Adam Keys is Thinking

Virtuosity and speed are nice, in music and life. But you leave some space between the notes or slow things way down? Make some space in between the music for the music to happen? Now you’re cooking something good. For example:

• Aretha Franklin, the greatest of all time at making the most of the space between notes. As I’m fond of saying: there is no song Aretha Franklin could not perform slower and better than anyone else. Compare the tempo of Otis Redding’s Respect to Aretha’s version, both recorded in the same year.
• AC/DC, “Back In Black” or “Highway To Hell”. This is where I’d start rock and roll songwriting 101.
• D’Angelo, “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)”. Most of his work is an exemplar, he’s a master of making songs feel spacious.
• Joe Cocker, “With A Little Help From My Friends”. Take a jaunty, mid-tier Beatles song and draw it way out. This makes room for the huge, stacked vocals chorus. Suddenly, it’s right in the feels.

Related: the funk is the notes you don’t play.

David Crawshaw, jsonfile: a quick hack for tinkering. 114 lines, including comments. Nothing revolutionary here. Just a nicely written and well-thought-out “classic hack” for storing data in toy programs and prototypes.

Regarding Leó Szilárd, a theoretical physicist who first conceived of the possibilities of nuclear chain reactions, nuclear power, and nuclear weapons:

The bath was down the hall. “I remember that I went into my bath…around nine o’clock in the morning. There is no place as good to think as a bathtub. I would just soak there and think, and around twelve o’clock the maid would knock and say, ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Then I usually got out and made a few notes, dictated a few memoranda.”

— Richard Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb

Shower thoughts, bath thoughts, lawn mowing thoughts. Great minds think alike, i.e., in similar repose.

Suppose you’re on a computer provisioned by a corporate IT department. They’ve restricted the software you can install. On principle, you’ve decided that even signing in to websites on a personal account is nice to avoid, where possible.

Given those constraints, how do you transfer interesting web stuff you’ve come across from the sphere of corporate IT into your sphere of IT? Normal tools like bookmarking sites or iCloud sharing are out. Emailing it to yourself is also out, too many steps and too janky.

What I came up with is:

1. Find a bookmarklet that will convert the current location’s URL to a QR code. This Codepen worked for me, but I bet there are others!
2. Hold my personal phone up to the monitor like a weird person and scan said code
3. Now the location is on my phone and I can do as I like

First: use them! Most frameworks have a project boilerplate and that’s it. Rails’ ability to quickly lay down a conventional resource, model, or anything else is a productivity booster. Use it!

Second: experiment with the commands before you run them. Try Harrison Broadbent’s, RAILSG · Ruby on Rails Generator Reference and Command Builder:

RAILSG is a collection of Ruby on Rails generator command references, and command builders.

Third, write your own. When your app gets traction, you’ll probably invent a couple of conventions of your own. Use generators to quickly write new code consistently. Garrett Dimon has become the expert on this, Creating Custom Rails Generators:

Rails generators can help remove significant friction from the process of spinning up new ideas, but you don’t have to limit yourself to the included generators. You can also create custom generators as long as you’re familiar with the available APIs and know where the speed bumps are.

And check out his forthcoming book on the same topic!

Funk is unique amongst musical genres, in my perspective, due to the importance of the notes you don’t play. The space between notes, and not “shredding” every possible moment, is important in all genres. But I find that the funkiest stuff gets that way from missing expected notes and shifting expected notes to moments where they shouldn’t be.

Funk was a rhythmic system of tension and release over time, but also simultaneous tension between some players exercising maximum restraint and others exhibiting maximum expressiveness. Most of all, funk was a science of subverted expectations, syncopation taken to its ultimate destination. With funk, things weren’t always where you thought they’d be.

– Dan Charnas, Dilla Time

Digital Underground, Rhymin’ on the funk. Recommended.

Funk not only moves, it can re-move, you dig?

– George Clinton, P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)

LFG: looking for game. An ad-hoc scheme, often forum-esque, where strangers looking to play an online game that lacks matchmaking find each other and coordinate starting a game.

No matter how famous they get, the forward-thinking artists of today aren’t just looking for fans or passive consumers of their work, they’re looking for potential collaborators, or co-conspirators. These artists acknowledge that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that the experience of art is always a two-way street, incomplete without feedback. These artists hang out online and answer questions. They ask for reading recommendations. They chat with fans about the stuff they love.

– Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!

This is how I found so many of my online pals and past/future collaborators. The wonder of blogs, “web 2.0”, and then Twitter. We were out there posting, finding tribes, and, occasionally teammates.

Jim Nielsen, Blogging and Composting:

But as a byproduct of whatever you’re building you undoubtedly learned, observed, or cursed at something along the way.

And if you blog, you can make good use of that experience!

Show up (almost) every day, stack some drafts. Write down what you learned or what surprised you or what amazed you. Sooner than you know it, you’ve got a thing going. Maybe even a thesis or long-running schtick. Works for any kind of writing, not just blogs. 📈

Day two: breakfast, books, public transit! Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (surprise guest: Maya Rudolph!) put on an excellent show. (Not pictured: very, very cold.)

Grits ’n Gravy. Enjoyed.

Powell’s Books. Enjoyed, transacted.

The light rail line back to our Airbnb. It’s nice to get around sans car now and then!

Dinner plates say what we meant to say at Bottle and Kitchen.

Seeing lady comics at a concert hall, not a bad way to spend a night out of town.

Day one, travel day. Air travel is fine. Green carpets are green. It’s cold and dreary, as expected. There may be snow. We persevere.

My experiments (with obsidian-copilot) have yet to yield a satisfying intersection between LLMs and Obsidian. I generally find OpenAI’s models write too much like breathless clickbait instead of an interesting human. I don’t want a summary or rewrite of my notes generated in that style. For querying/searching/discovery, OpenAI’s notebook-esque web interface is fine.

I’m still hoping to come across something that uses indexing and embedding to help me organize and connect notes I wrote, by my hand, in intriguing and novel ways. 🤞🏻

That said, if you’re already running an LLM locally via llama, obsidian-ollama looks like an excellent way to integrate it into your note-writing/knowledge management scheme. The code of this plugin is easy to follow and nicely structured, making it a good one to look at when the temptation to write Obsidian plugins comes. (Which, for me, arrives as a potential distraction more often than I’d like!) Disclaimer: I haven’t tried this one yet!

Most fascinating game there is, keeping things from staying the way they are. – Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

The status quo is a hell of a thing. Path dependence makes this a challenging game.

The biggest challenge you could take on in life: change it for even the slightest better. A virtuous challenge too, in an Aristotelian virtues sense?

I like the idea and execution of Tailwind. That said, there’s something nice about dropping a CSS library reference into a new HTML file and getting styled content without adding any classes or other legwork.

The nice thing about these libraries is they imagine, to some extent, a world where the stylesheets browsers use as defaults didn’t look so bland.

• new.css – if browser defaults looked real nice
• mvp.css – if browser defaults looked like Bootstrap or the Tailwind examples
• nes.css – if browser defaults said “heck, we’re going with it” and emulated the look of classic Nintendo game menus
• tufte.css – if Edward Tufte had been put in charge of default browser stylesheets

Rands in Repose, Seven Steps to Fixing Stalled To-Do Tasks:

The never-ending question you must ask regarding whatever productivity system you’ve built is, “Does this system make you more productive?”

The purpose of all this software is to get stuff done (make things), not to fiddle and shuffle tasks around! (This goes for individuals and teams, FWIW)

• Places visited
  • Marfa, Texas
  • Las Cruces, New Mexico
  • Tucson, Arizona
  • Disney World (Orlando, Florida)
  • Disneyland (Anaheim, California)
  • Prunedale, California
  • Salinas, California
  • Monterey, California
  • Dallas, Texas
• Writers enjoyed
  • Craig Mod
  • Henrik Karlsson
• Music re-discovered
  • John Coltrane A Love Supreme
  • Return to Forever The Mothership Returns
• Concerts attended
  • Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band,
  • Lyle Lovett and his Large Band
  • Thundercat
• My best writing
  • My summer at 100hz
  • I got better at estimating projects
  • Err the Blog, revisited
  • Turn the pages, read the code, hear the words
  • Natasha Lyonne is my generation’s Joe Pesci
  • A vacation is a tool for disconnecting
• Previously revisited
  • 2022
  • 2021