Sean Carney

Category: 🧩 Miscellanea

  • David Weitzner on Algorithmic Supremacists

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    Sean Carney
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    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…

  • May 2025

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    Sean Carney
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    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 sewer line from the front to the back of the house. Synth Building In April…

  • Jane Jacobs on Toronto’s Split Personality

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    Sean Carney
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    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 who do things, what you might call the vernacular spirit. This is all very informal…

  • April 2025

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    Sean Carney
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    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, and then organize the workbench in the basement so I can start using it as…

  • March 2025

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    Sean Carney
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    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 was a great feeling. Late February in Calgary saw a very rapid thaw after a…

  • Edward Tufte on Interface Design

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    Sean Carney
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    No matter how beautiful your interface is, it would be better if there were less of it. Edward Tufte

  • February 2025

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    Sean Carney
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    Housing January was a whirlwind as we moved out of our old house, in to our new house, and started to get unpacked and organized in the new place. In reality, this meant I wasn’t able to make any progress on anything else during the month of January. Moving into February, there is still a…

  • Jane Jacobs on Old Buildings

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    Sean Carney
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    As for new ideas of any kind – no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be – there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error, and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.…

  • You Don’t Need A Full-Size Pickup Truck, You Need a Cowboy Costume

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    Sean Carney
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    Brett Berks article, You Don’t Need A Full-Size Pickup Truck, You Need a Cowboy Costume, provides a good look at truck culture and the disconnect between how trucks are marketed and how they are actually used by owners. On one hand there’s no accounting for taste, on the other hand I appreciate the statistic that…

  • Bill Fletcher Jr. on Responses to COVID

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    Sean Carney
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    Yes, people were angry about restrictions imposed as a result of the pandemic, I got that, but what was being proposed in opposition? What was being proposed in response to the very real problem of dealing with a virus? An almost humorous response from the US right came from the lieutenant governor of Texas who…