Booked a trip to Italy today! We’re going by Nightjet night train, with the remarkable timetable of taking an 8pm train and being in Italy at 9am without a single high speed train involved.

I’m quite sore from landscaping our garden today and the past weekend. The work is very fulfilling - urban planning and garden planning are both design challenges in the real world that I like. It also vaguely reminds me of my years in Minecraft as a teenager because I’m paving with brick in a pixel-like pattern of squares and doing landscaping, lol.

Had a fantastic day with my sister and her kids the other day. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever been closer to her, it’s great to be a better brother and uncle than I was years ago. Most of the time we do end up discussing our oftentimes difficult parents and upbringing - glad we turned out okay despite it all.

Did a bunch of gardening over Easter. We took out most of the stone bricks and I started repaved parts where we want to extend the brickwork. Quite fun actually to lay down brickwork like that, it’s easy to do but a bit of a physical challenge as I’m using shouldering back muscles that almost never get to work. I’m hoping the weather helps a bit the coming weeks so we can get the garden plant-ready asap.

Started swimming again this week. I have lost the motivation to go to the gym a while ago but it's painfully obvious that I really need some form of cardio if I want to have the stamina for a busy/fun life. Cancelling my membership there when I can.

There was a period of my life where I was a gym rat, and last year it's been great for recovery workouts, but it doesn't work for me anymore. I just don't have any strength goals, am not the insecure twentysomething that needs strength to compensate for confidence, and don't enjoy going to the gym enough to get motivation from there.

Swimming is something that I do enjoy a lot. It combines the runners-high that I get (only after weeks) from the repetitive movement, it sends my heart racing but forces me to stay calm and keep down my breath, and I always feel good afterwards.

We’re house-and-dogsitting for two weeks for a friend. I was worried the dog might be anxious or something for a few days, but he’s been nothing but a happy-go-lucky doggo from the get-go. He listens really well to commands, is easily motivated by food and after two days he now lies down beside me while I’m working from this home. It’s clear he has come to like me (more than my SO for some reason) and it is very fun to walk anywhere near him and be met with the thump thump thump of his wagging tail.

Personally I'm convinced the walkie-visionie applications like Joanna Stern's cooking are the eyecatchy red herrings of this device. Like the fuckin' gamified vacuum cleaning video - it looks new and cool and we can go ooh and aah, but it'll get old veeerry quickly.

If I'd have to bet my money, I think the best possible future version of this is that it'll be a device for the times when you go 'I want to do something on an iPad, but bigger, but I don't have a big screen'. Really, how often is that?

I still think I want to try it out. And who knows - maybe lying on the couch with a 200" fake screen on my ceiling is the best way to watch Interstellar. But I doubt it's thousands-of-dollars better.

My assertion would be that there is a direct line from

i think that this kind of firehouse-sucking access to the world is more than a lot of people can bear

to

if they're addicted to the ipad, pull the teat out of their mouth

that doesn't seem to happen often enough. You'd do it, because you know full well where the internet is unsafe, but for the vast majority of parents it seems like an insurmountable task so they just don't. I'd argue the point is not to scare parents, the point is that parents should be helped in managing this shit because the techbros sure as fuck won't help. Tech always moves much faster than society can catch up to it, but in this particular case we seem to be lagging behind in a very painful way and the consensus seems to be to maybe do the absolute minimum.

Is the Internet a net positive? Well, yeah, but in moderation. So is alcohol as kb points out. I, too, was a socially isolated preteen on the web and have seen my fair share of awfulness due to the complete lack of any parental guidance. But it exposed me to ideas and information and people I'd otherwise never meet. Because it was hard for anything to engage me irl. I fled to niche hobby phpBB forums and mowed down pedestrians in GTA: Vice City when I was nine.

i don't see how the solution is continued coddling

I agree, so I think the solution is better parenting. I don't think I ended up worse from my exploratory years on the Internet but that was way before algorithmic feeds, with my own cautiousness a determining factor in what I did and did not do. Kids and teenagers benefit from parents giving them some borders. I didn't get any, but I came of age just before social media really shaped teenagers. Gen Z also didn't get any restraints, but got rekt by social media. Thank fuck it's dying, but that doesn't mean we're out of the woods I think.

make sure every once in a while they're not getting groomed by a neonazi or a pedophile. just relax.

This strikes me as a very absurd juxtaposition. What percentage of parents do you think are even aware of these dangers? because I'm afraid it's very, very low. My parents knew literally zero about the dangers, this generation of parents know...some things but it frustrates me how far we still have to go.

I thought I'd read this before... turns out my memory wasn't failing, but it has been a looong time:

I've been enjoying slogging through Grueber's The Dawn of Everything. As for a bit of lighter reading, I just started Titanium Noir from Nick Harkaway and have what if? 2 for when I'm in the mood for silly physics. It's not his best work but it's passable and scratches an itch.

Quick vent, I have not been reading much the past two years and it's frustrating me to no end. I've been religiously time-tracking my reading since February of 2017 and it looks like this:

2017: 167 hrs

2018: 249 hrs

2019: 152 hrs

2020: 143 hrs

2021: 123 hrs

2022: 65 hrs

2023: 52 hrs

...yeah, I just looked, I have 5 unspent Audible credits and 3 books I have already loaded up (The Goneaway World by Nick Harkaway, The Song of the Cell by Mukherjee and Hidden Potential by Adam Grant). I have a pretty good (as in, long) commute now but haven't been motivated enough to jump from light podcasts to a book.

Is it just me or does it feel like Substack is the only place left where there's any original, consistently good writing? Blogs feel dead, social media (especially Twitter) fails to deliver...

Spent a few rainy days in Antwerp with friends. On Saturday we went "huh why are all the stores closed?" only to realize its Armistice Day, which is Not A Thing in the Netherlands because we remained neutral, so I had no idea.

Next Wednesday is Election Day. A few months ago I was hopeful for a leftist renaissance, but that ship seems to have sailed as we are somehow gonna slide even more to the right after 4 cabinets of right-wing neoliberals. I haaattee itttt.

I feel like everyone has some kind of covid/flu thing, there's something going 'round and I was almost sure I got it yesterday but it seems to already fade away today.

I didn't know about the whole 'Waymo requires manual rules per road' thing, that is wild. Really puts a nail in the coffin that Google's "we simply scan the entire world and the car will have enough information to drive" is a formula that after a decade plus they just can't make work.

At least it's good to see one obviously risk-taking company put in its place with Cruise's pullback. Hopefully it's only a matter of time before Tesla goes the same way with their even-riskier approach to non-highway automation because that stuff is not, will never be safe enough because of their tech.

Got myself another Pfizer. Was the only one under 60 there.

Caught myself wanting to work last weekend. That’s a good sign I suppose. There does seem to exist a Law of Continual Work Suck in our household, as whenever I have it easy or good at work my SO has a hard time and vice versa. Right now she’s considering jumping ship.

I'll do you one worse:

...I think I ended up jumping through the book? Considering I had completely forgotten ever reading it I can't be sure of that though.

One of the things I like about the podcast How I Built This, is that it always ends by asking the person who built a company what degree of success they attribute to luck versus to their skill. It forces haughty CEOs to address the fact that they usually just stumbled into succes, that they got where they are by the help of other people('s money). Either that, or they end the episode by looking like, well, a Ben Horowitz.

There was a time when I ate the entrepreneurial, Tim Ferriss/Peter Thiel/Sam Altman narratives up. You can be anything you want! Go change the world! I'm glad I now know it's just throwing darts. After all, what is ambition but lust on a longer timescale.

I call this piece "A Triptych of Progress":

I was thinking of this guy. It's bonkers.

Yeah but nobody wants that. Beating my dead horse, Second Life is legit two weeks from crossing the 20-year mark and nobody, ever, in that entire ecosystem has ever cried out for immersion. The tech industry has been fishing around for a killer app for VR since Lawnmower Man and it just don't exist.

Nobody wants Zuck's version of VR, unless you are one of the few basement dwellers for whom VRChat or Horizon is a way to cope with your social anxiety. That much is certain.

What struck me about the presentation from Apple is how much it leaned into "this is just another way to interact with a computer". Do Macbooks have a killer app? Do iPads? No, they're just a different device to do the things on you're already doing on other devices, sometimes enhanced and sometimes limited by the device specifics. I'll use my iPad on the couch for some browsing, and I think people will enjoy using the Vision from time to time to do mostly things that can already be done on other devices, and partially to do things you can only do in such a device. I would not be surprised if it isn't for you, but I would also not be surprised to see myself buying/using this regularly in a year or two, because this seems to be the first device that achieves the visual acuity needed for normal people to do fairly normal things in AR with a new interaction method that relies mostly on looking and tapping.

Neither does anyone else.

How sure are you about that? You might not ever trade in your physical sliders but this device is not really meant to replace what you already have, it's meant to drastically give people more 'room' to do stuff when that room isn't really available. I could buy 5 large 4K screens and put them on an array on my desk and it would be maybe a third of what's capable when you wear the Vision (and it'd be more expensive too). I could buy a large setup of physical devices and spend thousands to get that right... or I could just have it pop into and out of existance whenever I need to. You want most of a production studio but you don't have a large spare room? You're on the go in a hotel and you want 5 large screens to do some work? Here you go.

Hell, if the passthrough is really as good as people are claiming, I could even see a hybrid solution where you have your physical sliders but you enhance them with half a dozen movable screens and dials. They already demoed that you can just type on your Macbook and have the entire wall as your screen.

It's not that the use cases for this aren't possible in other (and often better) ways. Normally I browse Hubski on my iPad, and it's an okay experience but to type out a comment I really need to find my laptop or get behind my pc. I sometimes watch YouTube on my iPad, sometimes on my PC but it's best on my smart TV, but I really think the Vision Pro experience could knock my TV out of the park. Some devices have some killer apps but really, it's the variety of options that makes it work.

I hear you thinking "so why isn't anyone doing that on a Meta Quest" and, well, one bonkers guy is, but the whole experience is so awful that it's repellant for 99,999% of people. My impression is that Apple's relentless focus on eliminating motion sickness, having screens so sharp that reading text is actually nice, having smooth transitions in/out, and their dynamic level of immersion make a very compelling case for this device being less awful and, say, only repelling 50% of people. Which is enough of a difference that this might just be the one AR device to actually pop off.

I had a similar urge, so I just posted the least bad take on the Vision Pro I've read so far:

It is fascinating the number of technological breakthroughs that Apple has made to accomplish this device. Dual 8K 90+Hz screens, on the fly predictive eye tracking to drastically reduce latency, an enormous day-one app ecosystem enabled by their aggressive merger of iOS, macOS (and visionOS), and all the little design details that have made it so that not a single reviewer reports the usual VR headaches and dizzyness.

but is it a good product?

This device: no. But this isn't a good product for the masses, this device is what the Pixelbook tried to be for Chromebooks, aka the expensive thing to kickstart a platform. The inevitable $999 Vision that will arrive in a few years though? With the pareto 80/20 features it needs to be good for most? I currently don't think it's all too far-fetched to see that as a good product, hypothetical as it may be.

That product, I think, is immersion slash flow slash escapism.

To me, the idea to have the rotating crown as an immersion-slider is one of the most interesting features of this thing, as it addresses the big elephant in the room of any VR/AR device which is that it shuts you off from the real world almost instantly almost entirely. I don't think anyone really likes that other than basement dwelling gamorz. Where previously the device itself was designed around a specific level of immersion (from 'none' in the case of Google Glass to 'as much as possible' in the case of regular VR), Apple seems to correctly realize that depending entirely on the situation, person, surroundings, and activity varying degrees of immersion are needed or desired.

I mean, the bane of VR is that you surrender your visual senses to the shitty fidelity and lag of whatever you strap on your face. You're either in the magical cave or you're out. Yeah there's some passthrough but it's not integral to the experience or device. Transitioning in and out is always jarring, nausea is always around the corner.

Again, it doesn’t look at all like looking at screens inside a headset. It looks like reality, albeit through something like a pair of safety glasses or a large face-covering clear shield.

The way Gruber describes it the Vision Pro does such a fantastic job of relaying the world around you (the entire world, the full vision) that I can totally see this blurring the line between regular vision and VR. A line that desparately needs blurring if this is ever going to work for the masses. The unmet need of AR/VR that the Vision Pro solves is that complete control over the level of immersion. And for that gradient you need the 'no immersion' part to be flawless.

But still, just because it enables a much smoother transition and thus I think enables it to potentially reach a larger audience than any device until now, that doesn't answer the question whether people actually need this new 'spatial computing' device. Personally I think this is where flow and escapism might be the big sellers. Escapism is the easy one: consumeth content in the best possible format. I think it was MKBHD who said he'd totally pay per view to watch big sports games in 3D at courtside with the Vision Pro, because it is so convincingly immersive. I wouldn't call it comfortable just yet with how heavy it supposedly is, but a bit of completely immersive escapism could definitely be enough for people to consider this device. And yes there will probably be people buying this to escape their shitty apartment / environment, but that's what people have done for decades in all sorts of ways.

The flow-part that Gruber talks about is interesting. There are already completely deranged weirdos who spend their working days inside a Quest Pro. They wave their arms around like inflatable tube men because that kind of interface is the only one available. So the idea of opening a fucking Excel in the Vision Pro is ridiculous to me at face value. But I have a crisp, large, wonderful 1440p 144hz screen in front of me that does the task of displaying a single window or maybe two next to each other just fine. Most of the regular desktop computing apps I use from day to day do not seem to be any better in visionOS.

However... there are many apps that I don't use all the time whose UIs are, if you're really honest, a nightmare of decades of compromises that a 2D screen requires. GIS. DAWs. Blender. Illustrator. The choice to make 3D item interaction largely vision based is another thing that does set this device apart from all the other VR wavy arms bullshit, because it seems to enable (near) full control with an interaction that is not that much different than using a mouse.

Really, what I wish Apple would've shown was a demo version of Logic where you can arrange everything in 3D space and move sliders by looking at them and moving a finger or something like that. I know how impressive your audio setup is, but I also vaguely know how expensive it is, and if I can get your setup for $3500 in an interactive 3D space instead of building it out? With a UI that knocks a DAW out of the water because it does not depend on me holding some plastic gizmo?

I think I would.

Job hunt starting to pick up steam, with six conversations in five work days (sorry c_!). Even vague work acquaintances are willing to help me out; but I guess that’s in no small part because my corner of the job market is small enough that we’ll run into each other again anyways.

The big all hands meeting yesterday had the iciest of vibes; what was most telling is that there were no questions from the audience after they hammered home some more details of the reorganization. And that they didn’t mention the understream of two thirds are considering quitting. No, we got a bunch of band-aids and “y’all be fine! Really! But we will close your office and kill your culture.”

It feels like I’ve been going to physical therapy for a long time, but it’s really only been 12 weeks now. I’m doing pretty great; I still have some bad days but most days I can get around pretty easily, and I’m enjoying going back to the gym after years of little to no sports. My weights are low but my spirit is high. Running still kills me (I can’t last more than five minutes) but I did a 30 minute bike ride, a 40lbs deadlift and a bunch of 30lbs squats today pretty easily.

It was unusually frank, and I did get a strong “I’m leaving too” vibe. I think our corporate overlords haven’t quite gotten that so many of us are thinking of leaving, so for me the most unstable part is that I have no idea what they’ll do once they do realize it. Although - the move to reorganize might be initiated by someone high up the chain deciding it was a mistake to acquire us, so perhaps they dgaf. There’s an all hands update on this early next week, so I’m very curious what the message will be then.

You hit the nail on the head. They're gonna get our group of entrepreneurs and force it into a megacorp of employees, and I just don't see that work no matter what they say. Entrepreneuring requires freedom, autonomy, the ability to tell management to fuck off. None of that will be the case because it doesn't fit the mold.

Honestly, I am having a hard time thinking of things that would be out of reach (feels like they're in my 'unknown unknowns') but you make a very interesting point. In hindsight I'm happy I made the career moves I did the past year or two because it's given me much more confidence in my abilities to do other types of work.

Aight, let’s talk use cases then.

an incomplete list of things I have used gpt3 for that I find useful

- automate menial text related tasks in a time efficient manner. “Change these 200 rows of code so that they all match this format”

- find bugs in my code that I’m too dumb/chase stared at too long to notice

- explain this complex text in a way that I understand, e.g. an academic paper, or difficult code. Answer follow up questions I have about it too.

- write the excel formula to do X Y and Z, a combination of things that is hard to google

- take my unstructured mess of a meeting notes, summarize the main three points and write an email to my colleagues sharing that information.

- find the sentiment of this wall of text I received from someone

and, perhaps most often used by me:

- write the shitty first draft of (code / email / report / …) so that I can use my creative energy only for the important stuff

Any of these tasks can be done by someone. It’s not the second coming of Christ by a long shot: I think of it more like 3D printing. But the ability to automate simple human knowledge work taps a well that is in my opinion very deep and very wide. It genuinely is a timesaver and I am already throwing a few bucks at it per month. None of the things on my list are interesting, but they are a part of the work that need to happen and I’ll happily offload that and more to an uninspiring but useful bot.

To make a point by asking a question: ChatGPT is the fastest new adopted thing ever in terms of DAU. It is constantly at capacity despite having Microsoft behind it. If it was just a fad, why are so many people still using it so much you think?

ahaaa so that’s what this was named after

The tomfoolery surrounding the bots is fun, but anyone in the Lambda guy state of mind about this topic is worth ignoring if you ask me.

Isn’t the real revolution in the fact that the mirror is polished enough that it can replace another humans in a set of tasks, where the excitement is in discovering the size of that set?

The Eliza game (which is actually a visual novel about Seattle tech scene burnout) contains the namegiving Eliza AI which automates therapy sessions by using the standard therapy play book and giving ChatGPT responses in that framework. The subtext is that it was a supposedly revolutionary thing that failed to actually change all that much besides creating a privacy hellhole and putting therapeutics out of work.

For me, the interesting part about this whole boom is that yes, it’s a next word predicting bot all the way down, but if that hammer is strong enough than it will find significant nails to flatten.

There are some people arguing “aren’t we also next word predicting creatures in some ways” and I get that, the mirror is oh so polished. I think it’s a maybe the only interesting discussion in that existential corner of the AI debates, but that doesn’t mean I’m convinced of that.

Thanks for the tagging. holy shit SEVEN YEARS?

We both got COVID for Christmas. Luckily only a mild version, but it sucks to have Christmas taken away like that.

This year.... Not much. So I'm prolly including things from end of last year.

The Body Keeps the Score is fucking great, and depressing, and I broke kleinbl00 with it SORRY

The Righteous Mind by Haidt was phenomenal until it nosedives into speculation

4000 Weeks is the antidote to productivity books / mindset that I really needed. I feel like it was directly written for me and it's on my select list of books that I actually look forward to reading again.

Rendezvous with Rama is so far my favourite scifi book I've read, I think. (I haven't read a lot.)

Finally read Bullshit Jobs and Utopia of Rules in its entirety which are good, but I like the latter more.

The Anthropocene Reviewed is amazing but I like the podcast format better.

I thought Piranesi was alright, until it became heartbreakingly great about two thirds in. Did my best to hold back tears in the fucking grocery store listening to it.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino is an essay collection by a Gawker/New Yorker writer and had a few interesting things to say but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

One of the lenses through which to view socially impactful technology is that they are technologies that move too fast for our society to adapt to it - the boomers can't handle misinformation bots, the millenials are all addicted to their phones, yadda yadda. It's not a perfect metaphor but it is a useful way to think about this, because these AI models feel like a large new virus when our society hasn't yet fully developed the antibodies to withstand the previous changes. I'm still having a hard time teaching my parents to distinguish phishing mails from regular ones, and now there's the chance that someone writes a fully personal email automatically?! It might just make emails 10x less useful in the process.

It's not that I need this, it's that it is becoming stupidly easy to wrap these models around any nefarious text-based thing (which is most of the internet) and I feel like we do not have the tools to deal with this soon enough. So even if this does end up screwing most of social media and the internet over, if the patient is dead is the operation still succesful?

The last months of the year are always busy, but after three years of it being brutal this time around I’m doing pretty well. Making the internal move from data specialist to spearheading a part of my team’s business has meant new challenges and responsibilities but somehow less overall stress. I think it helps that a much larger share of my week is doing the fun, engaging things that give energy instead of drain it.

I think I’m finally out of my reading slump after breezing through Piranesi last week and enjoying an essay collection by Jia Tolentino despite her being a New Yorker author.

If you haven't yet actually checked out what Zuck's Horizon Worlds actually looks like to use now, I highly recommend . example. It is truly breathtaking how they managed to create a shittier version of a beta of Second Life.

VR/AR will go the way of 3D printing: very useful for a handful of straightforward use cases, and nothing else. My money's on gaming, architecture/design, and not much else.

I made some killer maze designs in primary school too, so imagine the delta after two decades.

Feel like i should get back into running just because this new Royksopp song is too awesome for that:

Here's a song with a whopping 16 views that I adore for it's soft, PBS, menu-screen sound:

Just drove to Reims today. Next stop on our trip to South France is the Taize community, which I've heard great things about from my SO who's been there a few times now. I'm expecting a Bible camp version of Burning Man.

Note to self: never ever plan another 12-day-in-a-row move again. The human body is not designed to lift weights for six hours every day at >30C temps without any training. We made it though, so now it's time for a well deserved holiday.