucky that we were able to see this!

Iceland is an amazing place and we had a great time.

From here, we traveled to Norway to visit Oslo and Bergen, where I’m currently posting from somewhere on the coast just north of Bergen. In my next post, I’ll have some photos from our time in Norway.

Just turned on cross posting to Grain.social for images posted here!

Currently reading: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton 📚

Re-reading Jurassic Park, last time I read it was maybe 20 years ago. Realizing now how much of a metaphor for the AI age it is.

Life finds a way.

Finished reading: Palaver by Bryan Washington 📚

Ghost Pipe flower (not a fungus!) spotted while hiking near Asheville, NC. Thanks Beth and Jonathan for teaching me about this plant!

How to Hate AI • Steve Simkins

I read a blog post recently saying that it was ok to hate AI. While I agree to some extent, I think it was missing some key points about how to hate AI. It’s easy to just hate something you don’t like. We as humans have a natural propensity to hate or dislike things we are not familiar with. The problem is that this approach is akin to putting your head in the sand or screaming at the clouds; it doesn’t actually help anyone.

Nobody Pushed Back: Why Engineers Stay Silent Until It’s Too Late | How to Center a Div

Someone walks through an architectural decision and nobody in that room actually agrees — they just act like they do, because saying what you really think is socially expensive. Meeting ends, decision gets made. Six months later production blows up and everyone says “we knew this would happen.”

I wonder how AI is going to change this situation? Will it become harder to push back against something AI has built even if it’s bad? How long until engineers don’t even know what the AI is producing and the automated decisions being made are not even reviewed?

Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott

For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win.

That contract is now broken.

Free stuff unintentional (?) still life.

Some photos taken outside Taos, NM from last year that I don’t think ever made it to the blog.

If you like classic Macs and home automation, you’ve got to check out the Cydintosh project:

https://github.com/likeablob/cydintosh

I assembled mine and it’s working great!

It’s amazing to me that this little board is emulating a Mac while listening to events for weather data. What a clever project!

If this appeals to you and you don’t have access to a 3d printer for the enclosure, reach out. I have plenty of PLA in this color to go around. :-)

BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN | The Verge

I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea.

Great essay by Nilay.

It feels to me like the whole industry has forgotten about the “personal” in personal computer. I’m someone who loves computers, or at least I used to. But I think it sounds awful to have to remold my entire life to suit the computer.

The irony here is that LLMs are the first technology that really could make the PC personal. But instead we are on a path to remake our lives to suit the LLM, not to mention our land, water, and electricity.

I hope as a society we can course correct. I hope, if LLMs have to be a permanent part of the computing landscape, small, efficient models that run on the hardware we already have take over. Then we might have some hope of making computers personal again.