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Archives for General

working on my energy levels

(Warning: this is a long post, even by my standards.) For several years (a decade?) now, my energy levels during the day have been pretty bad. A few years back, I decided to try to do something about it. Things still aren’t completely fixed, but they’re significantly better, and I also have a better understanding […]

two things i like about capitalism

Another blog post in the category of “stuff that I probably should not blog about”, but it’s been bouncing around in my head. So: here are two things that I like about capitalism.   The first one: I like the way capitalism acknowledges risk up front. Over the years, I’ve gotten more and more convinced […]

breaking a bone in my hand

I broke a bone in my hand at the start of August. I was out jogging during my lunch break at work, and I tripped somehow; I’m not actually sure what happened, maybe there was some uneven sidewalk pavement, or something? At any rate, my toe got caught and my whole body pivoted around it, […]

changing podcast clients

I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts; honestly, if I had to name a single most important app on my phone, I’d probably pick the podcast app I use? Which, for most of a decade, has been Castro. Originally I started using it because I really liked their visual design; and then they […]

tradeoffs arising from the use of generative models

Since the discussion around the effects of generative models doesn’t seem to be going away, I figured I’d give in and write about my point of view of this stuff. Specifically, I wanted to talk about how I see some of the tradeoffs involved.   The first is the question of how much to worry […]

touching my toes

My body is decently flexible in some way; but my hamstrings aren’t one of those ways, it’s been decades since I’ve been able to touch my toes. (At least when standing; I could barely touch the toes on one foot if sitting with only one leg extended.) Which didn’t seem like the greatest thing, and […]

choosing a mastodon server

One more thing that I was thinking about when switching away from Twitter: what Mastodon server should I choose? And what are the criteria I should use to make that decision?   My first question: do I care about the local timeline of the server in question? Mastodon lets you watch a firehose of all […]

what i got out of twitter

One problem with being unusually behind on my list of blog posts to write is that, sometimes, events in the world overtake my posts before I actually write them. I normally solve this problem by not writing about events in the world in the first place; but, a few months back (when Elon Musk bought […]

overton windows and scope

Over the last half decade, there was a lot of argument about what sort of speech is acceptable on Twitter. And not just acceptable in terms of “a good idea” versus “a bad idea”, but in terms of whether or not a given type of speech should be banned from Twitter. Some of the speech […]

switched from twitter to mastodon

A heads up to folks that I’ve stopped using Twitter (or at least stopped posting on Twitter, for now I’m still reading it) and I’ve started using Mastodon. I’ll give more details in a later post, but I figured I should at least get an announcement out. I’m at @davidcarlton@mastodon.social if you want to follow […]

early impressions of cohost

(Because this post is about cohost, I typed it up there; here’s the link to it on cohost.) I’ve been signed up for cohost for about four weeks now; what’s surprised me the most is how unlike Twitter it feels. And I don’t mean that in terms of me following a much smaller number of […]

covid and randomness

One thing that watching our response to COVID brought home to me is that dealing with randomness is really hard, in lots of different ways. Some ways in which that played out: Group randomness versus individual randomness There are lots of actions that you can take that make a difference in terms of your chance […]

update on working part time

I’ve been working part time (three days a week) for most of a year, so I figure that it’s about time for an update. My top-level take: definitely the right choice. I’m glad I’m not working full time (whether at my current employer or a different employer); but also I’m glad that I’m working a […]

emptying out my podcast queue

As I mentioned a few months back, I’ve been spending a lot of my podcast listening time going through Friends at the Table, first their regular episodes and then their Patreon stuff. And now I’m done with those shows as well, or at least all of those shows that I’m interested in listening to. Which […]

how to spend my days off

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I’m now working part time. Which, of course, raises the question: what should I do on my off days? The list of options that I’ve come up with: Goof off. Get more serious about Tai Chi and/or Nei Gong Spend more time improving my music skills. Spend more […]

reducing my hours at work

The company that I’ve been employed by for the last ten years went public last September, and the lockup of my shares expired in March. So that meant that one large source of leverage my employer had over me has disappeared, and the amount of money we had saved changed significantly; that change in leverage […]

the possibility space of company behavior

This picture from Liz and Mollie showed up on my Twitter feed a few times recently: And that reminded my of one of my favorite (?) BusinessTown posts: Not because they’re pointing at the exact same thing, but because they’re both pointing at monocultures within how businesses (or at least tech business, or at least […]

national greatness

I spent a lot of 2020 being very frustrated with the United States. At the start of the year, the fact that we had Trump as president, that so many people remained quite happy with that, and that the Democratic party and electorate was coalescing around a candidate that seemed remarkably milquetoast. Then COVID arrived, […]

blogging less

I expect I’ll be blogging somewhat less here, at least for the next while. (Not that I blog a lot these days!) Damo Mitchell started up an Internal Arts Academy, providing online Nei Gong training. Which is very good timing: I’d been getting more interested in Nei Gong, and with the COVID lockdown, my in-person […]

learning something you don’t believe

I’ve been doing Tai Chi for four and a half years now; and I’ve been doing Nei Gong (literally, “internal work”: Qi Gong and the like) over the last year. And it’s been super interesting; but also, especially as I dig more into the Nei Gong work, I keep on having to face concepts that […]