18 entries for April 2026

Control

[AI companies are so overexposed to debt and market correction that their success relies on everyone using it. When it isn't working for everyone, the next best thing is making usage mandatory. They can require it by crippling local computing power and supply to force people through cloud services.] Want storage? That'll be another $20/mo. Want graphics for games? Another $20. You want to perform data science and fit ML Models?! You're going to need the Professional plan, starting at $200/mo. It's a rent-seeker's dream.

Why fight to get one of the few remaining laptops in inventory with onboard horsepower when you can get an OpenAI Terminal just for subscribing? Sure, all it does is provide you with a single interface, a blinking chat box through which your entire digital experience is mediated, but plans start at only $20/month! Isn't that easier? Look how shiny it is. Just relax. Don't resist. It hurts more when you fight it.

The Ma of a New Machine

[LLM chatbots generate "deep cognitive work"-level complexity with an interface for reaction and intuition.] It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction to keep the momentum going.

We’ve been looking at this problem entirely from the technology’s point of view. The LLM is driving us, pushing a specific interaction model and veering us towards making mistakes. We are not computers; going fast isn’t our superpower.

Filó Machado, Cibele Codonho: Correnteza

wicked chord substitutions. my version was based on the recording by Joyce and Toninho Horta.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.

We come now to the inconvenient truth of this technology: that it is built, like so much "progress," on theft. The training corpora of these models includes code with licenses not meant to be used in this way. Even if one could guarantee that copyleft code were not included in output, the entire system of weights and tokens is inexorably linked to copyright infringement. There is no escaping this. To call it theft is accurate in my opinion, but then I'm a bigger believer in copyright than many in my circles. What is the appropriate response, and by whom? How do we respond to the theft of others whose accidents are visited upon us? I write this on the stolen, unceded land of the Chumash and Tongva peoples. I do what I can to remember that, acknowledge that, and teach others what I know of those cultures. I have no idea how to mitigate the harms of the wholesale theft of intellectual property that gave birth to large language models.

I also don't know what to do about the destructive extraction mining that sourced the minerals making up my computer. These human harms are almost surely greater than the theft of writing, yet I am happy to ignore them. I mention this not to wave away the wrongs, but to recognize that all my technology is bloody. I don't know how to remove myself from the entire system in such a way that my hands are clean. I don't know that anyone can do so in the interconnected age.

The fight cannot be among laborers who are all threatened by this technology. The fight must be between the workers who wish to work, create, live, and prosper, and the elites who only seek to enrich themselves by means of this technology.

Filó Machado, Gennoshin: Dinorah Dinorah

such a simple short rhythmic refrain yet satisfying to repeat a million times in the same song

Moxie My first impressions of web3

I can run my own mail server, but it doesn’t functionally matter for privacy, censorship resistance, or control – because GMail is going to be on the other end of every email that I send or receive anyway.

I can build my own NFT marketplace, but it doesn’t offer any additional control if OpenSea mediates the view of all NFTs in the wallets people use (and every other app in the ecosystem).

[Blockchain transaction fees create an artificial floor on prices that would be more attractive by simply treating platforms as OpenSea or Coinbase as traditional centralized services.] Eventually, all the web3 parts are gone, and you have a website for buying and selling JPEGS with your debit card. The project can’t start as a web2 platform because of the market dynamics, but the same market dynamics and the fundamental forces of centralization will likely drive it to end up there.

Intuitive Guide to Angles, Degrees and Radians

[If a 2-meter radius wheel turns 6 radians per second, scale by radius to get 6 × 2 = 12. If it turns 2000 degrees per second, the calculation becomes 2000/360 or 5 + 5/9 rotations per second, which plugs into the circumference equation 2 × π × r as 2 × π × (5 + 5/9)…]

[Degrees are arbitrarily based on the sun (365 days ~ 360 degrees) and use the observer’s perspective. Radians use the mover's perspective.]

Nadah El Shazly: Claustrophobic Love

simple noisy cello over a haunting eerie harp with ethereal effects

Stacy Kidd: Let Love Enter

nice groove, not used to hearing jazz solos in house tracks

Rafael De Lemba: Ingazeira o Ingá

capoeira variations with blue notes, adding fire through singing

A taxonomy of ATmosphere applications

['Symbionts' use domain expertise to fill Bluesky feature gaps. Their survival relies on Bluesky growing without competing.]

['Offshoots' leverage Bluesky's userbase to construct their own separate communities.] Their permanence will come from their unique services — Blacksky Cash, Eurosky’s jurisdictional arbitrage, Cartridge’s single-minded focus on gaming. They get to play a positive variant of the old Microsoft playbook: Embrace, Extend, Escape.

['Cuckoos' create paid services on top of ATproto's shared architecture. They survive by leveraging the ecosystem without appearing a threat, and also by non-competition from Bluesky.]

Before bed: add 2x 500ml jugs of bread flour, 1 jug of warm water, quarter teaspoon of dried yeast, 2 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of rapeseed oil or olive oil to a bowl. Mix together with the handle of a wooden spoon. Cover and let rise overnight.

The dough is quite sticky, wet your hands to handle it. pull the edges of the dough to the center a few times to stretch the gluten. Split the dough, put in loaf tins or shape. Leave to rise again. Bake it in a hot oven for 40 mins.

Open Source Alternatives To Proprietary Software

Replace proprietary software products with open source alternatives.

Dropping to log-level

God is very cruel. He only gives us data about the past.

[Use the simplest model with sparse data and complicated models with abundant data.]

[When things move quickly, a log helps us understand what happened and enables us to extract pattens without needing to determine the best structure in advance.]

Filó Machado, Djavan: Origens

Sounds like Stevie Wonder singing in Brazilian Portuguese.

The case against conversational interfaces

We are significantly faster at receiving data (reading, listening) than sending it (writing, speaking). This is why we can listen to podcasts at 2x speed, but not record them at 2x speed.

[Roughly estimated: mobile typing ~30wpm; writing/typing ~60wpm; speaking ~150wpm; reading ~250wpm; listening ~270wpm; thinking ~1000–3000wpm.]

[Gestures and facial expressions compress data so we can trade specificity for speed.]