I've been searching for a reason/excuse to try Clay (and by extension C), and I just realized making a custom Wayland desktop panel (like this Rust-based one) is plausible.

Embeddings raise the possibility of exploring ideas spatially. The central challenge is how to balance between automatically laying out ideas semantically and allowing the user to group or cluster themselves.

User movement mirrors the experience of the best physical brainstorming - cutting up pieces and rearranging, examining, rearranging again.

Embeddings promise automatic clustering and hopefully surfacing new connections.

I've been putting todo lists in project directories lately. I think it would be cool to have a system that searches up parent directories for todos.

So you could do something like a todo command and see todos for your current directory as well as a parent directory like dev. So a natural hierarchy.

I guess search / grep is probably also fast enough you could pretty easily search through child branches as well.

It's holiday break and I'm doing some config stuff. I keep thinking about wanting to set my computer up as a "magic terminal". Where it boots into the command line - maybe into some combo of a tmux and neovim session, and everything is magical but through this sort of retro command line interface.

I feel like I'm making progress but also getting caught in the weeds...

I want to think more about some connected ideas. Silicon Jungle's prototypes where he is exploring breaking ideas into cards, I think called lenses, that can then be further explored.

Linus Lee's talk about using LLMs as a microscope for thoughts.

Some work experiments where we've been using LLMs to break scenes down into parts, then applying a transformation to one of those parts.

Thinking a lot lately about making a comfortable environment for myself. Both in real space and digital space.

In real space I think about my desk setup. I think about nostalgic 90s photos of cozy computer setups.

In digital space I think about my neovim and terminal setup. After getting things pretty well setup I've kind of let them sit - and added a few things that never quite worked right. That cruft started to build up and now I'm starting to clean it out.

Back on the train and in the glasses deck. Sitting next to a big coffee spill on the flor and a man slowly, methodically eating a sandwich.

I don't know if I'll actually publish this as a post, but I wanted to collect my thoughts by writing.

This morning I was thinking of buying a new kitchen knife and working on cooking a couple of dinners a week again. I'd like to find some sort of system for all of that that feels good.

Demo that has some promise where all data is in the image file. Sources on the left, canvas layout on the top right. Data encoded as image pixels on the bottom right.

But I'm not excited to jump back into it lately so I need to figure something out.

I think it gets more interesting when I have the three ways of working with the images.

Brainstorming on the train. Laying out the pieces.

I can use mediapipe hand landmark. I know the positions of the fingers. I'll use pointer finger as cursor, if they have two hands up I can use both of them...

I can use pointer and thumb pincer as click. I can normalize distance based on lower knuckle thumb distance probably. Click and drag works with that motion too, although maybe it's a shame you can't just point and drag - maybe also some ability to toggle based on the other hand.

Some of the most interesting responses I saw to Ted Chiang's piece:

Mat Dryhurst tweet:

The easy unlock re the cyclical AI art culture war that will seem obvious in retrospect is that the people creating models are artists

More response writing! Here we go. Same rules, don't summarize, pick out what's interesting to me even if it leaves a bunch of other stuff out.

First his definition:

art is something that results from making a lot of choices.

I'd like to get into the habit of using this blog to write down responses and appreciations of things. So let's do that:

I've been listening to the "Moving Beyond Syntax" episode from Future of Coding over the past couple days. Overall I've just really been enjoying Future of Coding episodes as a break from AI hype. As a reminder of all the interesting things there are still to do in programming as programming.

I also think the addition of Lu has been great. Now (and especially in this episode) there are three distinct points of view from Lu, Ivan and Jimmy, that bounce off and contrast with each other. I think sometimes I get stuck wanting to know / cover everything, and listening and enjoying the back-and-forth is a good reminder that it's good to be coming from a perspective. That you're part of a larger conversation and you don't have to cover every angle yourself. A good thing for me to write about is what angle I am coming from these days.

I turned off threads for now, the roll-ups were too much noise with all the new imported posts in here. I think maybe the right move is to have threads as an extra layer, so you can click through and see the thread page, but the index sticks to 'every post, reverse-chron'. Styling also plays a role here...

Incremental build all wired up. Trying building the last four posts and any threads they may be a part of. Maybe I'll also build a web UI for posting soon... but before that, time to import the rest of the writing posts and some posts from feed.

Testing incremental rebuild from the high line.

Got month-based index pages working here. Along with infinite scroll loading. Still want to get incremental rebuild working. Then I'll feel better about doing lots of little posts here.

Finally wearing my AR glasses combo out on the commute. Made some decent progress trying to paginate this blog today. Pushed the scale up to 2x which is helping. Also think I've got a good base system set up (refined from reinstalling across a bunch of computers of all the time) and that's helping.

Doing some real system config work for the first time in a while. Trying to approach that 'sitting down to an empty page of paper' feeling again for sitting down to the computer. It is hard work to make things simple though.

256 colors seems like it should be enough

Finished listening to the Diamond Age. Pretty fun! The primer was maybe a little different than what I expected from hearing it referenced. But man I will always love an experience that secretly teaches you how to run it yourself. Need to read the Andy Matuschak essay now.