deathmtn

I submitted some hills that this bot generated to an art contest a few months back. Three of them were chosen — for the high honor of being made into murals in some condo in Pennsylvania. I was recently asked to provide them as SVGs for production.

It was relatively easy to do for one of them, but the other two were generated before that bot used seeds to make its random choices. So, in addition to testing, this is another reason to seed your random number generator.

We’re sitting at the table waiting for the guy to eat some of the meal’s worth of beans that he dropped out of his taco. He doesn’t want to do it. Quality time

10-4-4-4-4-10.

37-minute run. 12 pull-ups. 63% humidity.

I gotta say, those regions that are going to have “wet bulb” climates in the next twenty years are going to be the worst hell for me. I’d rather live in eternal wildfire country.

Just thought of a good name for a restaurant: Cooked Flesh

I think learning to type Dvorak has gone fairly well, but it’s also made me spend more time on my phone in order to avoid Dvorak typing.

I’ve been theorizing that I might be more energized if I spent more time on leisure. This past week, because of wrist issues, I’ve avoided typing and have not worked on projects.

Instead, I’ve been watching TV, specifically What We Do in the Shadows, which is as funny as the movie was, and old Adventure Time episodes. I think the net effect has been to make me stay up later, sleep less, and feel more tired than normal.

Obviously, never relax!

I was talking to Alex about how I am bad at hiring agents in various forms (real estate, accountants), and he had the idea of an agent agent—an agent (human or software) that does the work of finding a good agent.

This is a service I’d pay for (assuming it had good results), but also, this is the kind of business I would never build. There’s just too much ugliness in it. This may be why I ultimately won’t be able to start a business. People that have successful indie businesses look for the intersection of things people are willing to pay for and things they can do. Hence, when I used to go to indie Apple developer meetups ten years ago, the most successful indie devs made things like backup apps and WiFi printing apps. Which I was totally unwilling to do.

I’m looking for the intersection of things people want to pay for, things I can do, and things I actually want to spend my time doing. This intersection may not exist.

I finally read/listened to this interview with Liu Cixin, the author of the Three-Body Problem. I first heard about it about a year ago because he got drunk and said he doesn’t care about the Uighur internment camps.

That part is exactly as I thought it would be. Like most Han Chinese, he feels the Uighurs should just fall in line. I think there may be an institutionally racist winners-and-losers mentality like the kind many Whites in America have.

The surprising parts are 1) the choice his grandparents made with respect to hedging during the rise of communism and 2) the shrugging at democracy.

The second part shouldn’t be surprising because I have been thinking a lot lately about how democracy isn’t really valued by possibly a plurality of Americans and about how disastrous US attempts to export democracy have been, in large part to many people throughout the world not finding it to be that attractive a system. In the West, this is unthinkable, and so it leads to condescending and destructive policy.

Liu imagines that democracy in China would be chaotic and corrupt, and average people’s lives would be far worse, given that he thinks they mostly care about getting enough to eat and getting healthcare.

I think he’s right about people’s common concerns, but not about democracy being chaotic and prone to corruption. There’s forms of democracy I can point to that could mitigate that, but unfortunately, I can’t point to a real example that has been pressure tested. I certainly can’t point to the US, which is almost a counter example about about democracy lately.

Hannah Arendt, in 1958, punches out the “pure idea man” concept .

Thinking, however, which is presumably ‘the activity of the head, though it is in some way like laboring—also a process which probably comes to an end only with life itself—is even less “productive” than labor; if labor leaves no permanent trace, thinking leaves nothing tangible at all. By itself,
thinking never materializes into any objects. Whenever the intellectual worker wishes to manifest his thoughts, he must use his hands and acquire manual skills just like any other worker. In other words, thinking and working are two different activities which never quite coincide; the thinker who wants the world to know the “content” of his thoughts must first of all stop thinking and remember his thoughts. Remembrance in this, as in all other cases, prepares the intangible and the futile for their eventual materialization; it is the beginning of the work process, and like the
craftsman’s consideration of the model which will guide his work, its most immaterial stage.

The “punch up my app ideas” people in 2010 really needed to read this.

The guy was talking about how Petey the Cat from Dog Man and King Viking from Press Start are both robot makers and are both bad guys.

It occurred to me that in real life, most robot makers are bad guys as well.

Hannah Arendt letting you know she’s not a hater.

In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized. This is unfortunate at a time when so many writers who once made their living by explicit or tacit borrowing from the great wealth of Marxian ideas and insights have decided to become professional anti-Marxists, in the process of which one of them even discovered that Karl Marx himself was unable to make a living, forgetting for the moment the generations of authors whom he has “supported.”

I have a lot of books checked out from the library, so the way I decide what to read is by waiting for a “this book cannot be renewed and is due” email from the library to tell me what to read.

The guy asked where the tooth fairy gets money to buy teeth from kids. The best I could come up with is that she builds walls out of teeth and sells them.

Took about an hour and half to transcribe and arrange (roughly) three riffs from voice memos into NanoStudio. First, you have to figure it out on guitar, then get it into NanoStudio, then get the approximate “right” instrument and range for the riff. And sometimes add harmony.

This is way better than losing ideas completely, but it doesn’t cost nothing.