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Neovim is by far my favorite text editor. The clutter-free interface and keyboard-only navigation are what keep me productive in my daily programming. In an earlier post, I explained how I configure it into a minimalist development environment. Today, I will show you how to use it with Godot and GDScript. Configure Godot First, we need to tell Godot to use nvim as a text editor instead of the built-in one. Open Godot, and head to Editor Settings > General > Text Editor > External. There, you will need to tick the box Use external editor, indicate your Neovim installation path, and use --server /tmp/godothost --remote-send "<C-\><C-N>:n {file}<CR>{line}G{col}|" as execution flags. While in the settings, head to Network > Language Server and note down the remote port Godot is using. By default, it should be 6005. We will need that value later. Connecting to Godot with vim-godot Neovim will be able to access Godot features by using a plugin called vim-godot. We will need to edit the nvim configuration file to install plugins and configure Neovim. On Mac and Linux, it is located at ~/.config/nvim/init.vim I use vim-plug to manage my plugins, so I can just add it to my configuration like this: call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged') " ... Plug 'habamax/vim-godot' " ... call plug#end() Once the configuration file is modified and saved, use the :PlugInstall command to install it. You’ll also need to indicate Godot’s executable path. Add this line to your init.vim: let g:godot_executable = '/Applications/Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot' For vim-godot to communicate with the Godot editor, it will need to listen to the /tmp/godothost file we configured in the editor previously. To do that, simply launch nvim with the flag --listen /tmp/godothost. To save you some precious keypress, I suggest creating a new alias in your bashrc/zshrc like this: alias gvim="nvim --listen /tmp/godothost" Getting autocompletion with coc.nvim Godot ships with a language server. It means the Godot editor can provide autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and advanced navigation to external editors like nvim. While Neovim now has built-in support for the language server protocol, I’ve used the plugin coc.nvim to obtain these functionalities for years and see no reason to change. You can also install it with vim-plug by adding the following line to your plugin list: Plug 'neoclide/coc.nvim', {'branch':'release'} Run :PlugInstall again to install it. You’ll need to indicate the Godot language server address and port using the command :CocConfig. It should open Coc’s configuration file, which is a JSON file normally located at ~/.config/nvim/coc-settings.json. In this file enter the following data, and make sure the port number matches the one located in your editor: { "languageserver": { "godot": { "host": "127.0.0.1", "filetypes": ["gdscript"], "port": 6005 } } } I recommend adding Coc’s example configuration to your init.vim file. You can find it on GitHub. It will provide you with a lot of useful shortcuts, such as using gd to go to a function definition and gr to list its references. Debugging using nvim-dap If you want to use the debugger from inside Neovim, you’ll need to install another plugin called nvim-dap. Add the following to your plugins list: Plug 'mfussenegger/nvim-dap' The plugin authors suggest configuring it using Lua, so let’s do that by adding the following in your init.vim: lua <<EOF local dap = require("dap") dap.adapters.godot = { type = "server", host = "127.0.0.1", port = 6006, } dap.configurations.gdscript = { { type = "godot", request = "launch", name = "Launch scene", project = "${workspaceFolder}", launch_scene = true, }, } vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("Breakpoint", "lua require'dap'.toggle_breakpoint()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("Continue", "lua require'dap'.continue()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("StepOver", "lua require'dap'.step_over()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("StepInto", "lua require'dap'.step_into()", {}) vim.api.nvim_create_user_command("REPL", "lua require'dap'.repl.open()", {}) EOF This will connect to the language server (here on port 6005), and allow you to pilot the debugger using the following commands: :Breakpoint to create (or remove) a breakpoint :Continue to launch the game or run until the next breakpoint :StepOver to step over a line :StepInto to step inside a function definition :REPL to launch a REPL (useful if you want to examine values) Conclusion I hope you’ll have a great time developing Godot games with Neovim. If it helps you, you can check out my entire init.vim file on GitHub gist.
It’s been around 2 years that I’ve had to stop with my long-term addiction to stable jobs. Quite a few people who read this blog are wondering what the hell exactly I’ve been doing since then so I’m going to update all of you on the various projects I’ve been working on. Meme credit: Fabian Stadler Mikochi Last year, I created Mikochi, a minimalist remote file browser written in Go and Preact. It has slowly been getting more and more users, and it’s now sitting at more than 200 GitHub stars and more than 6000 Docker pulls. I personally use it almost every day and it fits my use case perfectly. It is basically feature-complete so I don’t do too much development on it. I’ve actually been hoping users help me solve the few remaining GitHub issues. So far it happened twice, a good start I guess. Itako You may have seen a couple of posts on this blog regarding finance. It’s a subject I’ve been trying to learn more about for a while now. This led me to read some excellent books including Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, Robert Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance, and Robert Carver’s Smart Portfolios. Those books have pushed me toward a more systematic approach to investing, and I’ve built Itako to help me with that. I’ve not talked about it on this blog so far, but it’s a SaaS software that gives clear data visualizations of a stock portfolio performance, volatility, and diversification. It’s currently in beta and usable for free. I’m quite happy that there are actually people using it and that it seems to work without any major issues. However, I think making it easier to use and adding a couple more features would be necessary to make it into a commercially viable product. I try to work on it when I find the time, but for the next couple of months, I have to prioritize the next project. Dice’n Goblins I play RPGs too much and now I’m even working on making them. This project was actually not started by me but by Daphnée Portheault. In the past, we worked on a couple of game jams and produced Cosmic Delusion and Duat. Now we’re trying to make a real commercial game called Dice’n Goblins. The game is about a Goblin who tries to escape from a dungeon that seems to grow endlessly. It’s inspired by classic dungeon crawlers like Etrian Odyssey and Lands of Lore. The twist is that you have to use dice to fight monsters. Equipping items you find in the dungeon gives you new dice and using skills allows you to change the dice values during combat (and make combos). We managed to obtain a decent amount of traction on this project and now it’s being published by Rogue Duck Interactive. The full game should come out in Q1 2025, for PC, Mac, and Linux. You can already play the demo (and wishlist the game) on Steam. If you’re really enthusiastic about it, don’t hesitate to join the Discord community. Technically it’s quite a big change for me to work on game dev since I can’t use that many of the reflexes I’ve built while working on infra subjects. But I’m getting more and more comfortable with using Godot and figuring out all the new game development related lingo. It’s also been an occasion to do a bit of work with non-code topics, like press relations. Japanese Something totally not relevant to tech. Since I’ve managed to reach a ‘goed genoeg’ level of Dutch, I’ve also started to learn more Japanese. I’ve almost reached the N4 level. (By almost I mean I’ve failed but it was close.) A screenshot from the Kanji Study Android App I’ve managed to learn all the hiraganas, katakanas, basic vocabulary, and grammar. So now all I’ve left to do is a huge amount of immersion and grind more kanjis. This is tougher than I thought it would be but I guess it’s fun that I can pretend to be studying while playing Dragon Quest XI in Japanese.
Talking to the press is an inevitable part of marketing a game or software. To make the journalist’s job easier, it’s a good idea to put together a press kit. The press kit should contain all the information someone could want to write an article about your product, as well as downloadable, high-resolution assets. Dice'n Goblins Introducing Milou Milou is a NodeJS software that generates press kits in the form of static websites. It aims at creating beautiful, fast, and responsive press kits, using only YAML configuration files. I built it on top of presskit.html, which solved the same problem but isn’t actively maintained at the moment. Milou improves on its foundation by using a more modern CSS, YAML instead of XML, and up-to-date Javascript code. Installation First, you will need to have NodeJS installed: curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.7/install.sh | bash nvm install 22 Once Node is ready, you can use NPM to install Milou: npm install -g milou Running milou -V should display its version (currently 1.1.1). Let’s build a press kit Let’s create a new project: mkdir mypresskit cd mypresskit milou new The root directory of your project will be used for your company. In this directory, the file data.yml should contain data about your company, such as your company name, location, website, etc… You can find an example of a fully completed company data.yml file on GitHub. To validate that your file is a valid YAML file, you can use an online validator. Your company directory should contain a sub-folder called images, you should put illustrations you want to appear in your press kit inside it. Any file named header.*** will be used as the page header, favicon.ico will be used as the page favicon, and files prefixed by the word logo will appear in a dedicated logo section of the page (eg. logo01.png or logo.jpg). Other images you put in this folder will be included in your page, in the Images section. After completing your company page, we can create a product page. This will be done in a subfolder: mkdir myproduct cd myproduct milou new -t product Just like for a company, you should fill in the data.yml file with info about your product, like its title, features, and prices. You can find an example of a product file on GitHub. The product folder should also contain an images subfolder. It works the same way as for the company. When your product is ready, go back to the company folder and build the press kit: cd ../ milou build . This will generate the HTML and CSS files for your online presskit in the directory build. You can then use any web server to access them. For example, this will make them accessible from http://localhost:3000/ cd build npx serve To put your press kit online, you can upload this folder to any static site host, like CloudFlare Pages, Netlify, or your own server running Nginx. Conclusion Milou is still quite new, and if you encounter issues while using it, don’t hesitate to open an issue. And if it works perfectly for you, leave a star on GitHub.
In 1945, mathematician George Pólya released the book “How to solve it”. It aims at helping math teachers guide their students into solving abstract problems by asking the right questions. It has since had a large influence on math education and computer science, to the point of being mentioned by Marvin Minksy as a book that everyone should know. In this post, I will try to see how we can use Pólya’s methodology to solve a concrete software engineering problem: rendering 3D objects. Understanding the problem Before starting to solve the problem, we must make sure that we completely understand the problem. The first question to ask ourselves is What is the data? The data is a 3D object. The object is made out of triangles. Each triangle is made out of 3 vertices (and a normal vector). Those objects are stored in .STL files, but I will not cover the parsing of those files in this article, and will rely on the hschendel/stl lib instead. The second question, which is probably the most important is What is the unknown?. Or in programming terms, What should the program output? Our program should output an image. An image is a 2D matrix of pixels, each pixel representing a color. The most common way of representing color is the RGBA model, which stands for Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha. In Golang, images can be represented using the image.Image data structure from the standard library. The third question is What is the condition (linking the data to the output)? The data gives us information about the space occupied by our 3D object. If the 3D object is in front of our pixel, this pixel should be in a different color. We will use the method known as “raycasting” which consists of sending a ray from each pixel, and checking what the ray hits. Devise a plan Now that we have understood our problem a little bit better, we should try to plan what our solution will look like. The most helpful question to come up with a solution is Do you know a related problem? For raycasting, a related problem would be Does a vector intersect with a triangle? To solve this we can implement the Möller–Trumbore intersection algorithm. This algorithm transforms the above problem into two new questions Does the ray intersect with the triangle’s plane? and if yes, Does the ray-plane intersection lie outside the triangle? This first question is simple to solve, the only way a vector doesn’t intersect with a plane is if the vector and plane are parallel. In that case, the dot product of the ray and the triangle’s normal vector would be zero, since the dot product of two perpendicular vectors is 0 and the normal vector is itself perpendicular to the triangle’s plane. If the ray intersects with our triangle’s plane, then we can check if the intersection is inside the plane by switching to barycentric coordinates. Barycentric coordinates are a way to represent a point in a plane in relation to the vertices of the triangle. Each corner of the triangle will get the coordinates (0,0,1), (0,1,0) and (1,0,0). Any point outside of the triangle will get coordinates outside of the range [0,1]. Now that we know an algorithm that can solve our main issue, we can come up with the outline of our program: func MTintersect(ray, triangle) bool { if isParallel(ray, triangle) { return false } u , v := projectBaryocentric(vec3, triangle) return u > 0 && u < 1 && v > 0 && u + v < 1 } func main () { solid := readSTL() image := newImage(width, height) for i := range width { for j := range height { image.Set(i, j, white) ray := castRay(i, j) for triangle := range solid.Triangles { ok := MTintersect(ray, triangle) if ok { image.set(i, j, blue) } } } } writePNG(image) } Carrying out the plan This is the easy part. We just write the code. The main suggestion that Pólya makes, is to check that every step of the solution is correct. While programming, this can be achieved by writing unit tests to ensure the correctness of our code. Looking back Once we have something that seems to work it is tempting to just git push and call it a day. But there are a few more questions we should ask ourselves. First Can we check the result? A good way to answer that is to test our program ourselves, either by manually going through a checklist or by writing an integration test that covers our problem. Then we should ask ourselves Can we derive the result differently? This question is not only a good way to learn about other ways to solve our problem (like Scanline rendering in our case) but also a good opportunity to check if maybe the code we wrote was not the most intuitive solution and could be refactored. The last question is Can you use the result for another problem? We can answer this question by checking if our code is written in a way that is reusable enough if we ever want to. For example, the raycaster above could be used as the first step into the implementation of a more sophisticated ray tracing algorithm, if we wanted to handle reflections and lightning. Conclusion If you want to check the source code for the raycaster I made before writing this article, it is on my GitHub. You can find How to solve it by Pólya in any good library. To learn more about computer graphics check out Ray Tracing in a weekend. And for the details of the Möller-Trumbore algorithm, this video is the one that made the most sense to me.
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A thing you should know is that you get put on a lot of lists if you spend a decent chunk of time publishing blog posts on your website. Your website and contact information will be shared around on these lists, for the purpose of soliciting you for guest posts. If you’re not familiar with the concept, guest posts are a way for other people to take advantage of your website’s search ranking as a way to divert traffic to other websites. There are benefits to doing this. The most straightforward one is SEO. Here, outward going links serves a heuristic web search engines look to for quality when weighing results. Guest posts can also have some additional gray hat goals, including audience segmenting and identification via things like UTM-driven campaigns. There are also straight-up cons such as linking to spyware, cryptominers and other forms of malware, and browser-based zero day exploits. Curiouser and curiouser I’ve always been curious about what exactly you get when you agree to a guest post offer. So, I dredged my spam folder and found one that sounded more direct and sincere. Here’s the cold call email pitch: Subject: Body: Keeping up with annual home and property maintenance is essential for preserving value and preventing costly repairs down the line. Whether it's inspecting your roof, cleaning gutters, or checking heating systems, regular upkeep can save homeowners time, money, and stress. I’m putting together an article that highlights key tasks for effective yearly maintenance, offering tips to help homeowners protect their biggest investment. I think this piece could really resonate with your audience! Let me know if you'd be interested in featuring it on your website. Thank you so much for your time today! Erin Reynolds P.S. If you’d like to propose an alternative topic, please do so. I would be happy to write on a topic that best suits your website. Don’t want to hear from me again? Please let me know. My reply reads: Hi Erin, This might be a weird one, but bear with me: My blog is a personal site, and its content is focused on web development and internet culture. I've always wanted to take someone up on this sort of offer, presented in the context of the article being something you get if you take the person reaching out on the offer to write a guest post. Is this something you'd be interested in? Erin took me up on my offer, and wrote about annual home and property maintenance. To her credit, she also did ask me if there was another subject I was interested in, but I figured we could stay the course of the original pitch. She was also prompt and communicative throughout the process, and delivered exactly what was promised. Here is the article in question: By Erin Reynolds, [diymama.net](https://diymama.net/) There's a quiet rhythm to living in a well-loved home. If you listen closely, your house speaks to you-whispers, mostly. The soft drip of a tired faucet, the groan of an HVAC unit that's been running too long, or the gentle scold of a clogged dryer vent. These aren't just annoyances. They re the language of upkeep, and whether you're in your first place or celebrating twenty years in the same four walls, learning to listen—and act—is everything. Annual maintenance isn't just about fixing what's broken. It's about stewardship, about being the kind of homeowner who doesn't wait for the ceiling to leak before checking the roof. There's something incredibly satisfying about having all your home maintenance documents in one tidy digital folder-no more rummaging through drawers for that appliance manual or the roof warranty. Digitizing receipts, inspection reports, and service invoices gives you a clear, accessible record of everything that's been done and when. Saving these as PDFs makes them universally readable and easy to share, whether you're selling your home or just need to reference them quickly. When you use a tool to create PDF files, you can convert virtually any document into a neat, portable format. You might not think much about gutters unless they're sagging or spilling over during a thunderstorm, but they play a quiet hero's role in protecting your home. Clean them out once a year —twice if you're under heavy tree cover—and you'll avoid water damage, foundation cracks, and even basement flooding. Take a Saturday with a sturdy ladder, some gloves, and a hose; it's oddly meditative work, like adult sandbox play. And if climbing rooftops isn't your thing, call in the pros-your future self will thank you during the next torrential downpour. That whoosh of warm or cool air we all take for granted? It comes at a price if neglected. Your heating and cooling system needs a checkup at least once a year, ideally before the seasons shift. A technician can clean the coils, swap the filter, and make sure it's all running like a symphony-not the death rattle of a dying compressor. Skipping this task means flirting with energy inefficiency and sudden breakdowns during a July heatwave or a January cold snap-and no one wants that call to the emergency repair guy at 2 a.m. Keep Your Appliances Running Like Clockwork Your appliances work hard so giving them a little yearly attention goes a long way. Cleaning refrigerator coils, checking for clogged dryer vents, and running cleaning cycles on dishwashers and washing machines helps extend their lifespan and keep things humming. But even with routine care, breakdowns happen, which is why investing in a home warranty can provide peace of mind when repairs crop up. Be sure to research home warranty appliance coverage that includes not only repair costs, but also removal of faulty units and protection against damage caused by previous poor installations. It's easy to forget the trees in your yard when they're not blooming or dropping leaves, but they're worth an annual walkaround. Look for branches that hang a little too close to power lines or seem precariously poised above your roof. Dead limbs are more than an eyesore-they're projectiles in a windstorm, liabilities when it comes to insurance, and threats to your peace of mind. Hiring an arborist to prune and assess health may not be the most glamorous expense, but it's a strategic one. This one's for all the window-ledge neglecters and bathroom corner deniers. Every year, old caulk shrinks and cracks, and when it does, water starts to creep in—under tubs, around sinks, behind tile. The same goes for gaps around doors and windows that let in drafts, bugs, and rising utility bills. Re-caulking is a humble chore that wields mighty results, and it's deeply satisfying to peel away the old and lay down a clean bead like you're frosting a cake. A tube of silicone sealant and an hour of your time buys you protection and a crisp finish. Sediment buildup is sneaky—it collects at the bottom of your water heater like sand in a jar, slowly choking its efficiency and shortening its life. Once a year, flush it out. It's not hard: a hose, a few steps, and maybe a YouTube video or two for moral support. You'll end up with cleaner water, faster heating, and a unit that isn't harboring the mineral equivalent of a brick in its belly. This is the kind of maintenance no one talks about at dinner parties but everyone should be doing. Roof problems rarely introduce themselves politely. They crash in during a storm or reveal themselves as creeping stains on the ceiling. But if you check your roof annually-scan for missing shingles, flashing that's come loose, or signs of moss and algae—you stand a better chance of catching issues while they're still small. If you're uneasy climbing up there, a good drone or a pair of binoculars can give you a decent read. Think of it like checking your teeth: do it regularly, and you'll avoid the root canal of roof repair. There's an entire category of small, often-overlooked chores that quietly hold your house together. Replacing smoke detector batteries, testing GFCI outlets, tightening loose deck boards, cleaning behind the refrigerator, checking for signs of mice in the attic. These aren't major jobs, but ignoring them year after year adds up like debt. Spend a weekend with a checklist and a good podcast and knock them out-it's as much about peace of mind as it is about safety. Being a homeowner isn't just about mortgages, paint colors, and patio furniture. It's about stewardship, a kind of quiet attentiveness to the place that holds your life. Annual maintenance doesn't come with applause or Instagram likes, but it keeps the scaffolding of your world solid and serene. When you walk into a home that's been cared for, you can feel it—the air is calmer, the floors don't squeak quite as loud, and the house seems to breathe easier, knowing someone's listening. Explore the world of inclusive design with Eric W. Bailey, where insightful articles, engaging talks, and innovative projects await to inspire your next digital creation! I mean, this is objectively solid advice! The appearance of trust What was nice to note here is none of the links contained any UTM parameters, and the sites linked out looked relatively on the up and up. It could be relevant and actionable results, or maybe some sort of coordinated quid-pro-quo personal or professional networking. That said: Be the villain. The deliverable was a Microsoft Word document attached to an email. On the surface this seems completely innocuous—a ton of people use it to write compared to Markdown. However, in the wrong hands it could definitely be a vector for bad things. Appearing legitimate is a good tactic to build a sense of trust and get me to open that file. From there, all sorts of terrible things could happen. To address this, I extracted the text via a non-Windows operating system installed on a Virtual Machine (VM). I also used a copy of LibreOffice to open the Word document. The idea was to take advantage of the VM’s sandboxing, as well as the less-sophisticated interoperability between the two word processing apps. This allowed for sanitized plain text extraction, without enabling anything else more nefarious. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar I also searched certain select phrases from the guest post to see if this content was repeated anywhere else, and didn’t find anything. I found other guest posts written by Erin on the web, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? The internet is getting choked out by LLM-generated slop. Writing was already a tough job, and now it’s even gotten more thankless. It’s always important to keep in mind that there’s people behind the technology. I choose to believe that this is an article written in earnest by someone who cares about DIY home repair and wants to get the word out. So, to Erin: Here’s to your article! And to you, the reader: I hope you learned something new about taking care of the place you live in.
The world changed a lot in 1995. And for the web, it was a transformational year. The post 1995 Was the Most Important Year for the Web appeared first on The History of the Web.
We just opened a search for a new junior programmer at 37signals. It's been years since we last hired a junior, but the real reason the listing is turning heads is because we're open about the yearly salary: $145,849*. That's high enough that programmers with lots of experience are asking whether they could apply, even if they aren't technically "junior". The answer is no. The reason we're willing to pay a junior more than most is because we're looking for a junior who's better than most. Not better in "what do they already know", but in "how far could they go". We're hiring for peak promise — and such promise only remains until it's revealed. Maybe it sounds a little harsh, but a programmer who's been working professionally for five years has likely already revealed their potential. What you're going to get is roughly what you see. That doesn't mean that people can't get better after that, but it means that the trajectory by which they improve has already been plotted. Whereas a programmer who's either straight out of school or fresh off their first internship or short-stint job is essentially all potential. So you draw their line on the basis of just a few early dots, but the line can be steep. It's not that different from something like the NFL scouting combine. Teams fight to find the promise of The Next All-Star. These rookies won't have the experience that someone who's already played in the league for years would have, but they have the potential to be the best. Someone who's already played for several seasons will have shown what they have and be weighed accordingly. This is not easy to do! Plenty of rookies, in sports and programming, may show some early potential, then fail to elevate their game to where the buyer is betting it could be. But that's the chance you take to land someone extraordinary. So if you know a junior programmer with less than three years of industry experience who is sparkling with potential, do let them know of our listing. And if you know someone awesome who's already a senior programmer, we also have an opening for them. *It's a funnily precise number because it's pulled directly from the Radford salary database, which we query for the top 10% of San Francisco salaries for junior programmers.
Reading Whether it’s cryptocurrency scammers mining with FOSS compute resources or Google engineers too lazy to design their software properly or Silicon Valley ripping off all the data they can get their hands on at everyone else’s expense… I am sick and tired of having all of these costs externalized directly into my fucking face. Drew DeVault on the annoyance and cost of AI scrapers. I share some of that pain: Val Town is routinely hammered by some AI company’s poorly-coded scraping bot. I think it’s like this for everyone, and it’s hard to tell if AI companies even care that everyone hates them. And perhaps most recently, when a person who publishes their work under a free license discovers that work has been used by tech mega-giants to train extractive, exploitative large language models? Wait, no, not like that. Molly White wrote a more positive article about the LLM scraping problem, but I have my doubts about its positivity. For example, she suggests that Wikimedia’s approach with “Wikimedia Enterprise” gives LLM companies a way to scrape the site without creating too much cost. But that doesn’t seem like it’s working. The problem is that these companies really truly do not care. Harberger taxes represent an elegant theoretical solution that fails in practice for immobile property. Just as mobile home residents face exploitation through sudden ground rent increases, property owners under a Harberger system would face similar hold-up problems. This creates an impossible dilemma: pay increasingly burdensome taxes or surrender investments at below-market values. Progress and Poverty, a blog about Georgism, has this post about Herberger taxes, which are a super neat idea. The gist is that you would be in charge of saying how much your house is worth, but the added wrinkle is that by saying a price you are bound to be open to selling your house at that price. So if you go too low, someone will buy it, or too high, and you’re paying too much in taxes. It’s clever but doesn’t work, and the analysis points to the vital difference between housing and other goods: that buying, selling, and moving between houses is anything but simple. I’ve always been a little skeptical of the line that the AI crowd feels contempt for artists, or that such a sense is particularly widespread—because certainly they all do not!—but it’s hard to take away any other impression from a trend so widely cheered in its halls as AI Ghiblification. Brian Merchant on the OpenAI Studio Ghibli ‘trend’ is a good read. I can’t stop thinking that AI is in danger of being right-wing coded, the examples of this, like the horrifying White House tweet mentioned in that article, are multiplying. I feel bad when I recoil to innocent usage of the tool by good people who just want something cute. It is kind of fine, on the micro level. But with context, it’s so bad in so many ways. Already the joy and attachment I’ve felt to the graphic style is fading as more shitty Studio Ghibli knockoffs have been created in the last month than in all of the studio’s work. Two days later, at a state dinner in the White House, Mark gets another chance to speak with Xi. In Mandarin, he asks Xi if he’ll do him the honor of naming his unborn child. Xi refuses. Careless People was a good read. It’s devastating for Zuckerberg, Joel Kaplan, and Sheryl Sandberg, as well as a bunch of global leaders who are eager to provide tax loopholes for Facebook. Perhaps the only person who ends the book as a hero is President Obama, who sees through it all. In a March 26 Slack message, Lavingia also suggested that the agency should do away with paper forms entirely, aiming for “full digitization.” “There are over 400 vet-facing forms that the VA supports, and only about 10 percent of those are digitized,” says a VA worker, noting that digitizing forms “can take years because of the sensitivity of the data” they contain. Additionally, many veterans are elderly and prefer using paper forms because they lack the technical skills to navigate digital platforms. “Many vets don’t have computers or can’t see at all,” they say. “My skin is crawling thinking about the nonchalantness of this guy.” Perhaps because of proximity, the story that Sahil Lavingia has been working for DOGE seems important. It was a relief when a few other people noticed it and started retelling the story to the tech sphere, like Dan Brown’s “Gumroad is not open source” and Ernie Smith’s “Gunkroad”, but I have to nitpick on the structure here: using a non-compliant open source license is not the headline, collaborating with fascists and carelessly endangering disabled veterans is. Listening Septet by John Carroll Kirby I saw John Carroll Kirby play at Public Records and have been listening to them constantly ever since. The music is such a paradox: the components sound like elevator music or incredibly cheesy jazz if you listen to a few seconds, but if you keep listening it’s a unique, deep sound. Sierra Tracks by Vega Trails More new jazz! Mammoth Hands and Portico Quartet overlap with Vega Trails, which is a beautiful minimalist band. Watching This short video with John Wilson was great. He says a bit about having a real physical video camera, not just a phone, which reminded me of an old post of mine, Carrying a Camera.
