This week in squirrels…

Summary

  • Back on meditation
    • I have been pushing to start my day with meditation again, a quiet 10 minutes to start each day, with my favorite old meditation & bells app Enso.
    • Meditation is so hard to do, but the longer I do it, the more improvements in my state of mind I see. It pays off more than I sometimes give it credit for.
    • It is still a surprise Enso still works on the iPhone; it’s ancient and not really updated much at all. But I won’t replace it until I have to, because it is as much of an app as I want for a meditation session.
    • I am hoping to get back up to 20-30m soon. Still, meditation isn’t about urgency; it’s about building a mental muscle.
  • NixOS, Drivers, Power Management, and … maybe not NixOS
    • The continual battle of mine with NixOS has nothing to do with the last of LSB or writing Nix code, but what has appeared as the lack of optimizations and patches that seem to exist in many other distributions.
    • I am having problems that boggle the mind when considering that I have had far more issues with 6.12 on NixOS than both older 6.8 and newer 6.14 on other distributions.
    • But I have found some tests and hints that it might not even be my Nix box. Big egg on my face if true, but it would be weird switching to nix broke my router or something.
    • I also found that once I manually audited the hardware and options and set up power management, even in performance modes, I am getting far better power utilization and fewer issues.
  • Trying to be a better streamer
    • I think most people say this, but being a [good] streamer is a lot of work in the background, a lot of time playing with assets, making things, learning how to improve, making things, and buying too much stuff. Oh, making too much stuff, hopefully making it.
    • We always used to joke that furries are the modern patrons of the arts, but they have a new challenger with streamers.
  • jolars/tomat: A Pomodoro timer
    • This is something I have wanted since I left macOS; it’s just enough of a Pomodoro timer that runs as a service with a good bar integration and sounds.
  • Feelings about using AI for work
    • My employer is going hard in on AI. Things are tight and stressful, and being more efficient is the name of the game. It has gotten to the point where the CTO threw down the gauntlet in Slack with the unambiguous message to all the engineers, “The TL;DR is: if you can’t find the AI helpful when coding, then it’s likely the problem is you.”
    • I have been leaning into the AI because I want to stay with the curve of tech even if I have apprehensions, but I still have concerns™. These aren’t unique concerns™ I have heard them reiterated by influencers like Theo, but ones I feel are worth spending time writing out in my own words.
    • It feels like AI isn’t helping me as much as it is helping the company. I can use my pre-existing skill set to guide the computer to increase output and velocity to the point where I can no longer remain fully engaged in learning the work’s underlying systems and intricacies.
    • I am reviewing and working on the code that I am making with AI, and I use it more than for writing code. But the most efficient way to learn and reinforce knowledge isn’t reviewing; it’s implementing solutions. One of the most important lessons we learn in school is that doing and showing the work builds expertise and wisdom. Nobody goes from a Jr to a Staff engineer reading code. One increases their skill set by going through the process of implementing concepts, even when it feels rote.
    • If we let ourselves outsource the process of implementing and learning how to learn, we atrophy those skills. The question then becomes: can we maintain or grow when we are not the implementers but are delegated to the position of mentors?
    • Now, I don’t want to be entirely doom and gloom and decry where things seem to be going; I still see a lot of value in some areas of AI in business tasks and operations in particular. Some of these things are areas where I am actively deriving value. But in our zealous excitement, I worry about overusing a tool.
    • I also want to acknowledge that this is a feelings diatribe and I am no thot leader. But from past experience, I’ve learned that technical tools rarely come with guardrails and can be used in ways that cause significant problems down the road. One of my biggest challenges is determining whether a tool or method is something we should do, not just whether we can do it.
    • I also know that the human mind loves shortcuts and will take every shortcut we give it, and I also know that consequences don’t always immediately fall into our lap; it’s slow, and then suddenly all at once.
    • This is long enough to be a blog post on its own. I could expound on more of my thoughts if I did, but for now, I want to leave it as this pool of thoughts, maybe to rewrite later once I have thought more about it and talked to some other people, too.
  • Some of my favorite uses of AI, though
    • Not one just to be a negative Nancy, I am also collecting my favorite and more valuable uses for AI.
    • Writing one-off shell scripts for reports & bulk one-off tasks: If I am not going to use it more than once or twice? Make Claude write a shell script. Then I can polish that up in moments and run it to get my report. This is one of those areas where Claude can make it 80% faster than I can, and then I can get the 20% to make it work well quicker than it can.
    • Documentation, let it write documentation, then delete HALF of what it wrote because it overwrites technical documentation.
    • Set it on the “make the unit test pass” game.

Books

  • Hope You’re Happy Lemon Vol 1 ⭐⭐⭐⭐
    • Nobody be shocked, I like to get into body swap/gender swap stories from time to time.
    • This one was way better than many I have read lately, even though it has some parts I am not sure of in the long term. It has all the weak and overplayed tropes of a body swap. Still, it doesn’t completely mire itself in them, and it doesn’t get excessively horny about it.
    • Some of the core parts of the story are about cheating and lying in a relationship, yet it comes at it with the nuance of a chainsaw to start.
  • If I Could Reach You
    • I got three pages in and I already feel like I am not going to like this one.

Music

  • Cult of the Lamb Soundtrack
    • This is more playful than creepy, maybe even spoopy.
  • Purity Ring’s “Another Eternity”
    • Their new self-titled album is good, but this is my favorite album of the synth-pop group
  • Leroy’s Dariacore
    • This is not my favorite Dariacore, even if it is the originator of the genre, the copies I have are just a bit too low bitrate and grainy, maybe on purpose
  • Björk’s Vespertine
    • Sometimes I gotta listen to a Björk album on loop, this Thursday was Vespertine.

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

People with no skin in the game give confident advice. People with skin in the game say, “It’s complicated.”

  • JA Westenberg