Category: 🧩 Miscellanea
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As a society, our various addictions often have very little to do with personal failings or indiscipline. They have everything to do with a culture that shames and stigmatizes normal, healthy behaviors that simply look “weird.”
Since we’re often punished for being ourselves and doing what we want, we have to sneak around. That creates guilt and anxiety.
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The self-destructive response is to forbid yourself from doing things you enjoy and then wait for the desire to spill over into binges. It’s a familiar story. Depriving yourself of something only enhances the desire. So most Americans live in a relentless loop of binges, purges, and moral panics.
You don’t have to be an expert in sociology to see how other cultures have consistently outperformed us in terms of health and happiness.
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As we near the end of industrial civilization, there’s no end to the prescriptions for mental health. Here’s one I haven’t heard:
Be weird.
Jessica Wildfire, The Case for Being Extremely Weird -
I spent the afternoon going down an AI rabbit hole researching the state of AI coding tools and vibe coding in the last 2 years since I last tried this for myself. Obviously, it has come a long way with Claude Code looking very helpful, being more ‘agentic’ and solving some (but not all) of the forgetfulness and context window problems I saw before. The biggest change might just be that everyone is using better prompt to plan and guide their work than before.
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How We Traded Anxiety for Apathy
Today I read Joan Westenberg’s post on How We Traded Anxiety for Apathy, which lays out the concerned citizen to doomer pipeline which seems to summarize the journey many people have undertaken in the last 5 years. After hearing about…
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Identity turns out to be porous – at least the parts that have to do with what you listen to, what you watch, what you eat, what you read. So go ahead, it’s okay, there’s no need to be cool: abandon the canon, shake loose from fixed coordinates, collapse into the blueberry gifts of whatever turns you on.
Jeff Gordinier, My Tie-Dyed Transformation -
Algorithmic supremacists have a pretty bleak vision for the future. But how much damage can they do over the next four years? Well, to my mind, their understanding of the present is equally disturbing. Algorithmic supremacists show a disdain for the inefficient ways humans read, write, draw, compose, and create, wanting us to outsource those activities to machines that can spit out mathematical variations of what uncredited human artists produced with heart and soul.
David Weitzner, We must fight back against the rise of ‘algorithmic supremacists’ -
May 2025
Housing At the end of April, we realized that the 110 year old cast iron sewer line beneath our house had collapsed, so May’s project around the house will be cutting through the basement slab and trenching in a new…
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Jane Jacobs on Toronto’s Split Personality
This isn’t a dead city. There doesn’t seem to be much creativity at the top. It seems to me that Toronto has a split personality, a civic schizophrenia. On the one level there’s the spirit of individuals and small groups…
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April 2025
Housing In March we replaced the lighting in the basement with some nice LED fixtures and removed all the old T12 fixtures. My next project is to drop off the large collection of burnt out T12 bulbs at the dump,…
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March 2025
Housing Over the course of February, we finished unpacking everything in the living areas of the house and have gotten settled in to the new place. We were able to host friends for the first time mid-month in February which…
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No matter how beautiful your interface is, it would be better if there were less of it.
Edward Tufte