Author Archives: cleithart

I am alive and have two legs. This state of affairs will hopefully continue for quite some time.

From Idaho B Roll

by Brian Blanchfield

In Garfield, Washington, the second of three 
speed-trap towns cutting over into 
Idaho on the way home from Spokane, 
there is a gray-going-white basketball 
furred from use and exposure, deflated 
only enough to discourage prolonged play, 
in the grass by the public court, beside 
the little park's restroom, the simplest soonest 
option en route. It pleases me again 
to spot it and, before returning to the car, 
to shoot two or three baskets. It must, 
with everything else, be buried under snow 
half of each winter. You lose the news, 
you shake the hour of seated transit off 
and stand quiet with whatever you've seen: 
a tractor waiting to pull the giant buck 
from the double yellow line, the pheasant vanishing 
in the bush, the long bright flowering wheat 
or waves of grain in the anthem area wind 
inspires. Bounce it two or three times and find, 
at the four finger pads of your right hand, 
a meridian bowed across the ball, the grace, 
remembered, by feel, of backspin. Unseen 
mark of experience, in a groove, at the line, 
clock stopped, to get it to roll back to you.

Originally published in the Atlantic

Bonkers

Craig Mod:

I’ve always been opinionated about how software should work. Mainly, it should be fast. The bounds of it should be “knowable.” The contract you have with it should be “sane” (i.e., you just own it).

The rest of Craig’s post is about how he used Claude Code to fulfill his wildest software dreams. (In his own words, he’s gone “software bonkers.”)

I’m not going to lie, the tools he made sound pretty cool. But…

Are the bounds of Claude Code knowable? Is the contract you have with it “sane?” Do you just own it?

In some ways, these are genuine questions. I don’t know much about Claude Code. Maybe it isn’t just another product that will twine itself around your digital life. Maybe its omnipotence is beneficial and it really can help you make fast, sane, knowable tools. If so, cool. But I remain skeptical.

Revolutions Don’t Need Ad Campaigns

AI companies are pouring money into advertising. Either they are nervous about the market and want to create a need where none exists or they are nervous about their product and want to bluff their way to success.

If AI was as revolutionary as everyone claims, it wouldn’t need an ad campaign.

See also this story in the Economist about advertising in ChatGPT (paywalled) and Freddie deBoer’s essay about the actual technological impact of the digital revolution (spoiler: not much).

(both links via Alan Jacobs)

A New Addiction

There’s a lot that’s chilling about this post on AI by Matthew Milliner, but this quote in particular stuck out to me:

Recently I had a three-hour conversation with a woman on a plane who was struggling with a family issue, and we actually got somewhere. She thanked me for the time, confessing she had almost gone to AI the night before.

I don’t know whether those are Milliner’s words or the woman’s. Regardless, they are the words of an addict.

“I almost went to the bottle.”

“I almost went to porn.”

“I almost lit a cigarette.”

You Can See the Problem

When my soon-to-be brother-in-law first visited our new flat last year, he asked me about the kind of roller shutters we had installed, if they were electrically operated and if I could activate them remotely. I told him that the real estate developer had stuck to manual levers to keep the cost down as much as possible, but we could, if we wanted, easily add a little motor on the side.

But I told him that I preferred this manual system anyway. If one day I can’t open or close the shutters, I will know where the problem comes from: a mechanical issue with the roller.

Nicolas Magand

An upcoming issue of Good Work is focused on “Machines,” and it strikes me that the ability to see the mechanics involved is part of a machine’s appeal. Modern devices—especially “smart” devices—tend to hide the machinery, either by design or because they’re so complex, which makes them impossible to tinker with. And, as Matthew Crawford taught us in Shop Class as Soul Craft, tinkering with stuff is a human instinct. “We want to feel that our world is intelligible,” he says, “so we can be responsible for it.”

In books and movies from the twentieth century, people are always fixing stuff themselves—cars, toasters, space ships. Fifty years later, when tech has crept into even more aspects of our lives, tinkering, let alone fixing, feels almost impossible. You can’t see the problem, so you can’t understand the problem, so you don’t feel responsible for the problem. But lack of responsibility is uncomfortable. We want to feel responsible. Responsibility is good for us.

(In his post, Nicolas also links to a post called “My Coffee Maker Just Makes Coffee” by Bradley Taunt. Also worth a skim.)

Tacky

Source

I love the font, and there’s something charming about how bad the illustration is.