I Didn't Think It Was Supposed to Rain
Current Wx: Temp: 74.44°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 10.36mphWords: 533
We've been having some kind of issue with our water softener since November. I suspected the water softener, but Mitzi insisted it couldn't be. She'd had this model before in her townhome and never had any problems with it. But the water was salty and the only source of salt is the water softener.
I don't think I've got it resolved yet, but I think I know what I'm looking for now.
At any rate, I put it in bypass last night and then ran the water for a while to test the unsoftened utility water for total dissolved solids (TDS). They were lower than what I was getting out of the softener. Then I put the softener into recharge (wash the resin with brine), but forgot to take it out of bypass. I remembered that about 0430 this morning, for reasons I will never understand.
Anyway, it was pointless to lie in bed anymore thinking about it, so I got up to go check. Sure enough, it was in bypass. So I put it in service, and ran a recharge cycle.
At which point the drain hose blew off!
Hilarity ensued.
I vaguely recall "thinking" what do I do now? Well, I grabbed the hose and shoved it on the discharge fitting and held it there. Problem solved.
It now has a hose clamp. (Hurray for "junk" drawers.)
Cleaned everything up and let it do its thing. Went back into the office and watched a few YouTube videos on water softener maintenance. Read the manual some more, then decided to go for a walk.
I didn't see much in the weather forecast last night about rain. Sky was cloudy with an eerie red glow in the east. I carried the E-P7 with a Lumix 12-32mm/f3.5-5.6 compact zoom mounted. Neither camera nor lens is weather sealed.
I also made sure to pick the outdoor walk on the watch. More about that later. Maybe.
Anyway, it was warm, 70°F, so just a t-shirt and a ball cap and I was on my way.
A little over a mile in, I started feeling a light rain, very light. Didn't worry too much about it. Kept the camera cupped in my right hand.
About a mile and a half in, at roughly the halfway point, it was no longer "light," it was raining.
Seemed like my morning for getting wet.
Fortunately, it didn't last long. Did the best I could to shield the E-P7 with my hand and after it stopped raining I let it swing freely from the strap to perhaps "air dry." Got home, looked it over and it was dry everywhere I could see. Seems to be fine. Time will tell.
Made breakfast, watched a few more YouTube videos on water softener maintenance. Figured I'd attend to the marmot, and now I'm going to go take a shower and think about running to Home Depot for some more salt before I take this thing apart. I may take a nap first.
May not be my day for taking apart the water softener, but I think I have a pretty good idea of what to look at.
✍️ Reply by emailWhat's the Big Idea?
06:44 Sunday, 27 April 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 67.32°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 692
Do ideas seem to seize my attention more readily when I have a task that has a deadline, which I really don't enjoy? "Just when something demands your undivided attention, along comes a compelling distraction."
We're in a pickle, aren't we? I try to wrap my brain around how we got here, and what we might have done to avoid it. (Probably nothing.) And how might we use whatever lessons we can glean from our current predicament to shape a better future?
I love the story of the drunk searching for his car keys beneath the street light, "Because that's where the light is!"
We only have a narrow point of view, but it's often filled with such an overwhelming richness, we think we see everything. And we seem to think that the things that command most of our attention are the things that everyone sees or believes. Especially the things we know about, that have in some way aided us in our success. Or the things that have frustrated us.
We describe the world we observe in absolutes, "always," "never," "everyone," "everything," "universal." But that's only the world we observe, and it's not true even for that.
Why is "innovation" synonymous with "advance"? "Advances in battery technology have made them more affordable." Yay! For me. Perhaps not so much for the people living near the extraction industries obtaining the raw materials.
"Advance" means to move forward. Somehow, "forward" has acquired some value as a preferred direction to, what, "backward"?
"We're advancing in the retrograde direction!"
We have a limited, imperfect view of where we are, yet we consider some change to be desirable because we seem to think it moves us in a positive direction, while some other changes are considered undesirable.
This is where we can get mired in a long discussion of unintended consequences.
We have an entire culture and economic system that is built on perverse incentives. Would competition have become the central organizing principle of at least American culture, were it not for Darwin and that bastard, Herbert Spencer?
Would Spencer have even read Darwin, had science not held some privileged place in academia?
How do we allow economists to cherry pick their science to embellish and adorn their selfish and inhumane theories? Why is there no corrective feedback mechanism? (Well, perhaps because we didn't have a theory of dynamic systems, and ecology wasn't especially well developed then either.)
But we've had systems theory for a while now, and it hasn't really seemed to have had much of an impact in the larger economy. Now, don't conclude I'm advocating for "planned economies" here. What I am suggesting is that we have been down this road with technological innovation, social upheaval, unintended consequences, externalities, injustice and imperfect and limited remediation many times now. We ought to have learned a few things.
It seems to me that we should have been able to institutionalize a control mechanism (The 19th century term most would be familiar with is "governor.") to kind of check the worst effects.
But that would interfere with the privileged notion that "growth," like "advance," is a preferred outcome. Even today, we're slashing those limited and imperfect institutions that are intended to mitigate some of the dangers of unregulated "growth."
Ezra Klein laments that we can't build bullet trains in this country, because we get bogged down in permitting and environmental studies, and he has a point. But I'd suggest that it's also because we haven't applied a systems dynamics approach to our regulatory regime.
Anyway, for as much as we flatter ourselves how "advanced" we are, how much "knowledge" we have acquired and made available to enough people that "personal knowledge management" has become a cottage industry, we're still in a pickle. We will soon be "advancing in the retrograde direction" at a vigorous pace.
Hindsight is 20:20, of course. And it's really not all that complicated, I suppose, in the final analysis. Greed and ignorance. We'd deny it, of course, but we've made virtues of greed and ignorance.
And it will be the undoing of all of our awesome achievements. Ozymandius in the sand.
✍️ Reply by emailContext
05:55 Monday, 27 April 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 36.72°F Pressure: 1024hPa Humidity: 89% Wind: 1.36mph
Words: 1465
I watched this video yesterday and had a little epiphany that I shared at the Tinderbox forum. It doesn't seem to have resonated with anyone, but since it's my epiphany, I figure I ought to put it in the marmot.
It seems we're on the cusp of having on-device LLMs that can do many useful things. I'd say it's worth your time to watch the video all the way through, but I linked to the part that is just before the little epiphany.
"Data hygiene really matters."
"A local model is most useful when it can read all your stuff."
There are hundreds of thousands of files on this computer. I know, because I just transferred them from the old computer. I don't recall how many hundreds of thousands, but I believe it's more than 600K.
Of those 600K files, I'm confident an AI could easily ignore >95% of them, just by their location within the file system. They have little to do with the user, except insofar as one or more of them may be a problem for a particular app, or some other glitch you'd like your AI to sort out for you. But that's not where the real value of having a local model comes in.
"Your stuff is often scattered across a bunch of different places."
It's not just that, it's that those different places contain a lot of stuff that just doesn't matter.
Think about it. I have tens of thousands of emails in Mail. I'm a luddite when it comes to email. I don't "archive" my email, I have no idea what that really means. It all just sits in Mail unless I delete it.Some of it gets automatically filed into mailboxes, which provides some structure. I can usually search and find an email that I'm looking for, so I don't worry too much about mailboxes anymore. I have bookmarks stored in Safari. I have my contact data in Contacts. Are all those contacts important? Not really.
Within the file system, I have a folder called PDF Intake. Whenever I download a pdf, Hazel routes it from Downloads to PDF Intake. They don't always go anywhere else, but at least they're not cluttering up my downloads folder.
I have spreadsheets I've created, spreadsheets I've downloaded. Are any of them important? Not really. At least, not now. The New House spreadsheet is about to become really important, at least until this house gets built.
"Data hygiene really matters."
Data hygiene is about refining context.
Finally. A genuine use for an "everything bucket."
Of course, you can regard the file system itself as an everything bucket. But the act of placing something that otherwise only exists in the file system into an everything bucket adds a bit of context to that file. (Yes, you can add context, metadata, to files in the file system. I know. Thank you very much.) You felt it was important enough, at least in that moment, to record its location or position within the file system, with its hundreds of thousands of files, in a separate file.
That's some important context.
I think it's important to state that I'm not writing about doing something important in a production context, though it certainly could be. This is more about a life context, where an AI might be a useful personal assistant in helping you keep track of all the bullshit in your life. And there is a lot of bullshit in our lives. It's not going anywhere. You can't really ignore it. Taxes. License renewals. Zombie subscriptions. Organizations you at least notionally support. Maintenance.
So much maintenance.
And there are important things in your life too. And they can sometimes get lost in the bullshit.
There are people on the internet who make a career out of yak-shaving. Refining the prefect "workflow." Curating their Zettelkastens and PKMs and blogging about it. I don't know what they really get out of it, other than the joy of tinkering with a complicated machine, which is not to be under-appreciated.
So the epiphany was that it makes sense to have some context-dense data structure in your machine that your AI can look at to figure out what's important to you, even if it's bullshit.
The "everything bucket."
I've got Eagle Filer and DevonThink on this machine. I've made half-hearted attempts to use them from time to time, many times, over the years. They've never really appealed to me. They seemed like more work than they yielded in value.
A few years ago I started a Tinderbox file called Captain's Log, which was mostly an effort to learn more about Tinderbox, but also to give me a tool that kind of resonated with how I work. After a career in the navy, I have a natural affinity for a "log." A chronological record of stuff. Probably why I've been writing a "weblog" for more than 25 years.
In recent weeks, Captain's Log has been revealing itself to be more and more useful as I'm trying to keep track of the myriad details (bullshit) of building a house. And it's caused me to begin to modify Captain's Log and the way I interact with it. I've added a new prototype for phone calls. I didn't have one before because I seldom make phone calls, and I often screen the ones I receive. (If you're not on a "white list" your call goes directly to voicemail. If I'm expecting a call back from someone not on the white list, but temporarily "important," I turn off my focus mode and turn on the ringer.)
But now I'm making and receiving calls with some frequency, all related to the new house. I need some way to keep track of them, so new prototype log entry. It also occurs to me now that I need to figure out just exactly what this Phone app on MacOS can do for me.
There are automations that facilitate making log entries from Mail and Safari. I need to look at refining those. Previously, I'd just remain in Mail or Safari and review the log entry later, though I mostly failed to do that. Now I want to make the log entry from within whatever app, and then bring Captain's Log to the front so I can make annotations and tags and so on, in that moment.
I want to figure out a way to have the text of the email summarized and placed in the text of the log entry, along with any comments about it. It's easy enough to click on the link to the email and view it in Mail, but having the summary right in front of me might forego that necessity.
Having a local LLM that understands Tinderbox, will be very helpful I think. Not to create the Tinderbox automations, but to be able to draw inferences from the data recorded in it.
What I don't really understand, or have any insight into, is this idea of a "context window," how much data the front-end of an LLM can ingest to draw inferences from. I've got my old Groundhog Day blog all in one Tinderbox file. It's more than 900K words. I'm pretty sure it can't ingest that whole thing.
But if it knew how to work Tinderbox, it could, in response to a query, create a copy of the file, create agents to have Tinderbox gather notes that might be relevant, and that subset of data might fit within the context window.
I've got Groundhog Day, which runs from 2003 to I think 2009 or so. I did some blogging at Tumblr when Apple turned off their hosting service, and most of those posts are lost except for the ones I posted by email, which was a pretty cool feature. The Tumblr blog, Day of the Groundhog, I think it was called, was overtaken by social media, chiefly Facebook. And then something went awry with Tumblr and it compelled me to start the marmot, where I found my own hosting service and went back to using Tinderbox. Though those early days are pretty lean in terms of posts because I was still stuck in the social media quagmire.
But there's a lot of context about my life, what's important to me, where I've been and what I've done, in those Tinderbox files. I think it could be very valuable to have a tireless assistant who could mine those resources and help me surface some insights or memories.
The point is, having an "everything bucket," is a way of building context, and LLMs rely on context.
Kind of exciting. To me anyway.l Which is cool, because there isn't much that excites me anymore.
The beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailChipping Sparrow
Current Wx: Temp: 55.71°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 62% Wind: 3.49mphWords: 251
This is a test of a modified AppleScript for posting photos to the marmot. I sent a copy of the script in LM Studio to Gemma 4 26B A4B, the 26 billion parameter "mixture of experts" that only activates 4B parameters on execution. I asked it how to modify the script so that Tinderbox would become the frontmost app after the script ran.
It thought for a while. It thought fast enough that I couldn't follow it in the little stream of consciousness (I know that's going to make some people unhappy) it displays as it's working. I had the answer in a few seconds, and it recommended adding the "activate" command right after the tell application id "Cere" command. It brings Tinderbox forward if it's already running, opens it if it's not.
Worked.
The only limitation right now is that it doesn't make the document visible in the tab, unless it happens to be the relevant document. I have three documents open in Tinderbox all the time now. The marmot, Captain's Log and New House, and I switch between them all the time.
I could have tried the Gemma E4B model, but I wanted to see if 26B A4B worked. It does. I'm in the yellow on memory pressure, but it worked and it was pretty fast. Certainly fast enough to be useful.
Update: Ran the same prompt in the desktop Gemini app and the answer was the same and essentially instantaneous. It was, however, more verbose, offering unsolicited commentary.
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