Why use a relational database, when you could simply build your own schema less, poorly understood, underspecified relational database on top of a document store?
Finally what we all wanted, real markets that behave like crypto markets
Really curious to know what portion of users have intentionally interacted with the WhatsApp AI thing more than once? 0.2%? 0.01%?
Have been on a roll creating backlinks in my Obsidian vault - turns out that everything ends up connected to [[lowering activation energy]]
I think this might be the best year for new music ever?
I have a project called ”selected ambient voice notes” - it's a multi hour long Ableton project that I keep listening to, think is really good, and have no idea how to start editing
I will always read Michael Nelson reviewing Deaf Heaven
Moores law is ‘more is more’
On the surface Severance looks like an extended metaphor for how working sucks, but it feels a lot closer to the experience of school than work.
I went to a meet-up. I spoke to a man in a leather jacket. He asked me why I didn't use twitter. I said it was because I didn't like Elon Musk. He asked what was wrong with Elon Musk and I said that I don't like people who lie. He then said ”I have to leave this conversation” and walked away from me
Sometimes I'll be listening to a song and then suddenly, like being struck by lightning, I'll realise that I'm hearing a Tenori-on
People say the Teenage engineering radio is 'stupid' and 'overpriced' - but wait till you get used to listening to live radio at 80% of its normal playback speed.
Strategy: go on Spotify, or whatever, search for a collection of random words that you’re into listen to the result with fewest listeners
How long do you have to use a computer before it gets a soul?
obsessed with being obsessed
It feels good to export a wav of an Ableton project, and then permanently delete the source files.
If you're ever bored, try just really looking at something. It's a borderline psychedelic experience
”newborn jellyfish, mushrooms, white MacBooks, blind bodies with empty sockets”
Websites should be allowed to autoplay music
Imagine you love the Lord of the Rings and you’ve just spent a billion dollars to turn it into one of the worst TV shows of all time, betraying that you don’t remotely get it, your idol William Shatner is embarrassed by you, and now you’re about to ruin James Bond - which you presumably also love
If Apple Watches actually manage to do non-invasive glucose monitoring I will buy one
A strange development of the last few years is that filter coffee, which used to always taste delicious, now only tastes good if I drink it before 11am. If I drank it later it seems actively not nice. Doesn't apply to tea.
Maybe this is controversial - but I think pets shouldn't exist
Big something-pill moment when you realise that right-wingers don’t actually believe in capitalism, and that you can never expect them to implement needed things like toll-roads or paying for parking, or just generally allocating scarce resources by willingness to pay.
Only a fool would think it possible to enumerate the consequences of even the simplest action. And that’s why utilitarianism is bad and you should cultivate virtues.
‘No you don’t understand - this Netflix is actually different’ - the last thing you here before watching an episode of a really mediocre tv show
If you’re reading this, I still want my My Chemical Romance t-shirt back
I’m about ready to bite the bullet of the categorical imperative
It’s a real shame that they built all this high level ai stuff in python instead of typescript.
I've been accused of doing things ironically. This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of me. Nothing I do is ironic.
Given the whole “Fully automated space communism” thing - it’s weird to see how willingly the left have ceded any interest in driving the development of AI / are just pretending that it doesn’t exist.
I can see deepseek in my index funds
And for the tenth year running the music industry have declared that the sound of the future is: (drumroll) granular synthesis!!
Polymarket (the only real crypto product) would work a lot better if they hadn't used crypto
How do we reconcile Slime Mould Time Mould et al insisting that obesity cannot be explained by excess calories, and must have a secret complicated cause, with GLP-1s causing a noticeable decline in American obesity by reducing food cravings?
Downside of the fancy Stagg kettle is that I have to coach everyone that comes over on how to use it, or else they just leave it turned on, boiling nothing.
RIP to the one guy who really saw the beauty in everything
I need to start texting people I like way more than I currently do. Like 10x it or something
I listened to M.I.A.'s new song, post conversion to Christianity and hating 5G.
Sorry to report that it's really bad.
Still lots of alpha in asking ‘what if we had focus styles on these buttons’
I’d love to find a way to combine my interests in software and avant-garde fashion. Any ideas?
Imagine using twitter. Lol, lmao even
I’d never considered the impact of being able to easily navigate to websites you regularly visit. I think this is life changing advice.
I really like apple intelligence notification summaries. They are beautiful and baffling.
Substack are determined. Day by day, feature by feature, they will gradually make their website worse and nothing in this wide world can stop them.
I'm making a quiz where the contestants hear a tiny snippet of a song and have to tell whether it’s Oasis or the Beatles. I thought it would be hard but turns you just have to ask yourself ”does this sound good or bad?”
Baking recipes are always like ”375μg baking soda, 125.75g white flour (13% protein), 218ml distilled water, two eggs”
2024 was the year of insiders claiming to be outsiders for narrative convenience
The Quietus' album of the year list is exciting because I’ve only heard of two artists in the top 10
If you publish a list of your top 10 albums of the year - I’ll listen to number 10 and number 1 and let the devil take the rest
Well if @PepMangione says I should buy $ANIC…
Currently collating the oral hygiene advice of Azealia Banks
in chemistry they taught me about ‘rate limiting steps’ - and that was the most useful thing I ever learnt at school
He (me) is just not that into you (next.js)
I’m seeing more people quoting / reading Dominic Cummings - which is fair enough. He is an interesting guy. But do remember that he once edited his personal blog to make it look like he’d predicted a coronavirus pandemic, totally oblivious of metadata and the wayback machine
An important question that I don’t know the answer to - what happened in 2014 that made the internet so terrible for the rest of time?
I dreamt that someone made an NFT of my face and then all my friends were messaging me saying ‘WTF why are you into crypto - are you a loser’ and similar.
Sheeple are always trying to complicate their CRUD apps with 'middleware' and 'abstractions'. I on the other hand just write a big request handler function per route and it always works perfectly.
My coat's big - but I’ve realised that it needs to be bigger
It’s not the incentives, it’s you.
It’s not me, it’s the incentives.
Top level apples: Cox’s Orange Pippin, Belle De Boskoop, Bramley
In the process of buying a dressing gown on the internet, I notice that the checkout flow uses Adyen. I start telling A, who had never heard of them, that they're essentially the same as Stripe but mysteriously hyped. We wonder why no one talks about them. Then the payment repeatedly fails and I am unable to buy a dressing gown.
At least now we get to find out how exactly a government goes about halving car insurance rates
Moby Dick is the name of his sledge
After a few years thinking that having a favourite colour is weird, I'm forced to admit that 8 year old John was right and that orange is actually best.
How do Claude projects work? Do they just append all the files to your prompt? Or is it putting stuff in a vector DB?
I used to write drafts with pen and paper and they would often turn out good. Maybe time to start doing that again. Why did I stop? I don’t know. Probably because I was tricked into doing “PKM”
Now when I post on https://johnwhiles.com/notes it gets automatically syndicated to Bluesky. This was really easy to set up. Thanks for being cool Bluesky.
I guess I'm someone who uses Safari to browse the web now
When a new generative AI tool comes out - all the ai influencers race to use it and post the result on social media for clout. And then does anyone use the product?
(Yes I’m talking about the podcasts)
The VSCode UI is so painful that I’m finding myself using vim in a terminal inside of a GitHub code space to do tasks such as creating new files, or editing anything.
I wish that I had never written the thing about shaving
I have added Cloudflare's turnstile to my comments to deal with the ever increasing amounts of spam comments that are being posted to my site. It was pretty easy to setup, recommend.
A kind reader emailed me to let me know that despite writing an article about how you should RSS to your website, I'd failed to link to my RSS feed anywhere. This situation is now remedied.
I thought Online Ceramics shirts were cool until I saw someone wearing one in real life
Jeff Koons makes Funkopops for rich people
2-step rhythms, digitized kotos, and radio-ready samples cultivated a glittery, utopian atmosphere. A sea of Online Ceramics-clad young professionals smiled.
I’d like to buy a tiny touch ID sensor that I can put near my laptop.
“Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot”
Ouch
Richard Sapper was a genius, but ThinkPads are very ugly
I remember and miss the days when the “Menswear Guy” wrote an interesting blog rather than fighting people on Twitter.
It’s quite amazing how broken Tumblr is now. I can’t even successfully sign up for a new account.
Jacob Marley: “it feels good to be scrobbling again”
Robert Marley: “it feels good to be doing anything again!”
My Chemical Romance are unusual in that their choruses are often the weakest part of their songs.
Please, just a crumb of capital gains tax on property
Interesting that you only have to say “This is not medical advice” when you’re about to give medical advice
Interesting that you only have to say “This is not investment advice” when you’re about to give investment advice.
I’m like Dune but with a budget of 75 pence
Can’t wait for email providers to start blacklisting senders who don’t take one click unsubscribe seriously
I will soon be publishing a two hour long ambient album on cassette. Prepare yourselves.
My natural eyebrow slit has never received enough respect.
I watched a video tour of the world’s largest cruise ship expecting it to be fun and enlightening. It turned out to just be depressing.
I need to let people format their comments on my blog. People are writing paragraphs, and then I‘m removing all their line-breaks and making it unreadable.
If you put potatoes in bread, you get really good bread
Not sure when it happened, but at some point I stopped saying trousers and started saying pants.
The way that Swift handles errors seems really nice. Well done Swift.
On Firefox you can’t highlight text on a Notion page. So you can’t copy text from Notion pages on Firefox. 😢
I want to recommend Standard Ebooks - it’s a source of endless reading material, but with a bit more curation than Project Gutenberg.
I just downloaded every single Sherlock Holmes story. Pumped.
just setting up my twttr / testing the webmention feature