David W. Brown @dwb@qoto.org

"Picked and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right."
—The Confidence-Man, published today in 1857

When I visit any website

Beautiful QGIS labeling trick from
@newgeographer2:

"Use this make_circle hack in #qgis to create a curved title"

https://twitter.com/newgeographer2/status/1641044984525733889

#gischat #cartography #maps

"Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."
—Moby-Dick

This year is going to see my journal/log’s 10th anniversary and 100th notebook. I read the whole article and took a lot of notes which inspired me to think about how I can consolidate my capture (logging) habit a bit more into one place, but still keep multiple capture tools. After finishing this essay, it feels like Dave accidentally invented GTD for himself in a different form based on a stream of captured ideas that are moved up in the chain to have projects and next actions. The part at the end where he writes about weekly, monthly, and yearly recaps feels very GTD-esque. I actually tracked my time in a notebook like this before. I had a timestamp of when I started and when I ended a session of work. I have a long history of working in sessions, as I used to do a lot of freelance work, which requires time tracking (a session means that I focus on one task for a more extended period of time). My only question is how Dave transcribes his notebook entries into his digital system? I did it by hand, and it was awful. Anyway, this is an excellent write-up of a fantastic system that I’m going to use as inspiration.

https://decoding.io/2023/03/my-notebook-system-ratfactor/

I have three words to say to the White House and all the journalists who’ve said they won’t pay for blue checkmarks.

“Come to Mastodon”

https://www.axios.com/2023/03/31/twitter-verification-white-house-biden-check-mark

I just found out that Google lets you schedule things up to the year 2100 and I've been sending my friends the most chaotic invites for when I'm 120 years old.

Weird but true: Protons and neutrons are made of quarks, but the mass of those quarks accounts for only 1% of their total mass. The other 99% is energy from relativistic motion & quantum fields.
99% of your weight is energy, not matter.
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/118 #perspective

My kink is having machines huskily breathe into my ear about how they're going to do my job

Every #tool is dangerous, and the more powerful the tool the more dangerous it is. Of course. Is #AI as dangerous as #nuclear #weapons? Probably not. It might be in the same league as, oh, say #internal #combustion #engines—and those have done a hell of a lot of damage. But they haven't done it by ushering in the #apocalypse. Instead the damage is from slow, creeping, cumulative change where the effect of any one individual event is too small to measure.

So I really think the focus on world-ending scenarios takes away from the conversations we need to be having. This reminds me a lot of the simmering "how far is too far" #genetics debate, especially the kibitzing from "#ethicists" with no understanding of the #biology and an #ethical sense that isn't nearly as developed as they think it is. There are conversations on that topic I'd like to have without the constant Greek chorus of "#Frankenstein! #Gattaca! #JurassicPark!"