Gondor calls for soup.
The society I happen to have been born into is based on consumption. It tells me that my worth is measured in my economic contributions. That I will be judged by the clothes I wear, the car I drive, the establishments I frequent.
“The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle.”
Or,
“No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”
-Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Nearing the end of the year, I’m starting to think about next year’s theme. But before I get into that, I think it’s worth reviewing how this year’s theme went.
TL;DR – poorly.
Looking back on how I defined my theme for the year, I think the idea was solid, but I lacked clarity on what exactly I meant to do differently. One big mistake is that, outside of the start of the year, I mostly never thought about it again. It didn’t serve as a “north star” like so many yearly themes do. Whereas the Year of Time (2023,) kept popping up everywhere I looked, the Year of Scales of Arpeggios mostly just happened.
In the blog post linked above, I set out three specific plans I intended to engage in. If you haven’t clicked through, they were:
- Wake up before work, use that time productively.
- Build a system for meal planning.
- Learn to play disc golf.
And dear reader, I did approximately none of them.
That’s not quite entirely fair, I actually did get really good at waking up earlier. But I don’t really use the time productively. I think the end result is that I’m more “awake” when work starts, and that has some positive benefits, but never not once did I ever get my treadmill time in before the day started. Planning the day continues to be an elusive challenge. Executing the plan even more so.
It feels hardly worth even mentioning the other two, beyond saying that I didn’t even start to try. I forgot I meant to. The year got away from me and now here we are, on the precipice of December, and I don’t think I’m planning to start any of that in the remaining four weeks.
We can’t win them all, and I didn’t win this one. On to bigger and better things!
Winter is coming
You might surmise that this is a political post. And it sort of is, but also it isn’t. Because winter has always been coming. And most likely, winter will always be coming. Winter might be Trump, it might be climate change, it might be an asteroid that strikes the Pacific ocean and obliterates all life as we know it. We don’t know when winter will come, nor what form it will take, but winter is coming.
Some people will read that and assume that I am being defeatist. That clearly, we must all give up in the face of insurmountable odds. And no, read what I said because it doesn’t include anything about giving up. Despite it all, I’m not a nihilist.
That winter is coming is an indisputable fact of our universe, and the answer to winter is to chop wood, preserve food, hunker down, and tell stories. Prepare for winter; to be able to weather it, because you do not control which way the wind will blow. You never did, and you never will. Winter can and will show up on its own schedule, in its own way, and there is nothing to be done about it except to prepare.
Our ancestors built communities by huddling together around the fire, and though the mode may have changed the method remains. Many hands make light work, and there remains much work to be done. There always will, because the universe does not owe us peace. The universe does not owe us anything. Winter is coming, and the only chance we have to stand against it is together.
With any luck, and no small amount of fortune, we will get to plant trees under whose shade we will never sit. It is not for us to rest, because winter is coming. But we might hope that others may some day wonder at what winter ever was.
Wargaming as a hobby is incredibly cloistered, a series of rituals performed by robed adherents, and the systems broadly share so many concepts that you often draft on one to learn another. This means that onboarding someone into our mystery is often an afterthought - the process starts by reading thirty some-odd pages of scripture, but the real questions you’ll grapple with are the same as the fresh acolyte of any religion. They will all be within interactions the “rules” only suggest. It’s not that the map isn’t the territory - it’s that the map generally describes a world which cannot possibly exist, and the work is in harmonizing that with the real world. This is a form of labor I delight in! But there might be hard limits on how many people want to collaboratively embroider a secular religion in their leisure time.
— Jerry Holkins, The Heloc Heresy
On Generative AI
I would describe myself as “cautiously optimistic” about generative AI. LLMs are clearly capable of doing some useful things. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise at this point probably sounds a lot like they’re trying to argue the sky isn’t blue or the moon isn’t cheese.
For a little background, I first heard about GPT-2 back when it came out, a couple of years before ChatGPT hit the world stage, and some of the smartest nerds I know were marveling at the fact that you could get it to play chess competently. This was a surprising result, because LLMs use statistical techniques against words to predict outputs given an input. It shouldn’t know what “chess” is, and it shouldn’t be competent at the game.
Early ChatGPT didn’t really impress me that much, and it routinely got stuff wrong. My best example of this would violate confidentiality, so consider that I’m not necessarily trying to convince you that old ChatGPT sucked. I think that should be obvious. Mostly I’m mentioning it to explain why I didn’t even bother to start trying to use it or its competitors until much later.
Once Google announced Bard, I joined that bandwagon and made a few slight attempts to get it to do something useful. It mostly couldn’t, which also shouldn’t be surprising. An example of this was asking it to plan a Hawaiian vacation for me. I figured planning a vacation was the kind of thing that GenAI could probably handle, there should be lots of examples of vacations that people enjoyed. It really, really wanted me to go see the Pearl Harbor memorial. (I did not.)
Okay so that’s all fine and good. Jump to today. I use ChatGPT at work, and Claude at home, and for my use cases, I think Claude is a lot better, but I wanted to talk a little bit about what I’m actually using them for. What do I think they’re good at?
ChatGPT has proven itself quite adept at taking my stream of consciousness and making something other people could understand from it. If I start typing out the details of an email I would like to send, the important points, the audience, the tone, it will generate an email that’s perfectly cromulent. Same with a Slack message. But also same with a Jira ticket. If I know basically what needs to happen and the order it needs to happen in, then Jira saves me the trouble of spending time formatting it into a proper set of acceptance criteria.
Claude, with its Artifacts feature, has helped me develop and then fill out templates for data that I want to live inside my knowledge management system. I asked Claude for a template for a System of Systems document, and together we worked to refine it to have the detail level I wanted. Then I tossed it my list of systems, and it did a decent job of a first pass to fill it out.
The recurring theme is that I’ve found GenAI saves me from typing but not from thinking. Best case scenario it will prompt me with some questions that I might not have considered, but the important connection-making and organizational work is still happening in my brain. Given that, even as an unstructured stream of consciousness, the LLM can then enforce an order and produce an output that might be useful for someone else trying to understand what I thought. I don’t really expect this to change, and once the hype cycle properly dies down I think we’ll discover it’s roughly the limit of what an LLM can do. It’ll get better at doing it, but it can’t really have an “original” thought.
My question is how much money would you pay for the functionality I’ve just described? Right now both ChatGPT and Claude have generous free tiers, but that’s because their investors are expecting them to eat the world at some point, and, once eaten, for GenAI to have become so essential that people won’t be able to remember how not to use it. They’re building their captive audience today, and eventually that bill is going to come due.
I suspect the true cost of this service is a lot more than I’d be willing to pay to avoid typing an email, but time will tell. Maybe we’ll find a way to make “good enough” LLMs operate affordably. We’re still in the “a computer takes up an entire room and only universities have them” phase of this technology, and right now I have five different computers on my desk all of which are more capable than a mainframe was in 1982.
I’m also concerned about the environmental impact, in the sense that we burn a truly fantastic amount of electricity to provide this service. But I think that’s more general than LLMs. We spend a truly fantastic amount of electricity to do lots of things, and are generally incapable as a society of building real solutions to that problem.
Finally, I’m concerned that OpenAI, Anthropic, and every other GenAI company out there had to basically steal all of the world’s knowledge to build this thing. I mention this, because I think it’s worth mentioning. Copyright infringement is apparently okay when Microsoft does it, but if the consumer pirates a copy of Windows now suddenly they care? I am not compelled by arguments about how hard it would be to solve this problem, nor how much it would cost. If we wanted to, we would. But I definitely think it’s fair to consider this in your rubric for how seriously to respect the rights of corporations in turn.
For now I continue to stand by my policy of no GenAI content on this blog. It would defeat entirely the purpose. I’m not trying to impress anyone. I’m barely even trying to convince anyone. These are my thoughts, filtered through my own artistic sense of the right words to use to convey them. 90% of the value is that I took the time to express them, and 10% is whatever value other people might derive from consuming them. But it would be a tactical error to continue to avoid GenAI indefinitely. If you’re not engaging with it currently I’d strongly recommend thinking about where it might be able to help you; the answer is almost certainly not “nowhere.”
Thinking out loud about the iPad
I have owned several iPads, and the role of the iPad in my life has changed over the years. With today’s announcement of the new iPad mini, I think it’s time to reevaluate which iPad(s) I need, and potentially start the trade-in process.
Question #1: What do I actually use my iPad for today?
I have an iPad mini. I bought it around the time my kindle kicked the bucket, and my intention was to use it mainly as a reading device. In my mind I thought it’d take it with me on appointments, but in practice I don’t have many of those. It has come with me on every flight since I’ve owned it, and it does a lot of heavy lifting as the main thing I do to keep myself busy while traveling. In that context, I mostly read blog posts through Readwise Reader.
There’s a lot to like about Reader, even though it’s a beta product, but their offline reading experience falls a bit short: images aren’t cached. That might not matter to some people, but ends up being pretty important in the kinds of blog posts I have a tendency to save for later reading.
Because it was intended to be a reading device, I got the 64GB version, which is not enough space to store movies or TV shows for offline watching. Sometimes, especially in hotel rooms, that’d be a nice feature to have. I don’t subscribe to any streaming services, so I need the files to be available on my iPad if I want to watch them.
Finally, it’s a small use case, but the Citadel Colour app is only available on mobile, so despite the fact that I have an iMac on my painting desk, I need an iPad or similar for looking up paint recipes.
Question #2: What do I think I might use my iPad for in the future?
Last weekend I purchased a Kobo Sage for eBooks. I really liked my Kindle, but I no longer shop with Amazon and do not intend to buy a new one. The iPad, it turns out, provides too many distractions and so I rarely read books on it. The Kobo probably won’t arrive for at least another week, but once it does, I intend for it to live in my (not quite yet built) reading nook. It may not come on flights, I haven’t decided.
It’s worth noting that the Kobo solves for a use case I intended the iPad to solve, but for which the iPad ended up being poorly suited: books. There’s nothing wrong with the device, this is entirely a limitation of my attention. Given all the things an iPad can do, I get easily distracted and end up not reading long-form books. I think having a dedicated device that serves this role and has no distractions is key to getting myself to read more. It worked, in fits and spurts, with the Kindle. So the Kobo will do that now.
However, the Kobo doesn’t solve for everything. It doesn’t solve for “read it later” and it doesn’t solve for graphics-heavy formatted PDFs, such as TTRPGs I back on Kickstarter.
Again, I’m thinking out loud here so bear with me.
I’m starting to develop the following rubric:
- Text-focused books designed to be read for enjoyment, entertainment, or education will live on the Kobo.
- Graphics-focused books will live on the iPad.
To be clear, the iPad really does do these things equally well. It’s more about the mental partitioning. I can’t have one device that does both of these things because my squishy brain must be cajoled into doing things that I enjoy doing if the activation energy of doing them is greater than zero.
Question #3: Which iPad?
The million dollar question. Or thousand dollar. Probably.
Really I think there’s two contenders. The 13" iPad Air and the new iPad Mini. For all intents and purposes they are functionally identical except for size.
I do like the size of the iPad Mini I have. It’s easy to carry around. It moves around the house quite a lot. It’s perfect for Reader, and acceptable for TV/Movies. I haven’t tried referencing a TTRPG rulebook on it, and I will before I commit to a decision, but that’s the one thing that I think the larger iPad is likely to excel at.
If, like me, you think “well why not just keep the current iPad Mini” then let me introduce one more variable. As I mentioned earlier, Readwise Reader doesn’t work great in offline mode. So I’m seriously considering getting the cellular-enabled model, which solves for lack of connectivity everywhere except airplanes, and which lets me solve another unrelated problem: kicking the tires on a new wireless provider in a way that doesn’t require committing an existing device.
So now I’m stuck in the worst possible place: compelling arguments between two options and no clear rubric to pick one or the other. The larger iPad seems like it’d be better at looking at PDFs, the smaller iPad seems like it’d be better for read-it-later blog articles. The smaller iPad is great for travel, and travel is the main thing I use my iPad for. The price difference between the two options doesn’t really matter, but it’s too expensive to get both and call it good.
What to do?
From the journals of St. Rev. Dr. McPunch, Dweller, Vault 76
“Reclamation day” my entire ass. The vault has everything we need, and I’ve spent most of my life in it! Everyone else was in a hurry to get out and see the world. I’ll tell you what you’ll see: a fat lot of nothing. How could there be anything to see? Twenty years isn’t nearly enough time to clear the rads. But I’m running out of food, and I’m going to have to go out there eventually. Might as well be on my terms.
Of course once you go outside, the door closes behind you. Nothing to it but to do it I guess.
Couple of girls standing near the vault entrance. “A real dweller, gosh!” I’m as shocked as they were. There’s still people out here? Guess there’s some sort of rumor going ‘round about treasure, and some people think it’s the vault. Hate to break it to you, nothing in there. I bet it shut down the instant the last dweller (that’s me, hi,) left. But there’s people, and not just people from the vault. That’s got to be something, right?
Found the remnants of a farm not far down the hill, and a group of people calling themselves the Responders. They traded some basic supplies for a little help. I don’t mind playing a bit of gopher for some chems and clean water. The bad news? I guess there’s a cult? That worships the Mothman?! I ran some supplies for the Responders up the hill to another group calling themselves the Brotherhood. Bunch of tightwads, but caps is caps.
Never thought I’d see it, but someone left a Power Armor frame down at the farm. Just hanging out, free for the grabbing. It’s been stripped for parts, so nothing more than a frame and a bit of juice to keep it moving. I wonder if I can find the missing parts?
There was a call for help out of the South, something about a robot? I’ll tell you, it was the most people I’ve seen in one place since Reclamation Day. Mostly vault dwellers like myself, several with fully-functional sets of Power Armor. And me with my Little Slugger covered in razor blades. Oh well. I’m not really sure that I was much help, but there was definitely a robot. Wearing a sheep? It was confusing. But I got some more caps and chems for my trouble.
Overseer left a trail to follow, which has taken me to a little town called Flatwoods. Looks like it used to be a base of some kind for the Responders. I guess I’m formally a Volunteer now? At least that’s what the computer’s saying. There’s basically nobody left to confirm it, just one other random lady and her dog. Doesn’t seem like she knows much about it either. I did some tests, cooked a burger, and stole anything not nailed down to the floor. It looks like they called everyone back to a place called Morgantown’s airport. I’ll have to go check that out at some point.
I’ve added a 100% Human Generated policy to my blog.
[…] AI is here. It’s going to “win” for many definitions of win, and some definitions of lose. But that doesn’t mean we need to abandon our crafts to it. The Luddites “lost” for most definitions of lose, but people still make things at home that could come from factories. […]
_February 2025 Update: I’ve replaced my 100% Human Generated policy with a Collaborative AI policy, available here: thewizardly.com/ai-collab…
Things I have recently discovered ChatGPT is good at:
- jira templates
- confluence templates
- pictures of disturbingly happy fruit
- philosophical discussions about Zeno’s paradox as applied to disturbingly happy fruit
Things I have recently discovered ChatGPT is not good at:
- pictures of mothman
- pictures of mothman at a pool party
- pictures of mothman at a pool party with other cryptids
Folsom Street Fair is an anime convention.
No, I will not elaborate.
I might be the only person you know who doesn’t shop on Amazon.
I spent most of last night talking with a dear friend about community and connection in the current age of the Internet.
A few months ago I looked back at my first 30 days of tracking 100% of my time. Now I have about a quarter’s worth of data, and some patterns have emerged.
Saving $20 on airport food by spending $30 at Buc-Ee’s.
I’d like to talk a bit about my favorite Massively Multiplayer Online PvP Game: eBay
The way I make sense of the world is to talk about it, at length, with anyone who’ll listen. Which frequently means the people closest to me are stuck listening to me as I work out any complicated long-poll decision making process.
I updated the main body font for my blog. It’s kind of a kludgy hack, but I think it’s a lot more readable. I’m working on a v2.0 of the theme to roll up a bunch of other fixes, but it was important to me to achieve readability before I worry about the vibe.
The Nature of Things (Burmese Classical Poems)
Often a man suffers destruction
In order that another man
Might enjoy well-being.
Such is the nature of things!A courtier’s satisfaction.
In enjoying kingly confidences
In golden palaces
And a King’ s own good fortune
Are merely bubbles
On the surface of a vast ocean
Momentary and evanescent.If dictated by commiseration
I were to be released
And freed from execution
I would not escape Death.
Inseparable am I from Karma
All sentient beings
Being subject to dissolution.Respectfully I salute His Majesty.
Should I again meet my Lord the King
In one of my future rebirths
In the cycle of Samsara
Begrudging him nothing
I would lovingly forgive him.
Impermanent is my body of blood.
-Anantasuriya
As translated in Burmese Classical Poems
Establishing a baseline for reviewing things can be difficult.
I have a new blog theme! It’s entirely possible you’re witnessing it right now, with your very own eye-holes. If not, you might want to click through and give it a taste.
I’ll be moving in roughly 3-4 years. I know what city, but not which suburb or neighborhood. What are some things I could be doing right now to establish a social circle in what will become my new home?
In no particular order, a list of things I need.
- I need to figure out somewhere to keep my cookbooks.
- I need to figure out where to track my project to read and review RPG books.
- I need to catch up on my back issues of White Dwarf.
- I need to catch up on my back issues of comic books.
- I need to catch up on reading in general.
- I need to get a dev environment set up on my personal Mac.
- I need to find time to paint my Warhammer minis.
- I need to finish up the project I started to move from PARA to Johnny Decimal.
- I need to finish up the project I started around “use strategic thinking to plan your life.”
- I need to clean my desk.
- Which implies I need to find somewhere for these tiny lego plants.
- And these stickers.
- And get the new version of the BookArc.
- I need to start walking for exercise again.
- I need to find somewhere to put Rivendell.
- And then build it.
- Also the Sanderson Sister’s cottage.
- Also look into the lego lighting stuff. It looked cool.
- I need to write a bunch of period-appropriate albums to MiniDiscs.
- I need to read this illustrated Maleus Malificarum I borrowed from a friend before I see them again.
I need to have fewer things I need.
“Is this a problem you have to solve, or can the world solve it for you later?”
— Adam Savage
I’m not “traditionally” goal motivated. What do I mean by that? I mean if I tried to set a goal for a year from now that looked something like this: “in one year I want to have written a book,” that would not, on its own, result in any of the behaviors that lead to a book being written.