Pebble.is and AI
Wired: X Challenger Pebble Thinks AI-Generated Posts Can Help Lure Users Away From Elon Musk:
Pebble, a Twitter-style service formerly known as T2, today launched a new approach: Users can skip past its “What’s happening?” nudge and click on a tab labeled Ideas with a lightbulb icon, to view a list of AI-generated posts or replies inspired by their past activity. Publishing one of those suggestions after reviewing it takes a single click.
I hate this so much.
I’m in Easy Mode
Sometimes I feel like doing things the easy way. I don’t want to think about every step of every process. I just want to do something and then do something else.
The problem is, I can’t seem to consistently define “easy”. For example, I’m typing this in Emacs for my Blot.im blog. To create this post I ran a custom lisp function that automatically creates the Markdown file, fills in the YAML front matter, and puts the cursor at the ready. Dropbox then syncs the file and Blot’s server renders the post. Easy, right? Not really. There’s a lot going on there. So is it easy if it’s easy now, even though it was difficult to get here? Or, does easy have to mean that there’s nothing to it, right from the get go?
I honestly don’t know.
Forklift 4 on SetApp
I use Forklift all day on my Mac. They just released version 4, which looked like a nice update. Forklift is included in SetApp, but wasn’t getting the update, so I was concerned it was going to be left out. I needn’t have been worried, the update was installed today via SetApp and I’m good to go.
I haven’t forgotten you, Blot.
Kev Quirk suggested that he might move away from Blot due to some weirdness and search issues. Of course this reminded me that I haven’t posted to Blot in some time and I miss how simple it all is. Plus, I like how my theme looks. Why’d I stop using it, again? 😜
Also, It’s back at the baty.blog domain, just in case.
Wednesday, June 14, 2023
Blot.im has been down for going on two days now. I assume this is due to Amazon’s AWS issues over the past 24 hours. Still, it’s a bummer. As a defensive maneuver I’ve moved the site back to Hugo, at least for now.
Update (3:45 p.m.): Blot is back up after “the server was caught in a deathloop”. I copied today’s entry over and pointed the DNS back to Blot.
Mike Hall is on a roll with his Denote setup. I’m following it all closely because I use a nearly identical set of tooling, except mine is not nearly as well thought out or complete as his. His latest adjustment is around org-gtd and Things. I’ve been using org-gtd for a week or so and I’m also not sure it’ll stick. Mike created a nice way to generate links between Denote notes and Things that has me thinking.
Speaking of Mike Hall, He recently posted about how he’s generating a searchable, static HTML version of his Denote notes so that he can look stuff up while on his phone. All I want from my Denote notes on iPhone is the ability to find and read them. I asked Mike to share his setup, which he kindly did. A few path tweaks and I was up and running in no time.
If y’all were born in the 50s or 60s you’d have done things exactly the same as we did. And if we were born in the 80s or 90s we’d be bitching about it, same as you. Just like your kids and/or grandkids will be bitching about all the stupid things you’re doing that will turn out to have been mistakes.
Renaming an item in DEVONthink to match the name of its parent group
When creating a new project folder (group) in DEVONthink, I often make use of Templates. Templates are just files in a folder somewhere that get copied into the DEVONthink database. For example, I have a project “starter” Tinderbox document named “Basic Project Template.tbx”. When inserting the template file into my DEVONthink project, it uses the same name as the original, which isn’t helpful. DEVONthink is very scriptable, so I wrote an AppleScript to rename the selected document the same as the enclosing group/folder.
Well, I didn’t exactly write it. It’s more like I conjured it.
I first tried copying an existing script that seemed like it would give me a head start and set to modifying that. I didn’t know how to refer to the enclosing group in AppleScript so I started to browse DEVONthink’s dictionary. It occurred to me that maybe I could just ask ChatGPT for help, so I typed:
“Write me an applescript to rename an item in DEVONthink to the name of its enclosing folder”
ChatGPT wrote the following:
tell application "DEVONthink 3"
-- Get the currently selected item
set selectedItem to content record of viewer window 1
-- Get the enclosing group (folder) of the selected item
set enclosingGroup to parent 1 of selectedItem
-- Get the name of the enclosing group
set enclosingGroupName to name of enclosingGroup
-- Get the name of the selected item
set selectedItemName to name of selectedItem
-- Generate the new name by combining the enclosing group name and the selected item name
set newName to enclosingGroupName & " - " & selectedItemName
-- Rename the selected item with the new name
set name of selectedItem to newName
end tellIt worked great on the first try. The only change I made was to remove the “selectedItemName” from the final name. What a world.
Sunday, June 11, 2023
I’m not convinced that much has improved meaningfully since we started optimizing for digital.
Coming to my senses about Mimestream
I woke up from my trance and bailed on my disjointed bricolage of Fastmail->Gmail->Mimestream. Cobbling various pieces together just so I can use a single mail client on my Mac seemed…shortsighted. Mimestream is nice, but not that nice, you know?
So I’m back in MailMate and/or Mu4e. Oh, and sometimes Apple Mail. But I’m thinking about switching back to notmuch from Mu4e. Now that I say it, I’m not sure this is any better :). At least I’m not relying on Gmail now, I guess.
