100days - lesser daemon (Page 3)

05

May

Reading/Playing/Watching, 5/5/25

Stuff I'm Reading

I'd rather read the prompt - great blog post about LLMs in a university environment. Nicely sums up a lot of my thoughts about LLM-aided writing, which is that using an LLM defeats the point! "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly." Write bad essays! That's how you learn!

Bizarro World - a 2007 essay on the competitive retro gaming scene, in which the author discovers his wife is the best Gameboy Tetris player in the world. Really wild to revisit a time before Twitch when esports weren't really a thing and competitive gaming was relegated

3 min read

04

May

Surely the Second Coming is at hand

I decided to revisit Yeats last night. I guess this is what you do on a Saturday night when you're in your 30s. It's getting more relatable as the gyre widens.

The strange thing about being alive at this time in human history is that I feel like I've been waiting a decade for things to start getting bad for me personally. Things have been getting worse for a while now. I am very aware that as the meme going around puts it we are already about three lines deep into the Niemoller poem and it's not that long of

2 min read

01

May

I don't really think we were supposed to work this much

I'm sick again today. I get sick a lot - always have as far as I can remember. I didn't exactly win the genetic lottery for immune systems and I am also not exactly a paragon of health.

I am lucky to have a job that gives me what is, for America, a pretty good deal in terms of paid time off. I accrue a sick day every month, I get 15 days of vacation time, and I get summer Fridays. A lot of people can only dream of being in this position. But then I look at, say, Austria,

1 min read

26

Apr

The Boring Stuff Is Worth It

I've spent the last few weeks setting up a Plex server on a Synology NAS drive and I have finally gotten it working reasonably well. I haven't set up the arr suite or whatever yet because I can really only tolerate spending so much of my free time debugging docker containers but I'll get there. This was a long and mostly tedious process, but now I have a self-hosted media library I can access anywhere through Plex.

I struggle a lot with making myself do stuff like this. If I'm not working on a project obsessively (which I've been trying

2 min read

25

Apr

Just Because It's Useful Doesn't Mean It's Good

Independent of yesterday's dive into a "useful" application of AI, discourse erupted on Bluesky over Hank Green saying he didn't think the "useless" critique holds water anymore. For the most part people are very angry at the perception of ceding any rhetorical ground to Big AI, which is a fair position to take. Green also put it in a fairly condescending "just asking questions" kind of way, which doesn't necessarily help his case. I don't love the phrasing but there is something to his point: people are finding utility in these tools whether we like it or not, and I

5 min read