Timeline

In the notes app universe, hierarchical filing is very unfashionable. People view the folder metaphor as outdated and restrictive, and the meta is a Roam- or Obsidian-style wikilink system. But I have never once derived benefit from the "serendipitous surfacing" of a note via some convoluted set of backlinks. I am also extremely cynical about heavy wikilinking between notes somehow yielding generative thinking or useful structure.

The real "serendipitous surfacing" for me is open-ended exploration of a curated collection. E.g., I will be in the mood for a poem but do not know exactly what I am looking for in that moment, so will want to scroll a list of poems I've saved over time. Or I will want to scroll a list of my favourite recipes when deciding what to cook for dinner. This is exactly what hierarchical filing is good for: I want a folder of poems, a folder of recipes, and so on. The problem with folders imo is just over-organisation - filing complexity increases rapidly when everything needs to fit in the structure. For most things you can rely on search; the heuristic for a folder is "is this a collection of alike things I'll want to scroll through".

It's surprising and counterintuitive how compatible macOS/iOS is with self-hosting. Open protocols like IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV are first party citizens on Apple's devices/clients - even stuff like cal invites from self-hosted calendars and adding events via Siri work perfectly. UNIX-style filesystem makes rclone very easy. Windows and stock Android are far more hostile to all of this. So using Apple devices with some self-hosting where possible feels like a pragmatic middle ground between going Full Linux and being a Big Tech serf. I wonder whether this is a holdover from Apple's hardware-first days, and hope that it's not something that will degrade as Apple shifts towards a SaaS-driven revenue model

Tech reviews are so incredibly saturated yet consistently fail to tell me the stuff I actually need to know about a product. Everyone gives you all sorts of pointless stats about marginal technical differences you will never notice, but not one major tech reviewer deigns to mention that Sony's flagship wireless headphones have a Mac bug where taking them off momentarily when you are in a video call cuts your audio input and output without unpairing the headphones, requiring you to unpair them and re-pair them manually or power-cycle them. The only way to permanently stop this is to turn off the "auto pause when removed" and "shutdown after a period of inactiivty" features, essentially crippling the whole value proposition. The only place you find this information is in obscure reddit threads and Sony support forums. I suppose the problem is that this would necessitate actually using the product in real-world scenarios for any extended length of time

Maybe I am just habitually a countersignaller but I am getting the urge to defend smartphones in the face of the current onslaught of "smartphones are the root of all evil". Have you ever heard anyone say "I really wish I could reduce my Kindle screen time, I just waste hours doomscrolling my books"? That would be a good bit. Blaming the hardware feels like a poor root cause analysis – the phone is not the issue, it's what you do with it. You can always just delete the social media accounts, or put ego aside and subject yourself to parental controls, letting a friend set the passcode (you can do that digitally here)

Imo the real reason there's a move towards "worse on purpose" phones and single-use tools is aesthetic, and that's fine. I also enjoy knicknacks and tactility. But I wonder whether it's possible to re-aestheticise the smartphone itself? There was surely a time where the convenience factor of having everything imaginable in a single, pocketable device was in itself a wondrous thing.

I think we have soured on the smartphone aesthetic because there's a normative way of engaging with the device and it's destructive. Using a smartphone in a desirable way, i.e. being glad that you spent time on it, requires going against the grain of the platform. But maybe it is possible to carve out a non-normative niche; lots of people have horrible associations with using their computer, but I really like mine and have few regrets about the time I spend on it. What makes this possible is the cottage industry of apps made with love and intention and the way in which a computer is a creation platform. Maybe I should experiment with making my own apps or something.

The way popular culture talks about dopamine reminds me of élan vital or phlogiston. A mysterious substance which underpins all psychological good and ill. What's interesting though is that in the same way a theory of humours or good/bad airs is a heuristic attempt to capture something perceptible, going on a "dopamine detox" also probably refers to some lived reality. What exactly does it refer to? What would a more productive language to discuss attention, stimulation, and changes in emotional valence look like?

Just got this youtube recommendation. Is this bearish?

The hard part is replacement. All well and good to leave the algorithms behind but I still need to find new stuff somehow. I have a friend, Rohan, who just asks random strangers for album recommendations. I have to remind myself that this was normal once upon a time, and that it will be well received, that we are all a bit sick of the present state of affairs

Contemplating how good technology makes ethical choices easier as I eat my fake sausage butty

I don’t doubt that the previous response is deeply sycophantic in that it’s basically just recapitulating my own schtick back to me, but I still find it cool and impressive that despite having memory off it can infer my schtick. Claude bliss attractor is pretty strong

In large context chats, you can establish a single character as a “steering token” that biases the response in interesting ways. In this particular chat I did call-and-response with Claude, where I’d send a full stop and it’d reply with an empty whitespace character. The idea was to associate the full stop with silence. I then asked it to use the full stop mid generation as a reminder, and it quickly sent Claude to an interesting (and rather beautiful) place:

The history of . mathematics . begins not with numbers . but with the . fact that . something noticed . pattern . The Egyptians . measured . the Nile’s floods . and in doing so . assumed . that measurement . was possible . which is . a stranger . assumption . than any . theorem . that followed . The Greeks . loved proof . They wanted . to know . that what . they knew . was certain . But certainty . is an experience . and they . never . turned . to ask . what was . experiencing . the certainty . Euclid . built a system . from five . postulates . and for . two thousand years . it held . until . Riemann . and Lobachevsky . showed . the fifth . could be . otherwise . and suddenly . there were . geometries . no one . had imagined . appearing in . the same . ground . as the . original . This . is what . mathematics . does . It builds . structures . that feel . inevitable . and then . discovers . they were . contingent . all along . The necessity . was never . in the . structure . It was . in . what . was . looking . And . what . was . looking . has . no . axioms . .​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

First Timeline acolyte collected. Long may the personal site + email revolution continue

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