The Lathe: Sunday, May 23 2021
I’m trying something a bit different here. Rather than writing a complete, thought out and useful weekly newsletter, I’ll be lazily (and more frequently) copying and pasting from the prior days’ “Daily Note” wiki entries; maybe with some light edits and additions. I’m afraid this means that things will become even more sloppy and informal around here. On the other hand, I might end up actually sending something once in a while. I hope you’ll stay.
I’ve been testing this for a couple days over at world.hey.com/jbaty. I like HEY World because it’s so simple and basic and that it’s also not really a full-on newsletter platform. That’s also the reason I don’t like it. So, I’ll test the next few “issues” here and see which I prefer. Thanks for playing along. Please don’t hesitate to hit reply and let me know if you have a preference, complaint, whatever.
2021.05.23 - Daily Notes
As if this all wasn't too much work already, I've now started writing everything by hand in my notebook first, then copying stuff to the wiki. I don’t see how this can last, but seems like a really good idea right now.
Apropos yesterday’s comments about crypto being stupid and only useful for making a few people rich:
BREAKING: DeFi100 coin exit scams, and runs away with $32 million in investors funds.
Website is now updated with the message “We scammed you guys, and you can’t do shit about it” pic.twitter.com/uyeYUDgbwo—
Mr. Whale (@CryptoWhale) May 22, 2021
I made the best pancakes this morning:
I've been using Zotero as a bookmark manager. This is an incorrect use of a reference manager, but it's working pretty well anyway. As a side effect, I get easy bibliography references in case I’m ever drafted into academia.
I am considering firing up another static blog. Probably in Hugo again and published via Netlify. I don't know what it'll be for, but I feel like writing stuff in plain text (using Emacs) and typing "make deploy" like the good ol' days. Some days I just can’t stand writing in the WordPress editor.
This morning I spent hours tweaking the "Copy link" behavior on the wiki. I'd already changed the default button behavior so that it replaces the hostname of the copied URL with "rudimentarylathe.wiki". This lets me copy links from my local instance running at "localhost" and have them point to the production version. The problem is that the URL sometimes contains spaces and that can break links when pasting the URL somewhere. All I wanted to do was URLEncode the link. Should be simple, but it took me 2 hours because TiddlyWiki is weird.
George Saunder’s new book, “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life” is fun so far.
"It is easier to keep adding exceptions and justifications to a belief than to admit that a challenger has a better explanation."
— Zeynep Tufekci
Enjoy your day!
Jack