a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
10:14 – : In the style of the “how old are you in internet years?” meme. I realise that I’m “put up with parsing an RSS feed and making it into a data structure, rather than looking for a JSON version of the same” old.
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
This is mostly for Dave but I welcome eye-rolling discussion from all.
I’ve been doing a thing for a little while now, but only Dave has asked about it. And so, in our cozy, little internet for two, I’m just going to talk to him about it now.
Dave, hello, old friend. Thank you for paying attention to my RSS feed and this long, slow ongoing conversation about blogging that makes other people’s eyes glaze over sooooo quickly.
You asked:
@lloyddavis.bsky.social please can you show me how you do your micro.blog > WordPress daily thing. I think that’s probably the best way for me to achieve this: da.vebrig.gs/2024/10/30/%…— Dave Briggs (@da.vebrig.gs) December 10, 2024 at 5:52 PM
Well. So. Yeah. Hang on a sec.
In the summer, I was having cognitive capacity issues, keeping track of who I was talking to where about what. So I looked at the cross-posting capabilities of micro.blog – I was attracted to it first by seeing it being used by my early blog heroes Adam Tinworth and Robert Brook and I’m a big fan of how Manton Reece eats his own dogfood. Each of these people do their own thing with it and none of them are to blame for the stupid things I might choose to do when I pick up the same tools. I just mention them because I don’t want to look like I invented all this or that I think I’m cleverer than anyone else.
Where was I? Yeah so one of the cool things Manton has kept on top of is cross-posting to these different platforms. It was the most straightforward way of writing a post once and having software post it in several places (btw they also go to my ancient tumblr – and could go to medium, linkedin and nostr if I wanted to go bananas). And recently, I’ve been able to see my BlueSky and Mastodon replies there too, but that’s another complication and we’ve got enough complications here already, I think. Focus, Lloyd, focus!
Cross-posting deals with the copy/paste problem, but I was still feeling a gap. Ever since I got on Twitter, I wanted to have a place where I could find all my stuff instead of it being in different places. I couldn’t get my act together to go full POSSE, so maybe it’s cousin – PESOS might work. PESOS means publishing elsewhere, syndicating to own site. It feels inferior, and a bit wrong, but it kind of works for now.
I feel the need to just step back and acknowledge that I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m just bumbling along having a life and now and then saying stuff on the internet. I don’t have Information Strategy meetings with myself to work out the ideal infrastructure and architectural approaches. I’m just the same bumbling blog-hacker, driven by novelty, that I’ve always been.
So I decided that what I’d do now, since I’d got all the chunks being made on micro.blog, it might be nice to make a daily digest post on here (perfectpath) of all the chunks I’d made that day. (turns out, it’s hard to get *all* the chunks, I’m human, sometimes I forget and just post something on one platform directly – also replies – we’ll come back to that).
I was also interested in how to use ChatGPT for helping me remember how to write code. So I asked it to write a script using the WordPress XML-RPC API (because that’s all I could remember there was) to take my RSS feed from micro.blog (because that’s all I could remember there was) and automatically post it here at about midnight every day. After some iterations I got to this version of the script. I then made a cron job on my home desktop computer to run at 11:55 each night, redirecting the output to a log file.
55 23 * * * /usr/bin/python3 "/Users/lloyddavis/blog digest/micro_digest.py" >> ~/microblog.log 2>&1It’s all a little bit shit, but it’s my little bit of shit. Before we start with the “why don’t you just…” here’s where I can see it needs improvement:
I’ll never be a consistent weeknoter – at least in the sense of consistently posting week by week. I’m consistent in my irregularity – I just looked and it’s almost exactly a year since my last one.
So this is December 2024. I’ve been looking forward to this (in the way that people say to their proctologist that they’re looking forward to their next appointment) for a while. I’m now into the last few weeks of my fifties. After the weekend I’ll be saying “I’m now into the last fortnight of my fifties.” That’s how I’ve been dealing with it. Doing a time check every now and then through this year in an effort to make the passing of time feel slower. I’m pretty sure it’s the anticipation that’s doing me in. Once I’m there and I have a badge that says “I’m 60 (you might have to speak up a bit!)” or something, then I’ll be OK with it. That’s what’s always happened in the past with so-called significant birthdays anyway.
The main difference with this one is that it comes with some small benefits, not just free NHS prescriptions but also the start of my Audit Commission pension. It stems from my employment there between 1996 and 2002 when 2024 still seemed a long way off. Nothing huge, but still, it’s money every week for the rest of my life (the end of which, currently at any rate, “seems a long way off”)
On Monday I went to a Hard Art meeting. It was exhausting. Lots of people said so afterwards, although I always find it exhausting, so I’m not sure what was different from them. I’m pleased to see that lately we’ve adopted more Open Space ways of working (without it being *me* who’s pushed it to the fore). There’s lots more to think about in terms of how we work on stuff together and I’m a bit depressed that I haven’t been able to give that as much attention as I’d like this year, but when I pause and look back, I recognise that we’ve made progress.
I’ve been experimenting with republishing my micro.blog entries in a digest here. If there isn’t a digest that’s because I didn’t write anything. I use micro.blog as the place I write stuff that will end up on BlueSky/Threads/Mastodon. Everything gets cross-posted to those three (plus my old faithful tumblr). I have a script that runs just before midnight and checks the RSS feed for my micro.blog and puts them into a reverse-chronological list with a timestamp that links to the original – as always, it’s a prototype for something else. What I want is a digest of all my microblogging activity – a record of the little conversations I’ve had that day – but those are fragmented across the three platforms and although federation is coming (probably in a slightly sub-optimal way for the two newer ones) it’s still hard to catch it all. It’s also not mission-critical. My main aim at the moment is that it doesn’t piss people off.
I started to feel that thing where the natural world round here is slowing down getting ready to pause and reset, but the human world is speeding up, desperately trying to get stuff done before any sort of pause.
I’m not rushing, but I sent a few emails to tidy things up and clarify when we’re going to do some work and when it can be billed for etc. I’m very grateful not to be having the kind of end of year where it’s unclear just how we’re going to make it through to January. My condolences and solidarity if you are having that kind of end of year – it sucks.
On Wednesday, I remembered that micro.blog will host audio for you, so I made a little podcast about podcasting and cross-posted it here.
I also went to the dentist. She confirmed that I do need another crown to replace the mishmash of fillings on the upper left side, but that it’s not super urgent (but could easily become so if unattended).
My dentist is on the other side of Guildford town centre. I’m glad that I gave myself space to walk into town, but not so glad to find that a suspicious package had closed the train station, so I chose to get a slower but less crowded bus home rather than the faster, crammed one.
We gave in and handed a list of odd jobs to a chap who is much more able to do these things than either of us are. So now we have pictures on the walls; all the downlighters in the kitchen work; we have working lights in both the attic and garage; and best of all, he fixed the handle on the dishwasher so that I don’t have to scrape skin off my fingers trying to open it first thing in the morning.
I’m working on a first product to put out on metalabel. It’s an annotated version of the Tuttle Annual Report that I wrote in 2009. It’s fun to do and to noodle over what all that was about back then. I did get round to creating a Tuttle Club label page and the emptiness of that is motivating me to have something to put up there. I’ll be opening up conversations about collaborative working to share there in the New Year.
I’m aware of my tendency to make up systems to make stuff and then be too exhausted to implement those systems. But I’m doing some of that kind of stuff too – (hopefully with more of the actual making stuff and without the exhaustion).
That’ll do for this week.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
13:02 – Audioblog: Wed 4 Dec 2024: If I’ve done this right, the feed should be at lloyddavis.micro.blog/podcast.x…
10:44 – : “The Observer” is to the chattering classes what “The Spirit of the Blitz” is to the Clarkson/Farage axis. You don’t love The Observer, you loved being a kid and cutting up the Sunday Supplement and making collages out of it with clippings from Radio Times.
Still. A picket line is a picket line.
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
I saw that micro.blog will host mp3s – so I made one.
The feed (I won’t always cross-post things here for now) is https://lloyddavis.micro.blog/podcast.xml
At #barcamplondon at the weekend, there was a session on AI music. I didn’t go, but a couple of friends who did mentioned it to me at lunch.
It seemed from the descriptions I heard that it was about the ease with which generative AI tools can make music that sounds like other music. The use case seemed to be “say you like Chopin’s Nocturnes. If you fancy something that sounds a lot like that, but are a bit bored with the canonical works, and Spotify’s recommendations don’t hit the spot for you, this tool could make you a playlist of stuff that satisfies that need.”
I choose those Nocturnes as an example because I’ve recently found that a) they’re really good for calming my otherwise feverish brain when overstimulated and b) that I do indeed find myself wishing there were a few more than however many opi actually exist and yeah Spotify hasn’t shown me anything yet that fits the bill. Debussy? No thanks.
Back to the AI. So I nodded along with this and asked questions in the way that you do at a barcamp. And thought, “that’s something shit that I hope never happens”. And then, yesterday, while perusing the Tube of You, I saw a recommendation for “Vintage Music For a Rainy Autumn Day” from a channel called “Vintage Relaxing”. I’m not going to link to their videos directly so that you can choose whether you want to give them any more view minutes, but as far as I can tell, they’re hour-long playlists of otherwise unidentified bits of music in a 1930s/40s generic big band style. I further surmise that these are machine generated – ie they are musical slop (“low-quality media—including writing and images—made using generative artificial intelligence technology”).
And, of course, because I did listen to some of this, there was more of the same, but different, in my recommendations this morning.
It’s 3 hours long.
So much to think about here:
Some people (I’ve met them, believe me!) have always argued that spam is in the eye of the beholder (what an image!) ie that one person’s spam is another person’s nutritious pork-based product. And, by extension, this is slop if you don’t like it, but jolly old-time music fun if you do. I don’t buy this. There is a line and I think this stuff crosses it.
I’m not in the “all AI bad because theft (past, present or future) from creators” camp. But I do think there’s probably a horrible easter egg surprise in this for people making music on the web – not least the prospect of getting copyright strikes on YouTube (and ultimately everywhere your music is available) because someone like this posted a shit-ton of generic stuff that you end up sounding like, but they got there first. When I saw this argument presented first, I was a bit “yeah I can see that with cinematic ambient stuff that all sounds the same to my geriatric ears anyway” but now I’m not so sure. It’s likely already there for your own best-beloved genre and you just haven’t seen it yet.
The “for you” style of algorithm is out of control. A little curiosity gets interpreted as eager attention. On the user side, we’re going to need *another* set of new filters to say “not that’s *not* for me, thank you” and while we’re waiting, I think the filter will be at the app/platform level (ie “I’m just not looking at Instagram reels for now”). But because it so fiercely and effectively leverages under-priced attention it isn’t going to go anywhere soon.
I’m really trying not to be a purist about the music itself – my daddy taught me to be open-minded in my listening while knowing your own preferences. But it is also shit. It’s dressed up muzak that goes nowhere, real-life bubble-gum for the ears whose main purpose is to rack up viewing hours from low cost content creation and thereby extract highly profitable advertising revenue from your ongoing attention.
It’s also just weird. If you do decide to listen carefully, you’ll ear the audio equivalents of how badly generative ai portrays fingers. Is that a guitar solo or piano? Is that trumpet or alto sax? It’s none of them, it’s an approximation of a bunch of sounds that is similar to something that was once organic. It has less soul than a replicant.
The situation: after 4½ years of pandemic-encouraged working from home, organisations are still trying to get people back into the office and it’s still not working.
You may or may not agree with that basic premise – maybe you’ve given up trying to get people back in, or maybe they’re all back in, or maybe WFH is working for the people who like being remote and the office is working for those who like being in the office. Also, people flow easily between both modes and any work that needs doing gets done, whether the people involved are in the office or on a beach in Madeira. Yeah right.
For most people I speak to, it’s a long-term conflict that has possibly reached stalemate. Progress towards resolving this conflict has been made, but people broadly fall in to those for whom working from home has been a liberating godsend and those for whome it was a nightmare that they couldn’t get away from quickly enough.
Note that I say “progress towards resolving this conflict” – not “progress towards getting things back to normal” or some such weighted phrase. I don’t know what’s best for you or your organisation, but I do think that the door that was opened by lockdown situations (at least here in the UK) showed us a glimpse of other ways of working that we’re still struggling to come to terms with.
In the meantime, positions are hardening around whether your physical location has a positive or negative effect on your productivity and the overall success of your organisation.
Long-term readers will remember that (consults notes, faints, recovers) for at least ten years I’ve been saying “We will work anywhere, but not necessarily the same ‘anywhere’ every day” (captured in this talk I gave in October 2014 – oh there’s also video of it)
So I’m biased towards individual freedom in this matter, but I also recognise that asking for total individual freedom within a business or organisation that has a main purpose other than the total freedom and happiness of its employees (sadly, most of us) is always going to come up against that purpose eventually.
So my evidence is very anecdotal, but broadly the arguments seem to be
“I’m more productive if I can choose whether and when I come to the office. I’ve found that working from home releases me from distractions that I can’t escape when I do go in. I realised that those distractions had been detrimental to my mental health.”
versus
“We believe that our productivity and general mental health is enhanced by having all of our people in the same place. Also head office (or whatever, some higher authority than the person making the pitch) have decided that we need to have people in for at least three days a week and so we’re already recording how much time people are here”.
Perhaps you’ve heard more.
I think we’re on a hiding to nothing by rooting this conversation only in terms of productivity and mental health. Mental health, because it’s hugely subjective and one size does not fit all. Some people have been driven crazy by being at home *and* some people have (possibly always) been driven crazy by being in an office – and some people drift between the two over time.
I also agree with Cal Newport that the trouble with looking at “productivity” is that we just don’t have good measures of what it is in knowledge-based work nor do we have solid facts about how to achieve it and so we end up with “proxy measures of productivity” like busyness, messaging overload and presence in the office. And although not everyone has the language to describe it, we all know that something is off with the way we work together.
So it seems to me that the people who are pushing (or are being pushed) to make sure the office is full of people again need to come up with a warmer version of the “why” – it can’t be just about “your contract” or “an edict has come from up top”. It has to be couched more in human terms about how its honestly affecting all of us so that we can put that distraction aside and get on with what we’re supposed to be doing – serving clients, helping people, making cool stuff that will help people even more and having fun (or at least not killing each other) in the process.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
10:21 – : After 20 years of being trained to use web-mail, I think I might be ready to slouch back to something desktop-based (mainly because multiple accounts with different providers). What are you using, cool kids?
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
08:50 – : I’m waiting for a (non-urgent) telephone appointment with my GP. It was scheduled for 19 minutes ago. I’m reminding myself that this is more convenient than walking over to the surgery and sitting in the waiting room, despite my increasing levels of impatience. #LoveNHS
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
a reverse-chronological list of things I’ve posted today to lloyddavis.micro.blog – replies aren’t included
15:49 – : There’s more than one way to skin a cat, but I’m not allowed to say that in our house any more (ditto comments about how little room there is in my office).
This is an experiment in trying to pull together all the things that end up in all the places.
Perfect Path 