This week in squirrels…

Summary

  • Journaling
    • I am reformatting my journal for a bit. I am not sure how this will post, but since it is a weekly deal for now, I’ll treat it more like an outline with a list, making it easier to skim and add notes to sections. I can then format it later.
    • Do you love it? Do you hate it? I am still deeply on the fence and am wondering if I should reformat it before posting. Let me know!
  • Hades 2
    • Hadies is way too good. I haven’t had a chance to play it much due to life’s distractions, but it is fantastic when I do get to play. I got hooked on it over the weekend. Sadly, I only managed one play session, as I have been intensely focused on technical projects both inside and outside of work.
  • NixOS
    • I am back to trying to redo my NixOS usage. I have been using it for my secondary Linux desktop and a minor server for a while. But I want to go ALL THE WAY.
    • I didn’t love trying to combine NixOS and nix-darwin, so now separate flakes.
    • NixOS and nix flakes are the worst type of nerd hole for me to fall into because there is a LOT of tweaking and tuning you can do.
    • After sidelining nix-darwin, I was able to do a lot of massive optimizations and clean up as I brought in my shell server and gaming rig into the fold!
  • Trying the AI
    • I have been experimenting with AI and coding Nix flakes, too. It’s still really not the best experience because I am not trying to solve easy problems when I use it.
    • I found the AI can sit and struggle for a shockingly long period of time on problems I can solve faster; I need to work to see what problems it is good at.
    • Also, I am having a struggle with its code quality. It uses many outdated patterns or configurations, particularly with renovate configs and Nix.
    • Learning the Zed editor is ok. It’s arguably a great editor, everything I wished Sublime Text was when I used it. However, it’s taking me a long time to get under my fingers and up to speed. I am so fast in Neovim with lazyvim that it’s hard to compete.
    • In the end, I just found a better integration for Claude-code and Neovim 😆
  • Anime
    • The anime season is wrapping up this week. So many of my shows had 13 episodes, so they went a week longer, but now this is the quiet week before a new flood begins
    • Checking Livechart has shown a scary amount of shows I want to check out. But as usual, few will make the three-episode cut
    • Oh no, I was wrong! It’s starting this week! The floooooood haha. Many shows are starting this week.
  • Sick Week
    • I ended the weekend all feverish and sweating my brains out. The start of the week has been challenging, and I haven’t been good at managing tasks; I get stuck on things.
    • In fact, my journal last week came days late, and I didn’t even get a schedule out, no matter how much I want to stream
    • I thought it got better, but then “rebounded” Wednesday when I crashed after lunch, got back up, and then crashed out hard for bed, so hard I actually overslept my alarm for the first time I can remember. Perfect for a day with an 8am meeting.
  • Ring doorbell
    • I received notice of a new feature of Ring™ doorbells called Search Party. This feature comes with a new firmware, allowing people to trigger the “Search party” by asking to find a dog (assuming it is identified by photo). All nearby footage will then be uploaded and scanned to locate the missing dog, enabling the owner to track it.
    • They claim they will be looking to add cats to it as well. But what is the timeline for using this for tracking and identifying people? The skeptic in me says I am being paranoid. Then somebody reminded me they publicly brought back giving police access to your Ring™ cameras recently.
    • Update: December, according to reports shared by the EFF, they plan to start scanning the faces of everybody detected and build a database of people beginning in December.
    • My older doorbell probably isn’t eligible or working for this. Still, it’s about time to upgrade to something locally configured and stored.
    • I ordered a Reolink and Hope to see it linked up with my home assistant soon!
  • Period Tracking in games
    • Dear GOD. Love and Deep Space (LaDS) has a period tracker. For the love of all that is unholy, do not give this game company your health information. I know we can become desensitized, but this is still a valuable and potentially dangerous disclosure of health data. Do you not want to give random gaming companies your hormone and fertility cycles? They will abuse this.
    • Also, don’t even try to shame me for my gaming choices.
  • Way too much Music
    • Friday was Bandcamp Friday! And, as always, I was flooded with emails. I found some excellent recommendations and new albums to check out.
    • What did the most damage was actually finding some artists from the 90’s and early 2ks had put up some albums I no longer have, or have horrible copies of, so… hooray to Bong-Ra and Razed in Black, I guess.

Books

  • My Journey to Her: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ outstanding art, a well-told story with lots of details. If someone were curious about bottom surgery, I would send them this book.

Music

  • Purity Ring’s Self-Titled:
    • They released their extremely JRPG-themed self-titled album, and this has caused me to spend a LOT of time listening to their entire catalog on loop. I’m not sure where to categorize this band outside of electro pop, but it’s catchy and easily put on a loop.
  • Daniel Renfro’s “Settle Down Kid”
    • Out of all of his projects and albums, this one is still one of my favorites. Most of Rigel’s Star’s works have more polish, but this one has a raw indie pop-rock style that resonates with me. Whenever someone mentions Phoenix Down, I need to listen to it.
  • RP Boo Elevator Music DJ Set
    • I have to admit I had never heard of RP Boo or the Chicago Footwork style until the Planet Mu 30th anniversary comp, and I am HOOKED. Repetitive tight loops and syncopation? This is, and will always be, my jam. If you can invoke the minimalist styles of Steve Reich, you have a fan in me. I have been listening to DJ sets and have acquired some of the Planet Mu releases as well.
  • Bong-Ra’s “Bikini Bandits, Kill! Kill! Kill!”
    • This early 2000s breakcore/hardcore album is one of the greats of the 2k’s hardcore scene. Themed after B-movies and exploitation films of years before, it has titles like “Can You Dig It?” and “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble.” It is overfilled with excellent sample work and some of the catchiest hardcore I have heard to date.
  • 100 Gecs
    • No real reason, sometimes I get 100 gecs stuck in my head and have to put their two albums on loop for a day or two

Reads and Videos

  • Merriam-Webster’s new Large Language Model for the AI Era will be released Nov 11th
    • Turns out some people out there still know how to make a good troll
    • No, seriously, this one got me good.
    • Even the comments on this are hilarious
  • Do Trigger Warnings Work?
    • I want to quote Betteridge’s Law of Headlines; Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
    • I have heard a lot of discussion about how Content Warnings are primarily a function of trying to cater to white fragility and comfort by suppressing the uncomfortable truths of other people. I am in favor of protecting the most vulnerable, and there are some serious uses for content warnings. Still, I don’t like the idea of them as a means to control expression.
  • Your Worst Halloween “Hear Me Outs”: Graded
    • You thought I was going to share a bunch of super deep and painful things to process. Still, nope, it was me, another full-length Blake Jennings video of him being the funniest thing I have access to.
  • If You Let Your Kid Use Sora, You’re A Bad Parent: AI Slop Will Raise Your Kids If You Don’t
    • The whole article is in the title, but this is a conversation my entire family is having a lot of. We can give our kids access to the world too easily, and their friends might already have access to it. But there are no guardrails on the internet that understand and respect that it is dealing with a child with a developing mind.
  • OpenAI’s Social App Is Here, and It’s Really, Genuinely, Truly Abombinable
    • This and the previous article go into how the dopamine drip feed of the late 2010s to 2020s era’s quick video drip feed is bad for ALL of us. There are books after books about how this is a rapid escalation, damaging our attention spans, burning out our dopamine, and lowering literacy rates.
  • Mega Addresses How Bad The Twitch Situation Is
    • The title is clickbait (as all seem to be on YouTube now), but this is a Twitch Streamer who is exponentially larger than me, complaining about the same thing I have been talking about in past weekly posts and bsky posts too.
    • The tl;dr is that people are claiming that in the last month or so, Twitch stopped counting people who “lurk” (are watching without actively chatting) as Viewers.
    • I experienced this huge drop where, after a short period of not saying anything, people drop off. I went from 8-10 to 1-3 “viewers”
  • Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Moderating is Such Sweet Sorrow
    • In this podcast, there is a fantastic extension of Hanlon’s razor. The razor is, “Don’t attribute malice to what can be attributed to incompetence.” They added, “Don’t attribute incompetence to what can be attributed to not having enough time to think the problem through.”
    • They were discussing the theorem that content moderation at scale is impossible. This relates to the ability to create content and establish safety rules that are agreed upon at scale.
    • There was also fascinating terminology and thoughts around the concept of strong consensus and weak consensus norms and how moderation becomes more challenging the closer you get to weak consensus. Strong consensus refers to things that are more or less universally agreed upon, regardless of group size, versus things that have a daunting amount of nuance and disagreement, the more the group grows.
    • This ties a lot into the issues about codes of conduct, which I talked about in last week’s post, which brings me back to
  • When Values Eat Their Young: How Ideal-Driven Groups Drift into Their Own Shadow
    • A repeat!
    • After hearing the podcast, I started tying back these ideas of moderation and consensus causing conflict and strife in communities to some other conversation about the use of codes of conduct and how they can be weaponized problematically or cause a community to lose the plot. Which, of course, is the point of this whole blog post
    • I am still for having a code of conduct and moderation, especially when we think about what it takes to protect the most vulnerable in spaces and realize that tech is not apolitical in any way, shape, or form. I don’t buy into any critique of code of conducts that tries to ignore the fact that participating in any community is a privilege or that the communities cultural values are any less important than technical ones. I am mad this excludes me is not really valid either.
    • I believe we have work still trying to build out codes of conduct that actively reflect the challenges of moderation listed above. What is even worse is when there are CoCs that used in the crusade of silencing dissenting voices, or even worse, have selective enforcement that doesn’t apply to the people people of privilege and status.
    • At this point, I’ve written about this so much. I should break it out as a blog post unto itself. However, I dislike writing a blog post that poses questions without providing answers.

Quote of the Week

I am so flippin’ tired of leaders adopting the “let’s be edgy” mentality. It’s juvenile.

I’ve said before that the mark of maturity is knowing the difference between being edgy and being sharp.