fort mckay (4/12)

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.

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.

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

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.

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