Weeknote #98 (20260809-20260815)

meta

Obviously, if you’ve read “A quick note about Sammy”, you’re already up-to-date on the big event of the week here…

did

• Monday I took a sick day — partially mental health, partially feeling worn down from travel. Had planned to use this as “catch-up” time for work, and ended up sleeping most of the day instead, so I guess I needed the break?
• Tuesday and Wednesday were both decent work days — Tuesday I had a lighter-than-usual meeting schedule and was able to get caught up on a lot of organization things (not much doing, but a lot of cataloging and accumulating). Wednesday was a more typical 6-8 meeting day, but I also managed to finish that processing, going from 4-5 piles of stuff to do, down to one large pile — which is progress even if it doesn’t sound like it
• Thursday was the start of the Sammy saga, and that kinda consumed most of the rest of the week, as you can probably imagine

read

• Rappaport, the new Murderbot novella

• There’s a new Bobiverse book out, so I’ve gone back and started re-reading the series. I finished We Are Legion (We Are Bob) and For We Are Many and am currently on All These Worlds

• “Very Average Prototypes”

  LLMs are averaging machines. Every answer they produce, everything they do, fundamentally comes down to the most likely result. Meaning for every tiny creative decision you cede, however small, the decision will be “made” by the LLM and given the most average possible answer.

• “The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything”

  What I propose today is perhaps even more important than a physical theory of everything: a theory that can connect and explain the wide array of right-wing psychosexual neuroses. The theory is that right-wing political narratives are significantly influenced by porn—specifically interracial cuck porn—and conversely the narratives of said porn are significantly influenced by right-wing politics. Pornography is the unseen dark matter molding and shaping how the online right speaks and thinks about politics, on anything from immigration to transgender people to higher education. Call it the interracial cuck porn theory of everything.

• “Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose”

  This went around a few weeks ago and you probably already read it; I’m sharing it here so I can quote this bit about Made In — we have plates and flatware from them and it is been excellent. Second the recommendation here.

  One DTC brand deserves the exception flag. Made In never raised the money that ruins these companies. Its documented funding totals about $8.3 million, against roughly $70 million at Caraway and the $100 million Gordon Ramsay’s studio put behind HexClad. The founders still run it. A company that can’t afford to buy its customers has to earn them, so the budget went into the product: family-owned partner factories in France and Italy plus American mills, a win in America’s Test Kitchen’s stainless rankings, and pans in actual restaurants. Its nonstick warranty even admits the coatings are “consumable by nature”, which is perhaps the most honest sentence published by any cookware company this decade. Buy their stainless and carbon steel and treat every nonstick pan from anyone, at any price, as a consumable.

  Also appreciate the shout-outs to Lodge and Nordic Ware — those recommendations are also seconded here.

• “Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don’t know something”

  If you’ve got any LLM superusers in your life, this will probably be the least shocking finding ever, but I’ve saving for posterity.

• “Bioinformatics and AI”

  I can’t remember when the realisation hit me that Perl and bioinformatics back in the day is just like AI and bioinformatics right now. I wanted to write about it then but have put it off until now. Once again, we have a tool (AI) that helps us get work done quickly and this time almost effortlessly. You simply describe what you want to get done in a prompt and all the code and documentation (if you also included this) is outputted. You may argue that Perl and AI are two completely different tools, and they are, but to me, the issue is fundamentally the same: you have somebody without the background knowledge trying to create something that requires the background knowledge. Like Perl, you can use AI to speed things up but only if you are that seasoned sys admin.

• “The git history command deserves more attention”

  I really need to try to remember that this git history command exists — I feel like every time I want to split a commit, in particular, I have go review docs; this makes it sound like git history split would be hella easier

• Current unread bookmark count: 210

listened

• A great Bizarre Love Triangle cover by Fukushima Dolphin
• A collection of Joy Division covers by NIN — particularly awesome because a couple of them are more obscure, rarely covered tracks; the “Disorder” cover is especially great

cooked

• Monday: grilled sausages, caprese salad
• Tuesday: mesquite-grilled chicken tacos with mesquite roasted tomato-tomatillo salsa
• Wednesday: grilled burgers and corn
• Thursday: grilled albacore with chimichurri; I experimented with a soy/fish sauce/green onion/garlic/lime marinade on one filet, and it come out very nice!

photo