Early Version

i barely got anything done today.

i have at least an outline of things to be done tomorrow.

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In The News: Los Angeles burning.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-los-angeles-fires-will-put-californias-new-insurance-rules-to-the-test/

💡 when I read articles like that, I start screaming at nobody in particular "this is why I left California: the state is governed by fuckwads who dispute the laws of reality, and blame everyone else for the suffering they cause".

The Reddit comments are also awful. "The problem is greedy insurance companies!". NO. The problem is a complete lack of a competent strategy for fire management, and a voter base that disputes the laws of mathematics.

You can't just pass a law saying that people have to offer insurance products that will lose money. ⚔️ well, actually, maybe you can ... but then where are you when the insurance companies go bankrupt?

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🔥 i mean, it was a federal holiday ...

well, most of the print-view changes are done.

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the Substack Notes feed seems to be unusually terrible this week. Many of the posts are several months old. There is too much "bro-sphere" dating advice posts. There are three different posts about "porn star Lily Phillips fucks 100 men in one day". Some casual stereotyping based on nationality. And, of course, more apologetics for Luigi Mangione.

🔥 does that say something about the targeted user? / not really, I have already blocked a lot of this content on Substack.

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plans for today:

• additional UX polish based on user feedback
• "portfolio" / "recent experience" section of personal homepage
• some additional writing tasks
• social event, scheduled at 5PM

10:02AM ⚙️ all times Eastern Standard - The honor guard is at National Cathedral in Washington. The casket is leaving the vehicle.

Inside, the front two pews on the right have the row of Presidents. The current regime (Biden, Harris, and +1s) in the first row, the previous (Carter, Clinton, Obama, Trump) in the second row. No Michelle Obama in the shot I saw. 🔥 I wonder if Carter wanted his funeral to be while Biden was still President?

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The USA has no "established" religion, but the Episcopal Church in Washington DC is less un-established than the others. At least when a certain type of pomp is required.

⚙️ According to Wikipedia, the Cathedral is the third-tallest building in Washington DC.

🤖 From Reagan onward, the Cathedral has consistently served as the location for modern presidential state funerals in Washington, D.C.

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When a young man dies, there is talk of how it was such an unspeakable tragedy.

When an old man dies, the mourners read eulogies written by dead men. Gerald Ford, Walter Mondale.

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10:18AM - the casket is proceeding down the aisle. 🔥 state funerals are not hasty affairs.

The colors are predominently black, with some white from the clergy. I see more "Vatican red" than "CoE purple" ⚔️ officially called "lilac".

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10:39AM - a technical glitch in the broadcast, during the speech of the son of Gerald Ford.

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10:47AM - Walter Mondale's son is on. The chyron does not say his name. He read "1977" as "1971".

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11:21AM - Jason Carter (a grandson) is on. 💡 Supposedly Biden will be speaking as well. This is going to run late. State funerals are not hasty affairs.

The speeches are hagiographies (of course), but what the speakers are saying is good about the late Mr. Carter does tell us something.

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11:34AM - Joseph R. Biden is on. 💡 his public speaking is ... fine? as long as he sticks to short sentences, or takes a pause during the long ones

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11:48AM - a Homily by Andrew Young.

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11:58AM - and now, Garth Brooks performing Imagine. 💡 nope. I'm out.

after some time arguing with the machine (and a tarot reading), I determined that a database migration was not a good use of time or effort. 💡 choosing between MySQL, Postgres, and Firebase was also not a good use of time or effort.

instead, most of the other tasks on the to-do list got done. the "Preview" button exists now. the one known security-issue was fixed. there is a PRESUBMIT to hopefully catch some of the "LLM didn't include an import" 🔥 or, software developer didn't include an import issues before submitting.

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the goal for tonight is to finish the various "printing doesn't look pixel-perfect". the use of color, as well as the spacing and layout, are all (sometimes) issues.

once that is done, I am declaring Atacama 1 to be finished. ⚔️ well, actually, i will still probably end up fixing a few things over the next week. 💡 let's say "feature-complete"

the "new lexer", the conversion to Postgres, the "frame/dispatch" model, and the automated LLM features will have to wait for Atacama2. Which will either be in a few weeks, or never.

💡 I'm not sure how to resolve one issue. in "high-contrast mode" (which might need to be renamed), there isn't enough cohesion between the sigils on the left, and the text boxes on the right. the original goal was that frame/dispatch would let the hr blocks span both columns. that might still be possible in Javascript now.

i haven't entirely decided on "topics" / "channels". at least the cities emails tend to aggressively jump between topics. 🔥 experience has shown that approximately nobody likes this. 💬 I didn't make him for you.

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tomorrow is the funeral of James Earl Carter. i might watch. 🔥 i might live-blog it.

surely one of the USB drives around here has a Linux install drive on it?

💡 "get the c.2016 laptop running Linux, because Windows on an HDD is too slow" probably won't be done today.

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I have come to the conclusion that, while the machine is good at some coding projects, it is uniformly bad 💡 or, at least, not good at sysadmin tasks. It's not useless for them, the results for specific questions are still better than a Google search. But if you ask it to do a mildly complex task, it will almost certainly get something wrong. 💡 there is no reason to think this is any "universal truth"; it is more a reflection of the available training data and the limitations of an LLM-only system

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today's primary goal is the "frame-dispatch" database schema migration.

there are subgoals:

• set up the PRESUBMIT check for Python imports
• ensure the local environment can create the alembic schema migration scripts
• add some additional database fields for desired features 🔥 will they be "hashtags" or "channels"? or "topics"?

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I'm not stating any LLM-specific goals with the schema migration. But it is possible either "LLM-generated topics" or "LLM-generated copy-edits" or something will suddenly become very easy.

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non-Atacama goals:

• time-permitting, today is the day I should get a haircut. and, go shopping while i am out.
• nothing else remarkable is planned.

💡 "save message when the browser restarts" is not currently a feature.

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the new https://www.pow3.com is up.

there are various letters to be written:

• a cover letter on what I can do, what I want to do, why I haven't been doing it for the past few years, etc.
• on LLMs in general, and my LLM coding experience. 💡 there are a lot of "unnecessary" commits because of the need to pass changes back-and-forth between my own branches
• the LLM benchmarking data from November/December
• investments I have made (and will advertise)?

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also the mailserver is closer to working.

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i played two games of chess today. one win, one loss.

chess is a game about hoping the other player makes a mistake. against perfect play, you cannot hope to win. 🔥 and tu cannot hope to even draw.

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features for Atacama for tomorrow:

• The "frame-dispatch" schema migration. 💡 that is: instead of just generically calling them "emails", there will be a dispatch, separated into various frames ⚔️ well, actually, I don't know where the "chain" logic will be. having multiple replies is useful. but, a "main branch" is also useful. ⚙️ the hr tags separate the dispatch into frames.

It is likely that some other useful feature will arise naturally out of the migration. ✨ tomorrow's details will be described tomorrow and not today ⚔️ "getting tests running in PRESUBMIT" is orthogonal to the database schema.💡 some version of "the LLM writes a summary if all the text is in colortext blocks" is the most likely feature

the machine succeeded at none of the more-complicated tasks I had planned for yesterday afternoon.

today there is no Atacama work. tomorrow there will be some, but it will be triaged.

the main goal is "new personal website". ⚔️ well, actually, some content from Atacama might show up there.

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the chess and the biking were good, mostly; i needed an ibuprofen this morning. 💡 which means both "I need more biking" and "I need no biking today"

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In The News: Facebook tacks into the winds of the Trump administration.

some of these things (moving content-moderation teams to Texas) are probably things they already wanted to do, and now have a good excuse for.

others are kow-towing.

but, the headline is that they are "getting rid of fact-checkers". 💡 for reasons that survive scrutiny

There are several massive problems with the c.2021 fact-checking regime. For one, the fact-checkers definitely have veered into "liberal opinions are true and other opinions are not, regardless of the facts". 💬 They said they were researching misinformation, not researching preventing misinformation. -- Dylan Alvarez 💡 Ben Collins, one of the most prominent "misinformation" pundits, now runs Fake News site The Onion.

But, more importantly, the problem is: "by doing enough fact-checking, you imply that everything that survives fact-checking is true". Which was never the case.

And, more broadly, the concept of "people vote on what content is popular" is inherently flawed. Facebook works as "what your friends are talking about", but it is as bad as every other site when filled with "viral" content.

🔥 aren't viruses a bad thing?

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it will not be a 12-part email next week.

the rhythm of 2 emails per day does not work for me.

8/4npk1/3p2p1/1Q1Pp2p/P7/1P5P/3r1PP1/2R3K1 w - - 5 40

💡 hopefully we can fix the syntax in post.

A puzzle: what move did I play here?

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https://chatgpt.com/share/677c8470-58a8-8007-87ba-59d24d0042b7

💡 an intelligent computer system would have consulted Stockfish.

approximately all of the tasks in 3/12 are done. at the end, I hit Claude's "please come back in a few hours" threshold, with a paid account.

🔥 after seeing "rotated sigils" implemented, i turned it back off.

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for the afternoon, some Atacama tasks of a different complexity-class.

💡 presumably at least one of these will turn out to be a bad idea and/or take more time than it is worth

• stop calling them "Emails" in the DB schema. possibly migrate to a Dispatch / Frame structure (so sections of emails can be filtered separately)
• print-mode tuning. better placement for two-column mode, smaller text, less padding / line space, color check. 💡 generating a PDF would be nice, but is dependent on other things that aren't done
• add an option for "login-required" when writing posts; these shouldn't show up in the stream
• add plumbing for LLM calls. calls to GPT-4o-mini are cheap enough (and competent enough) to be sufficient.
• update the landing page to be less passive-aggressively useless
• the new lexer, again

the details for these will probably be more interesting than "I asked Claude to do it, it kinda-mostly did it, I cleaned it up". and in a separate reply.

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also, non-Atacama tasks.

• as mentioned earlier, "clean AWS"
• get a new personal website landing page
• 20 minute Peloton bike ride 🌎 the wobble factor was fixed by tightening all the screws
• probably two chess matches, 10+10, against humans online

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https://www.sourcenotes.blog/p/5-ideas-to-carry-into-2025

💡 this whole "you can't punch down" meme has reached the end of its useful life. there is too much perverse anti-status signaling going on.

The targets in this conflict are the elites—those perceived as sitting at the top of the social hierarchy. Gioia lists wealthy CEOs, DC politicians, celebrity TV newscasters, law enforcement authorities, experts of all stripes, Ivy League academics, movie stars, and other figures of authority or expertise. “All of the cultural energy right now is on the bottom. And that energy has been intensifying,” he observed.

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https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/weekly-scroll-meta-swallows-the-slop

🔥 the LLM takes aren't terribly edifying, but the soup content is good.

I wish there was a name for the common failure mode I see in modern culture - it goes something like this: 1. There are some highly autistic people that have real issues with certain foods or certain behaviors can’t just adapt or move on. 2. There are some people who self-diagnose or claim to be ‘autistic’ when really they’re just entitled and selfish and they enjoy being weird jerks. 3. Society has become more aware of the first group and more accepting of the first group over time, but this has also led to explosive growth in the second group, who are now empowered to be pricks about anything they want and claim ‘autism’.

💡 it is literally the same problem as the previous frame. weaponization of "I'm low-status so you can't criticize me" by people who are objectively high-status.

🔥 poor people don't whine if they can't have a $47 bowl of soup

⚔️ well, actually, i can't do "one line per bugfix" here. there is too much interference.

So, here are the things from the 26-item list I expect to finish before the next dispatch.

• Fix sigil boxes in dark mode.
• Fix "rotating sigils" - an idea half-created by the machine.
• Fix single-message page - there is some old/bad CSS (no "block" for colortext, scrollable second column)
• Create "read more from stream" page
• Fix font color in "Style picker" widget
• When an unsupported method is used (such as POST /), don't throw an exception
• Create robots.txt
• Create favicon.ico
• Create apple-touch-icon.png
• Improve server logging

If all that is done, I will start looking at the other 16 items.

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also it snowed a lot in various places.

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there is no other news since last night.