Thought Bricks

I recently finished reading The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. I came across it after reading Meditations and looking at some more books from the same reading list since I liked Meditations so much. It was very well written and researched. The use of a variety of historical people and situations made it quite interesting. If nothing else, it made me much more interested in reading up on my ancient Greek and Chinese history.

This article tries to explain what Elon Musk is trying to do with Twitter - I mean X. It seems he wants to go back to the future and re-establish an internet bank he started in 1999 called X.com with the idea that this app would have “the ability to conduct your entire financial world.” Who wants this? Why would anyone want to combine social media with banking? The article points out that WeChat in China has this sort of platform, but why would this be successful in the West?

AI is all over the news these days. It’s even inspired a pretty awesome stock market rally. I’ve been doing some exploration of what is out there and one of the more interesting things I ran across was MusicGen. It does what’s on the tin: generates music using a Language Model (LM). It’s interesting even if the music isn’t great, it does fit with the description used to generate it. I haven’t played around with it yet, but I plan to see if I can generate some cool theme songs for my dogs.

I’ve not been doing much bash scripting recently. So, when the need arose to create some simple scripts, I did some quick refresh on some things that make scripting better/faster/easier. A nice resource I found had some opinionated advice on bash and a really nice template that I’m going to use as a starting point for my scripts. It looks like this: #!/usr/bin/env bash set -o errexit set -o nounset set -o pipefail if [[ "${TRACE-0}" == "1" ]]; then set -o xtrace fi if [[ "${1-}" =~ ^-*h(elp)?

The rebranding of Twitter as X is really weird. What is the description of a post on X? A tweet made sense, was sort of cute, and entered the vernacular. What is an X? The appropriation of a logo that I strongly associate with X.org seems problematic. I guess they don’t really have enough lawyers to contest it. But there seem to be many, many other companies have the rights to X as well.

I recently read Meditations: A New Translation by Marcus Aurelius. It was really interesting and impactful. It’s a sort of diary written by a Roman emperor towards the end of his lifetime (A.D. 121-180) that is presented as a collection of books. The entries vary considerably in length and subject matter but it isn’t a recording of day to day activities but more about behavioral observations and thought experiments. I discovered it as a follow on to some readings about stoicism and found that it resonated with me.

Transmission by Joy Division just came on in my music mix. It’s a great song and sounds fresh (at least to me). I’ve been listening that that band (and others like them for more than 40 years. Since I was a teenager with bad haircuts and questionable taste in clothing. Really weird to think how much has changed but how art can persist. I’m sure some of that is just nostalgia for a mispent youth.

I love to ride my bike. If I could, I would ride everyday and everywhere. It seems this is no longer that strange especially among the young. The Economist has an article on how young people are turning away from driving. The reasons seem to be economic (cars are expensive), climate related and cultural. I don’t expect the US to become The Netherlands anytime soon, but even just a slight tilt away to providing safer and better places to ride would be great.

Can drugs change fundamental aspects of our being? Are we just a bag of chemicals that can be optimized so we are the people we want to be? This Wired article by Paul Ford got me thinking about that. He had struggled with obesity and then with a switch in medications, all of a sudden, poof, his issues were solved. He no longer had the cravings for food. That’s pretty remarkable.

The Great Backyard Bird Count is taking place now. I’ve always liked birds and can identify a few common ones so this year I decided to participate in the event. It’s really nicely done. They have an app called Bird ID that helps you identify the birds and collects the data. It’s very easy. There is also a place to view the collected data that you need to have an account to access.