Scrawlspace
This is scrawlspace. I scrawl in this space. Do not expect coherence or permanence…
…actually, looking back at the history for this part of the capsule, you can mostly expect permanence by this point, at least going forward. I used to rearrange things more often than I do now.
2025-04-01: Happy LLM Training-Set Poisoning Day!
There’s also this:
2025-03-31: Really keepin’ with the space theme, here
aspizu/astro-gemtext on GitHub
If for some reason you want out of the Gemini ecosystem, you can quickly port all your writing to the Web via…Astro.
2025-03-28, like ten minutes later: Expresso opinion
Martin Chang had a look at Nostr:
Martin Chang, “Nostr, my thoughts on a new decentralized pubsub protocol”
I got a client many years back and occasionally peek at what my client calls a global feed.
As far as I can tell, there are three kinds of posts on Nostr:
- Posts in Japanese
- Posts that are clearly demonstrating some sort of enthusiasm for cryptocurrency and other related technologies
- Neither of the above
The top two post types (I’m not sure how much overlap there is) probably accounts for 90–95% of all posts I see.
I saw one Geminaut’s post on Nostr once. His post was in the “neither of the above” category. I was pleased.
I’d like to join him in making Nostr less boring, but you all — my dear readers — get almost all of my Make The Internet Less Boring energy and I’d be spreading myself too thin if I were to post on Nostr, too. Oh, and I dislike posting the same thing in a bunch of places — if I ever want to become Cory Doctorow, I know what I’d need to change.
Not unrelated:
indieweb.org, “POSSE” (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere)
2025-03-28: Old
I was looking for something to occupy my time while I did some light exercise, so I thumbed through a pile of streaming videos and stumbled upon Superhero Movie. I was JUST familiar enough with the scary-movie genre to appreciate Scary Movie, so I thought this would be my cup of tea.
The movie started, and I saw names go by during the title sequence.
- Brent Spiner
- Leslie Nielsen
- (some name I could have sworn was associated with The Naked Gun)
I thought “this’ll be good”.
It was. It was, as far as I could tell, a Leslie Nielsen movie. They don’t make ’em like they used to.
After the credits rolled and all the leftover gags had played, I had a look at the release date.
2008.
17 years old. It dawned on me that this IS how they used to make them.
2025-03-20: I need to drag my mother along on another hike already
Someone asked:
Zack · @HackingBaseball · March 12, 2025
Hey web world,
Does anyone write pure html + css anymore?
Someone else replied:
htmx.org / CEO of div tags (same thing) · @htmx_org · March 12, 2025
statistically no. people who write their websites in pure html + css are busy reading classic literature, learning to windsurf, and hiking with their families, since they don't have to upgrade their build stack from version 14.5.75 to 15.1.200 every three weeks
2025-03-14: Get ready
If you’re struggling to remember the proper name for the 250th anniversary of something, the meme is “semiquincentennial”.
I suppose “half of 500” rolls off the tongue better when you phrase it like that, but I didn’t have that formulation on my bingo card.
2025-03-06, maybe tens of minutes later: Yes, jq is that hard
Sean Conner has a fun post up:
Sean Conner, “Yelling at clouds”
I yell at clouds too, and I used to tie an onion to my belt on a regular basis, and I like jq, but:
So … using jq is so hard you need to use a tool that will confabulate ¼ of the time in order to construct a simple query?
Yes.
Is that what you are saying?
Yes.
That you can't be bothered to use your brain?
I’ve tried using my brain. I suspect that my brain would be OK enough if the jq manuals had like three times the amount of examples, but they don’t, and I can’t really pick up the language in passing and would have to devote some real study time to it…which I can’t be bothered to do, because I can still count on two hands (maybe one) the number of times I’ve used jq.
tl;dr brain too smooth.
Just accept the garbage spewed forth by a probabilistic text slinger?
No. You look at what it generates, run jq with the ChatGPT-made query, and see if jq gives you what you want. If its first try didn’t give you what you wanted, you either tell ChatGPT what it screwed up and to fix it, or you start fiddling around yourself using ChatGPT’s output as a starting point.
LLMs are at their most useful when you can check their output yourself.
They’re at their most dangerous when you can’t tell if they’re bullshitting you.
jq-query crafting is more of the former kind of thing than the latter.
2025-03-06: I have a lot of actual content in my feed(s)
You’ve seen my feeds page, right?
They’re only gonna get bigger.
They have actual content in them, like describing ChatGPT as “Sam Altman’s pet shoggoth”, so I want to keep them around for you all and not just shove the old entries off into a separate file where only I can see them.
Still, imagine decades of feed items, all in the same feed.
I’ll probably introduce a cut point at the end of the decade, and introduce more on a one-per-decade basis.
JSON Feed has a top-level `next_url` that can be used to point to even-older entries.
Atom, apparently, does not.
JSON Feed 1.1, “Top-level” (items)
2025-02-26: Alright then, keep your secrets
I threw all this at ChatGPT wondering if it could make any sense of it.
It says the text isn’t processed with a Caesar cipher or anything basic like that.
I have one of those OpenAI accounts where Sam Altman pinky-swears to not train his models on your questions, and Sam Altman is the most trustworthy person on the planet, so there’s that.
Guess nobody’s getting a free lunch for this one, at least not with ChatGPT. I don’t care enough to try and throw an Englishman and a caveman and a whale at it.
2025-02-23 (technically): A shallow thought about DeepSeek
The whale mascot is cute.
2025-02-22 (technically): I thought this was dead
I’m going through Helix themes. You know, for the text editor.
The heisenberg theme has blinking comments.
BLINKING.
COMMENTS.
2025-02-21: Le sigh
Ars Technica, “Dozens of things you can do to clean up a fresh install of Windows 11 24H2 and Edge”
[looks at the computer screen]
[looks at the camera]
If you’ve ever wondered why zoomers salivate over Vista screenshots and VMs when Vista earned well-deserved reputations for both needing 150%–200% of your current RAM to run acceptably AND breaking your printer (by changing out the printing system when printer vendors weren’t all willing to upgrade drivers for every single printer out there)…
…this is why.
2025-02-09: New acronym just dropped
SABLE
Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy
Think of your Steam backlog, my plastic container box full of paper notebooks that I’m probably not going to use up before I croak (obliquely mentioned previously), etc.
2025-01-25: Heterodox, indeed
You keep an eye on Heterodox Technology, don’t you?
I had a look at the links for January 7…
“Heterodox Technology links for 2025-01-07”
and one of them was an entry for a language called Koka:
Koka — A Functional Language with Effect Types and Handlers
What makes this thing heterodox enough to be interesting, however, is the “Install” section:
## Install
### Install with the VS Code Editor
The easiest way to start with Koka is to use the excellent VS Code editor and install the Koka extension. Go to the extension panel, search for Koka and install the official extension as shown on the right.
“Wanna try it out? Install a Visual Studio Code plugin.”
There’s also a curl-and-pipe-to-shell installation option, but putting the VS Code plugin at the top of the list is interesting. Reminds me of OCaml back when I tried it where the installation instructions got you to set up emacs first to run it.
2025-01-21: A foray into the previously-mentioned jockpoasting
After a couple of nonconsecutive days these past couple of months saying “MAHA begins tomorrow”, I think I’m finally on it.
I figure that almost all of my problems can be fixed by having a normal, proper level of exercise activity, including a fair bit of hard cardio (getting into Zone 4 of 5 at least for a little bit). Because my V̇O₂max is trash, I’m going for something basic and not dependent on the weather: running on a treadmill. I’m doing Couch to 5K.
The Apple Watch’s fitness features really shine when you’re doing dry-land cardio. I was able to program in this kind of thing easily:
5-minute warmup work 60″ recover 1′30″ repeat previous two items 8 times
…and I was able to use my phone’s keyboard to type in the label (“C25K Week 1”) instead of having to hunt and peck on my watch.
The first day I did it, I wimped out two intervals early. I called that day “C25K Week 1 Day 0”. Mercifully, I haven’t had the typical runner problems (yet; knock on wood) like shin splints and wishing I’d taken a cold shower to hasten my recovery. Granted, I’m refusing to run two consecutive days, but I haven’t felt bad the day after running, which is nice.
Also, today’s events conspired to get me to take a one-hour break in between finishing exercising and starting my usual sauna-and-shower routine.
I figured this might be a good time to see how far I can go with an extended recovery period and also headphones to help pass the time. While it shouldn’t surprise anyone that hopping into the sauna right after exercising will limit the amount of time you can stay in there before you’re driven to nope out, what you do in the sauna matters, too. If you’re mentally occupied by conversation, it gives you something to think about other than how it’s so hot in there. I tend to go at off-peak times, so I thought I might listen to 35-year-old boomers talk about current events for as long as I could last in there, hoping that would increase the amount of hot time and all the benefits that come with it.
…of course, I’m superlatively conflicted about wearing headphones in the sauna; while my AirPods Pro are good at isolating what I’m listening to (so it doesn’t leak out to others and disturb them), I feel like a low-grade heel much like the people who bring their phones — with cameras — in and fiddle around with them and even listen to music on them.
I usually last 20 minutes. Today, I lasted 30 minutes. Not sure how much the total cooldown and the audio distraction each contributed.
I heard a banya hat will let you last longer by insulating your extra-heat-sensitive head from the heat, letting the other 90% of your body last longer than your oh-so-precious li’l noggin can stand.
I checked online and they’re basically all made of wool. My skin doesn’t like wool. Plus I’d have to pack it out of the gym on some schedule to wash the thing, and I don’t think it’d be able to air out decently while sitting in my locker.
I asked around and someone said that towels make perfectly fine banya hats. This past Sunday I went to the gym, saw that the sauna was standing-room-only, and decided to go into the occasionally louder and less-reliably-hot steam room with my usual towels in tow plus an extra hand towel to wrap around my head. I managed to wrap a near-perfect do-rag or something on my head, but when I tried to recreate it maybe 15 minutes later in the freshly-depopulated sauna I couldn’t get it to stay on my head nicely to save my life. I suppose it’s somewhat useful to stay busy trying to get a hand towel to stay on your head, but I’m also not very keen on doing low-grade upper-body work for ten minutes when I’m trying to relax.
Archives
If you want to read older entries, here’s the page for the previous year:
Updates
If you want to stay abreast of updates, have a look at this capsule’s page describing its feeds:
Additionally, the following URL will always redirect to the current year, assuming I haven’t forgotten to update the redirect after making the first post of the year:
⏚
Source