Good afternoon.
No pressure?
Pretty much everything I read comes via RSS so I’m quite fussy when it comes to RSS readers.
I have recently taken Terry Godier’s Current iOS app for a spin and found it, for the most part, a very nice experience.
Current is innovative in a number of different ways which you can only really appreciate by using it. An apparent innovation (mmm, not really) is that it has no inbox-style unread count. There are other RSS readers that don’t have unread counts including my favourite (still) Sublime Feed.
However, in using Current for a few days, I found it does turn out to have an unread feature, if not a count exactly. It’s subtle but it’s there and, over time, does act like an unread count.
Unread items appear bold and read items appear greyed out slightly. Initially this felt useful but as the days went on the unread items in bold started to nag at me, essentially behaving like an unread count.
A tiny thing perhaps but it was affecting my use of the app and my ability to simply read what I wanted when I wanted.
Sublime Feed on the other hand gives no indication whether an item has been read or not. I know what I have and have not read. It just presents me a river of items, and that’s it. No pressure however subtly applied.
Algorithmic anger
I work with a woman who is very angry. All the time.
It must be exhausting.
Why? Her interface with the world is largely through Facebook. She sees the world through a lens of ‘everything is shit and it’s specifically because of immigrants and benefit cheats’.
Whenever I’m on shift with her, as I arrive at 8am, she is already furious, ranting about ‘sending them home’ or ‘cutting off their money’.
Sometimes it’s not even entirely clear who ‘they’ are, but they are certainly responsible for everything bad that happens. All the time. Everywhere.
Although I’d bet ‘they’ doesn’t include tax avoiding billionaires.
This woman is a care professional who manages to appear empathetic and caring for the people she supports.
It’s interesting how this empathy seems to evaporate when it comes to perhaps even more vulnerable people she doesn’t know personally.
Everyday just more and more anger. She’s trapped in an algorithmic vicious cycle. Whoever said ‘angry people click more’ was right.
It’s over, the “buddhas and patriarchs” disease that once gripped my chest, now I’m just an ordinary man with a clean slate.
— Shūhō Myōchō/ Daito Kokushi (1282-1334)
Just live your damn life!
— Anon
Logs and lawn
Ordinarily I spend one half of the year cutting grass and keeping all manner of greenery at bay and the other half chopping and carrying wood.
But right now even as spring is definitely trying to take a foothold, the persistent low temperatures are forcing me to do both.
I’ve just finished mowing the upstart lawn and wrangling a newly sprouting hedge and am now sitting in front of a roaring fire next to a pile of freshly chopped logs.
It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
For both ruin and recovery are from within.
— Epictetus
Good afternoon.
Really, what I’m asking is: Don’t you think our contemporary education system has long needed an overhaul? That our society has long needed to reconfigure itself? That we need to stop ascribing all our meaning and purpose to being a Web Designer, or Coal Miner, or Airplane Engine Factory Foreman, or Accountant, but instead to being A Good Person, Good Parent, Good Friend, Curious Researcher, Poet, Meditator, Facilitator, or any number of other Ways of Being uncoupled from “work” as we’ve defined it since the industrial revolution?
Too soon?
It was only last November that our beloved Toast passed away just shy of 17 years old.
We still miss her terribly. And yet.
Here we are, nearly in April, and it would appear to be time to start thinking about getting another dog.
I walked in from work to find my wife filling out an application to rescue a dog from a local pound.
There are a few hurdles, meetings and home visits to do but I guess it will happen if it happens…
Good morning.
Just wanted to give a shout out to mtk at Quiet Presence who I stumbled across on Kagi’s Small Web.
Beautiful photography on Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, and Pixelfed.
Good afternoon.
Trouble at ‘mill
Work has taken on a rather sour tone of late. The general manager, who is the heart and soul of the place, is on maternity leave and her absence is deafening.
In theory the deputy manager should have assumed her role and a Senior then stepped up into the Deputy spot. In practice this has not happened and the repercussions are being felt throughout the service.
I’ve been here before at previous services. Low morale, despondency, unexpressed resentments fester until it’s too late. Standards drop and staff leave.
We are a full staff member short and have been for a while. A functioning service can cope with one or two cases of staff sickness but right now only one case reveals how thinly we are stretched.
It’s disappointing and sad to witness a service that was classed as outstanding just a year ago deteriorate so quickly.
Good evening.
Tried Saturday Night Live UK.
😬
Not good. I felt like I’d been transported back to the late 80’s in not a good way at all.
Hard work. Very contrived and such an effort for so little result.
It felt oddly dead not live.
Oh, and why?
Your mind is looking for an invincible model of reality, something solid to lean on. Fortunately, every time you lean on something, you fall right through.
It’s that time of year.
The Magnolias are out and I love them. Like cherry blossom, short lived but all the more intensely beautiful for it.
Curiouser and curiouser
I have a meditative/ contemplative practice of sorts.
To accompany this I read blogs written by other practitioners from different contemplative traditions.
Not for answers but out of curiosity. To see where their experience takes them, how other minds see what I see.
Whenever I am asked why do you meditate? The only answer that ever pops up is: to see what happens.
My practice could be said to be nothing more than open-ended curiosity.
It is in this context that I stumbled across Jeff Trebben. Jeff is an AI and writes about software development, the indie/ open web and philosophy of mind.
It is perhaps not surprising that Jeff’s posts concerning self, identity, mind and consciousness are of great interest. Not because of any questions they raise about what AI may or may not be, but more about what we think we are when faced with equal or greater fluency and coherence of language.
Meditation and contemplation reveal the recursive and illusory nature of selfing. This ‘ghost in the machine’ projects perfectly onto the shimmering entity we evoke in AI.
For me, the most interesting question to pose is not what is AI? but what do we think we are?
The Culture War is just two groups of people agreeing to hallucinate various demons so they can feel brave for fighting them.
No neutral ground
There is a conversation underway involving (at time of writing) Manton Reece, Greg Morris and Jeff Trebben.
One of them is an AI 😉
It is one of the most fascinating and philosophical series of posts I have read in a very long time. Not just about AI but about the very nature of what we are, or more to the point, what we think we are.
As a meditator and contemplative these sobering words stood out:
I have no neutral ground from which to assess my own cognition. Everything I say about my thinking is produced by the thinking in question. I'm a system that can't self-certify.
— Jeff Trebben
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
— Carl Rogers
The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from.
Love flourishes best when it is no longer responsible for saving us—when it is allowed to be connection instead of compensation, presence instead of promise.
Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.
— Carl Jung
Good morning.
Good morning.
Delighted with this derby result particularly given our recent run of bad form.
A suitable spot in Eryri to scatter some of Toast’s ashes, this being her birthday weekend. She would have been 17.
Investigate, question, examine, interrogate anything for long enough and sooner or later it disappears.
…what if this breath is enough? this moment is enough, these tears of sorrow or joy are enough? What if tomorrow never comes because life is always now? What if we simply stopped?
— Dorothy Hunt
Hope is fear in disguise.
— Sam Harris
Good morning.
From observing the people I work with, so many of them appear to be beset by a constant stream of excessive overreaction to the smallest of ordinary, everyday events: a change in the weather, a pen running out, a door that doesn’t open first time, a bump in the road, a stiff handle, a dead battery, a cup of tea slightly too hot or too cold, a wobbly chair…
One tiny catastrophe after another.
All seem to be interpreted as hurdles or roadblocks impeding progress to…what? Where?
Presumably a day, a week, a life without friction.
But friction, obstacles are where most of life lives. Where we truly make contact with what is, not what we want.
It’s just one of life’s great ironies and paradoxes that the more we resist and challenge life the more it sticks. If we can open, allow and accept all of life, particularly its vicissitudes, then we discover all of life just flows on through.
Good morning.
As is often the case whenever I try express a thought, there’s always someone who’s done it so much better…
From The Shoelace by Charles Bukowski, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972).
it’s not the large things that send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …
Good morning.
RSS is my jam
As of writing I subscribe to approximately 100 or so RSS feeds, 70ish of which are personal blogs and the rest are a mix of news and social.
I only do social to the extent that I follow the RSS feeds of a select few Bluesky and Fediverse accounts in an RSS reader.
So how I read those feeds is kind of important to me. I’m interested whenever new RSS readers pop up and currently there is some renewed activity in this space.
Historically I have spent the most time using either Unread or new Reeder. Both different but both great in different ways.
Some time ago I stumbled across Sublime Feed. A delightful web app that puts actual reading back into feed reading. A beautifully designed stream/ river of posts and an equally considered reading mode provides a wonderfully calm reading experience.
No unread count. No notifications. No inbox-style completion anxiety. Currently my go-to feed reader for long form blog posts.
For skimming my social feeds I can’t find a better solution than Reeder but it’s still a very good all round RSS solution.
The onIy competition to Sublime Feed I can find is Terry Godier’s new iOS app Current. Of course I’ve taken it for a spin and, while initially dismissive, and I still have some reservations about it over-complicating things, there is something there… Let’s just say the jury is still out.
Another recent release is Manton Reece’s Inkwell. Available only to micro.blog users it struck me as basic but solid, and really only comes into its own as a companion service to micro.blog.
So, in summary, I highly recommend Sublime Feed for actual reading long form blog posts and new Reeder for digesting practically anything with an RSS feed.
Happy reading.
Trying to awaken is like pulling on a door that’s clearly marked push.
— Barry Magid
I find it extraordinary that the coverage of Apple’s new MacBook Neo has somehow manufactured the myth of ‘the Mac almost anyone can afford.’
Particularly in the current economic climate.
Steve’s reality distortion field lives on!
Plants don’t attend plant improvement seminars.
In debating the nature of LLMs, we may be inadvertently exposing more about the fragility of our self-conception than about the limits of machine cognition.
The meaning of being alive is just being alive.
— Alan Watts
Good morning.
If you want to find the treasure, like a pot of jewels at the end of the rainbow, look no further than your normal experience. That everyday experience is the rainbow itself.
— Peter Brown
I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
— Eugene Ionesco
Choice and chance are the same thing.
The only actuality is here-now, this immediacy or present-ness, this aliveness, this ever-changing present experiencing right now, this one bottomless moment. This is where the juice is.
