The mountain came to me, not reading HN tho. Going to a mountain!

spent my saturday building this screen door

... now my throne has a view

Although I do have a strong policy against writing throwaway prompt garbage for anything (one of the several reasons I have never actually interacted with any LLM), so if I used something like this, I'd omit the guide and it would need to work on the basis of actually generally usable information. Which this can do.

Literally the first time I've seen a use of LLMs for programming which I could imagine using. (Given a sufficiently libre LLM.) Not that I've been spending any time looking for such things.

Typed hole filling plugin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh0axmFH1j8

How does a bird view the shoreline?

Little zipper he follows

because from breakers fish rise.

How does the fish see the trough beak,

of a gliding pelican?

Scooped up in a bucket

then black.

And how does the night see the day?

Estranged friend, political opposite,

unknown, unimagined,

never touched,

except two brief moments

at dusk and twilight,

sunset and sunrise

when the light and dark mingle,

and world’s spheres pull closer

for such a fleeting short time.

But noon will never know midnight.

Noon will never reach out to midnight

to comb her soft hair

or invite him to dinner

with no one else there.

Noon and midnight are as distant as

opposite ends

so they dream and envision

and write poems

imaging their counterpoint

has a wild side.

Maybe noon sees midnight as risky and loud

when in a peaceful place

it’s just not true.

Maybe midnight sees noon as too hot

when in a temperate winter

noon can be icy...

Back from a 815 mile EV road trip mostly done in 1 day. Some fun stuff but the only real reason for the trip was a disfunctional US system that made us have to do like this tree.

2010

I remember conflict between me and other students, because of how I approached the world then. I remember a young woman named Brittany who was a Quaker who argued with me a lot. I remember arguing with Adam even though I wanted to be his friend, both of their friends.

Experiences that stand out

Folding a paper crane at Snug Hollow bed and breakfast

How everyone interacted in that moment

How I felt separate from others then especially but still was somehow glad and grateful for the experience.

Walking on the snow down to the sport fields on day one

Coming back and making a haiku

Feeling emboldened because you kept encouraging my abilities

I felt zero apprehension about whether or not I could do contemplative writing for the first time

I just remembered a guy named Michael Huckstickler. Was he in that class? If so I remember him much more clearly in my peace and justice class. I barely remember him in CW.

I remember a really nice short haired woman whose name I have forgotten. She was from Knoxville. She was very encouraging. She told me if I’m afraid of the end, know there will always be a next chapter.

I remember Rachael from Dominican Republic and how there was a terrible storm affecting her family while we were in Loretto.

So these impressions of people have specific places and memories too. The woman from Knoxville, I remember she saw a deer and Rachael Parker referred to it as God’s Creation. I wasn’t with the others on the walk where they saw the deer, echoing my thing I said earlier about being separate. I was in the gift shop or outside it I think the whole walking time because I didn’t feel like walking much. I am certain it would have been a wonderful walk. I remember the smell of intense because a monk was having his funeral.

I remember different things about writing too, but the major first memory for me now is people. I was living in Beth Curlin’s spare room and I was trying to think up what to write about on the first day. I called my friend Lauren and asked her for her writers opinion, and I think it was around that time that I came up with the word ritual.

What I meant was routine, unless it was a Freudian slip where I was trying to expand my knowledge my using the wrong word.

Basically my first idea was to think about routines, like drinking tea, and routines within the writing process like keeping a notebook of ideas or drafting incredible first lines or having a writing practice of an hour in the morning before anything. I think the last one may have been what I really had in mind.

I wrote a lot back then. Maybe more than I do now but I really am not sure about that. I think it was the same amount, just more compared with peers. There were differences regarding how I wrote between now and then, in terms of how I loved to write on paper if I was in a coffee shop or getting ready for a class or sitting in a lecture before it started. That is the one and only thing I don’t do as much of now. The reason is because I am more social now. So I would talk with my friends and socialize if I was at a concert or even a cafe, and that preempts writing to a point.

But I have a time and place for writing now and I do it abundantly. I write also in a group that I am part of and I write and read regularly in it. We were reading a bell hooks poem just yesterday. My writing group is very interested in African American writers especially poets like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. We read a lot of classical poems but mostly we just write and share our writing together.

….

Note that I will block microsoft apologists in this thread without further engagement.

Imagining the alternate universe where chiark.greenend.org.uk/~bruce/debian/ftp/ is in all our sources.lists

(not directed at the putty devs at all, but it is like the existence proof that users will use any crazy cool url even in the kind of situations where people tend to use putty)

top level domains for free software projects are a trap. use any nice deep url structure you like as long as you can ensure your cool url doesn't break

https://donotsta.re/notice/Ax9dEIy1HzYtqRgWG0

What gets me, as a local software developer is there is probably some useful medical recovery idea under all this. Just tech has laid this poisoned path that guarantees a certain type of result.

that one cursed coffee shop conversation I can't quite manage to tune out has this morning gone something llke

"the professor has developed the algorithm already.. I just need to put it into an app"
"you can outsource development. like to fivr. ... um, probably not fivr but something like that"
"or could I find a local software developer around here somehow?"
"android or IOS? electron?"
"SAAS?"
"exercising.. full range of movement ... recovery ... patients ... zero gravity support"
"will this need FDA approval?"
"ya know, investers are gonna want AI in it"
"maybe have it like, coach them?"
"turn on the camera ... process the images"
"I have a bunch of articles I found that support the idea. I keep getting into rabbitholes prompting AI"
"board ... supermajority ... investers... 51% ... $1 million revenue"

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1032604/73596e0c3ed1945a/

What a neat talk. If I had been there I would have asked: Since the Arch wiki is generally applicable to #Debian except for some arch-specific parts, and is under a free license, why not just port it to the Debian wiki?

(Pity that we all got stuck on wikis that don't natively support forking and merging.)

Just gonna mention one time more that the #github ToS gives them a license to use your content in a way that is very apparent in 2025 includes training their LLM on it.

The only license I will ever provide to my free software is the license it's publically released under, so I will never push it to #github, and have not since the day they made this part of their ToS.

Working on 2 bugs today. I fixed the first. Somehow that fix also fixed the second. Yay? Um, no.. I didn't see how it was possible so I investigated, and my fix introduced a new bug, which only happened to make the second bug not occur.

Probably time to retire and take up vibe coding eh

If you had to eat the same thing every day what would your one meal be?

I decided to do 3 meals because I don’t want to just do one. (I think the calorie count adds fairly low.)

Plato de fruto (Costa Rican dish – fruit plate)

Oatmeal with cinnamon plain yogurt maple syrup and walnuts

Spinach or kale salad

with pecans and soft crumbled goat cheese

balsamic vinegar dressing

salmon sushi (half)

sweet potato sushi (half)

Last meal

plain water

lemon merengue pie homemade (to start the meal)

dr pepper

stuffing

my dad’s rolls from the 90s before he went whole wheat with butter (kinda like Texas roadhouse rolls)

lemon queens cake and raspberry ice cream (Food city brand)

(still thinking on this. I wouldn’t want to feel overstuffed.)

I once knew a woman who ate cake and ice cream every day.  She lived pretty old and very full.

we're at the point in our solarpunk dystopia where a potato chip factory is installing a megawatt #solar array to charge their delivery trucks offgrid

rrd is such horrible technical debt

My payment today is hacking a javascript rrd library to be able to parse the version now produced on Debian 32 bit arm, which has a single 64 bit timestamp in the middle of a struct.

I probably should have just deleted the 32 bit arm box and put in a 64 bit box.

guess I'll be upgrading my laptop from one debian stable release to the next today

... for the 1st time in my entire life

in an experimental phase with my #sourdough, working on flavor.. whole wheat plus 15% rye, 100% hydration, and a 4 day cold proove is a flavor bomb

final solar project taking shape

This will take 75 to 100 wheelbarrow loads of gravel to fill them, I wonder if I will finish by winter solstice? But otherwise only needs about 25 feet of trenching for wire.

Finally laid out the ground mounts for the final 12 #solar panels of my install. I cleared this area behind the house of trees this spring, but it's been too busy/hot to work on it until now.

 Love Keeps Coming

https://git-annex.branchable.com/special_remotes/p2p/

testing new #gitAnnex feature that lets it be used with just about any P2P network that supports socket-like connections. yggdrasil, fowl, iroh, etc. Expanding on tor hidden services that git-annex already supports.

My test script simulates such a network using socket files with this absurdly small shell script.

It was pretty cool when "git pull" and "git-annex get" just worked over this on the 1st try.

Contemplative Writing 7

1. If you hadn't taught/taken/worked for/ this course what discoveries might you have never made?

Gaining knowledge about what is meant by contemplative writing, learning to write in this style, learning all writing has contemplative elements. Meeting and knowing others in the process. Wouldn’t have been as personally aquatinted with Libby. Honestly garnishing housing as part of my trade was one of the biggest things for me.

Learned there is a value to unstructured time for writers. I’d say most professions/people place almost zero value on unstructured time. I think most of the arts can be benefited by giving people the space and time to listen more deeply to what is bubbling up. Do you have to be creative to appreciate silence/ intentional unstructured time? I think any writer definitely benefits from this time, even if technical writing or researching a science book.

Most people don’t have the liberty of free write time, but my life has given me a lot of it, and so I think the course taught me to value it and encouraged me to continue writing.

2.   What first inspired you to teach contemplative writing?

I actually did teach contemplative writing with my zoom writing group several mornings during covid and again recently, less. I wanted to share this kind of writing I have specialized in with my peers. Some of them had told me they felt intimidated about writing without prompts. Writing has always felt easy for me and I have always been open with my process and I wanted to share that somehow with them.

3.  Did you ever find out what contemplative writing is?

Allowing what bubbles up bubble. Much better with certain elements, especially nature and silence.

4.   Have you been contemplative writing in the past couple years?

I have written a lot since college and the past couple years. For me I feel all my writing has been contemplative but could it have been more contemplative and how?

5.  If you were to start a cw project this semester what do you think you'd choose?

3 days a week of morning practice maybe? Just seeing where it lands. Current new ideas include developing a poetry memoir and completing a long walk.

6.  Are you writing a book about contemplative writing teaching and findings?

What is the plan for it??

I would love to help Libby with this book, fleshing out her intentions for it.