A Study In Arches
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Let's be precious.
I got up early, which is to say, "late," so I figured I'd just go ahead and walk instead of screwing around on the computer. Still nice and cool, with fairly dry air, so I wore a sweatshirt with the vest and stuffed the E-PL7 in the vest pocket.
It wasn't a "brisk" walk, I wasn't trying to get my heart rate up, I did that yesterday. But it was faster than I normally walk carrying a camera on my wrist or a sling, so some exercise.
I love walking at this time in the morning because I encounter so few people and cars and no landscapers. I got to the clubhouse before sunrise and stopped and tried to take my time framing this composition. It's still not "perfect." I wanted less of a reveal on the right side of the middle arch so the top right of the curve would have blended into inner right vertical of the arch closest to the camera. I'd shift left and right, forward and back, changed focal lengths and got tired before I found it.
This is the last of six attempts, and the one where I noticed the newspapers in the frame and cleared them out. Got home and had breakfast and read the news and decided to screw around on the computer. But first I figured I'd try some in-camera black and white conversions. I don't have any particular aesthetic feel for black and white. I get that it's about tonality and texture, but I don't have any sort of feel for it.
I did a bunch of conversions editing the RAW in the E-PL7. One was a straight monotone conversion with the "neutral" filter. I added some contrast and filters as well. A couple more conversions and the color jpeg are up at Flickr, all straight out of camera. I liked this one the best. I'm pretty sure this is the one with +2 contrast and the red filter, gradation was normal so no lifting the shadows in camera. 34mm effective focal length, ISO 3200.
This is a "Silent Sunday" shot for Shelley.
✍️ Reply by emailAllegedly Edible
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Yesterday was a beautiful day. After screwing around with solar panels and taking a nap, I rode my bike to the garden and looked in on the tomatoes, peas and beans. Did some watering and wandered around with the Oly Stylus 1s.
This was over by the herb garden. I don't recall exactly what it is, but it's supposedly edible.
Took the long way home, so 10K on the bike yesterday, 5K on the walk.
Yesterday was a big exercise day for me, closed my Move ring for the first time in a long time. Felt good.
✍️ Reply by emailSocial Media Sucks
09:36 Sunday, 14 April 2024
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I don't care if it's Mastodon or one of the BigCos. It's like, "People are great, drivers are assholes." Frankly, I can even say the same thing about bicyclists.
You put someone behind some technology where they're isolated or insulated from the other people they are supposedly sharing this plane with, and they become their own worst selves. They become entitled, arrogant and selfish.
I don't miss it.
✍️ Reply by emailMovies: An Update
09:42 Sunday, 14 April 2024
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Just because Jack reminded me about movies...
We watched Batman Returns the other night, after watching Tim Burton's Batman not long ago. I don't think I ever saw Batman Returns before. I had no recollection of it, other than knowing that Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny DeVito starred in it. It was great! I think it was better than Burton's first Batman. Of course, then the wheels fell off.
I wasn't in the mood for television the other night, but Mitzi landed on Inside Man, which I hadn't seen in a long time. So I sat down and watched it with her. I'd forgotten how much I liked it. I'm a little confused about the final scene, but I'm getting used to being confused.
Argyle is up on Apple TV+, so I watched that last night. Enjoyed it very much. Kind of a mash-up of Barbie, The Bourne Identity, Kingsman and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Very camp. Loved the soundtrack.
✍️ Reply by emailThis Morning's Moon 4-14-25
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Tried this shot with the OM-3. Very quick on the compositing of the handheld hi-res shot. Handling of the 100-400mm zoom with the MC20 teleconverter mounted is a bit more challenging. Did some just handheld, this one with my elbows on the hood of the Mav.
The beat goes on...
✍️ Reply by emailThis Is Pretty Cool
06:55 Monday, 14 April 2025
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Watching the video is encouraging and inspiring. Not a bad way to start Monday.
✍️ Reply by emailSecret Chimp
09:21 Monday, 14 April 2025
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Anyone remember, Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp? I suppose that gives some people the sads, being an example of humans exploiting animals for their own trivial amusement. I get it. Kinda disappoints me too. Chimps belong in the forest doing chimp things, not on television making humans laugh.
We shall not speak of Trunk Monkey. ("Don't platform them, Rogers!")
Anyway, when I think of "link" my word-association network summons Lance and Mata Hairi before The Legend of Zelda, or Ted Nelson, or that Cerf guy. I'm a boomer, what can I say?
Well, Ted predates the Baby Boom, but Lance was on TV before I knew anything about computers, other than they can become sentient and kill humans (2001: A Space Odyssey and Colossus: The Forbin Project.)
All of which is an oblique avenue paved with non sequiturs to get to the point of this post: What's up with "links"?
Since we didn't have a theme for last week's Tinderbox meetup, and I'd been thinking about links recently, I posed the question in the meetup. I learned a lot about Tinderbox, but I'm still kind of ruminating on links and linking.
It seems like we use the word in different contexts, one of which is an interactive feature of the user interface, most often used as form of navigation or movement through a document. The other is as a kind of descriptive relationship between two notes or nodes, which may have a visual expression in a particular view of the relevant notes or nodes. This seems to be most valuable to people who prefer an expansive, two-dimensional layout of notes or nodes.
So one meaning of "link" is as a hypertext facility, indeed, the defining characteristic of what a "hypertext" is. I think. Many smart people have written about this stuff, and I haven't read much of it.
The other meaning is as a shared semantic element of two or more notes or nodes. This "shared semantic element" is probably best described as a "relationship." Something that connects them. Blinding glimpse of the obvious, no?
It is this other meaning that kind of intrigues me.
I believe Google's search "algorithm" assigned some meaning to the number of links to a particular web site as indicative of its value or authority. I believe technorati, if anyone remembers that, did something similar; essentially ranking weblogs by the number of other blogs linking to a particular blog. The idea seeming to be that those with the highest ranking had the highest value. (Because why would people link to them if they weren't offering something of value?)
I suppose that has some superficial merit, but it always seemed like bullshit to me. To some degree, the very act of assigning some other characteristic (or "attribute") to a web site ("node") on the basis how many "inbound" links it has seemed sketchy, because promoting that (in search results or in the technorati "Top 100") had the effect of adding even more inbound links for, well, reasons. Mostly stupid.
So that's kind of the WWW view of links and their value. They're not just for "navigation," (Netscape Navigator), their existence implies some extra intrinsic meaning which can be discerned by "the algorithm," or, as we used to call it, "counting."
Bullshit.
Maybe it's more sophisticated now, what with "search engine optimization" out there trying to proliferate links, and bots doing the same thing. Maybe they just don't "count" anymore. I think technorati is dead, I haven't checked, because I hated it when it existed, and it would only depress me to learn it was still a thing. Pretty sure it's not, social media ate it, like they did nearly everything else.
But then there's, "the graph." That's where "links" are "edges." (Pretty "edgy," right? Sooo edgy.) And that's where something called "graph theory" tries to discern meaning from the combinations and constellations of nodes and edges. That's the kind of shit going on when they "target" you with ads, or propaganda. "You may also like..." Because people with your particular array of edges likes these nodes over here, that you aren't currently linked with. ("Never end a sentence with a preposition, Rogers.")
But where does that fit in with PKM, personal knowledge management, not to be confused with the "old and busted" personal information management. Because "knowledge" is so much more valuable than mere "information."
Pfffft! I spit on your information! I am a serious person! You are a mere dilettante. Do not waste my time! I'm pursuing knowledge! It's all here in the graph! Can't you see it? Don't you sense its power? Are you not in awe of my hand-curated, PKM graph! (Don't get me started on zettelkasten.)
Jesus.
Cynical bastard, aren't I?
("We mock what we do not understand.")
The world runs on bullshit. I thought I might have been missing something in terms of "linking," because all those shiny PKM apps had their graphs and all their nodes and edges. I strongly suspect that most of this is just a fad.
I think boxes and arrows (maps) serve a purpose. They can help place ideas in a different context that may make them more accessible. John Snow and cholera. Probably never would have spotted those wells in a table! But I suspect that that particular insight was accessible in that context because it was part of an actual map!
Likewise with systems dynamics, flows, sources and sinks. Process diagrams, where disparate elements come together in an ordered sequence of some kind and feedbacks emerge.
Six degrees of Kevin Bacon is kind of interesting, or, rather, was kind of interesting. But what is the larger meaning? That everything is connected?
No shit. But once you're three degrees removed, what's the point? Unless you're a conspiracy theorist.
Information. Knowledge. Wisdom.
Much of this is performative. We live in an age of social media where we're all the stars of our own reality show. We have a "personal brand." We need to attract attention, so we flock to where the attention seems to be right now.
Is that wise?
Thales.
Know thyself.
Stick that in your graph and smoke it!
Today's rant sponsored by Bitter Old Man. Remember, if it's not better, get bitter!
That's my brand and I'm stickin' to it.
Carry on.
✍️ Reply by emailBetter Start Searching for an Alien Space Cloud
09:39 Monday, 14 April 2025
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Alert all Blue Blaze Irregulars in the tri-state area. Prep the jet car for city driving.
(IYKYK)
"No matter where you go, there you are."
✍️ Reply by emailPersonal Knowledge Management
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Just came in. Doesn't have a graph, but it does have an index, by God!
F=ma and you can't push a rope. Everything else is derived. But this elaborates on that a bit. Saves some head-scratchin'.
(Glad I started strength training.)
✍️ Reply by emailGettin' a New Crown
17:23 Monday, 14 April 2025
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The one that keeps coming off is over twenty years old. Did an x-ray to make sure the tooth was stable. Go back in a week to get a new crown.
Which, OBTW, may have something to do with why I'm cranky. Didn't get my afternoon nap!
Anyway.
The beat goes on...
(The beat that can be counted is not the beat.)
✍️ Reply by emailClouds
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Researching about the new house, warmer weather luring me outside, a grueling lower-body workout and getting sidetracked into investigating local LLMs, the marmot has been neglected.
This was the sky last night. It had been overcast for much of the day, but it was warm out so I spent some time outside and in the garage. It cleared up toward the latter part of the afternoon, and we sat outside on the porch just watching the clouds blow by and making some vitamin D whenever the sun appeared. It was very windy, which seems to be a regular thing around here. I've put two 15lb dumbbells in the grill to keep it from getting blown over. Seems to be working, but I'd rather have the weights for side raises.
Well, getting back to the when we last met, Brad the Builder came by on Saturday and we had a productive meeting reviewing the revised draft our designer had sent us. Brad recommended a change that will save us some money, going from 8" concrete cores to 6". It will also get us an extra 4" in both interior dimensions if we keep the same footprint, which we are. And we can use those inches. It nets out to 24 sq ft, but you can do a lot with an extra 24 sq ft.
Sunday we had a session with our trainer and focused on lower body, which I hadn't worked in a bit of a while. Oof! I probably shouldn't have done 30 minutes on the elliptical before the workout. I spent most of the rest of Sunday in the recliner, and my legs were so sore yesterday. Happy to do it though. I think you get the most benefit in overall health from lower body workouts in terms of the signals it sends to other systems in the body. You need to train your upper body for activities of daily living, like moving furniture, but it's your glutes that really tell your body that you're serious about this and it ought to get with the program. Or so I've read.
When I wasn't in the recliner, I was reading about running local LLMs. It seems like data center AI services are starting to really take off, and there will be some scarcity of compute in the near future. I've been mostly pleased with the results I've been getting exploring home construction in Claude, and I've held my nose and signed up for a month-to-month subscription with ChatGPT for comparing responses. (Claude seems better.)
But what about local LLMs? What are they good for? From my research I can confidently say, I don't know. But they seem like an area that is also rapidly progressing. I installed Apfel on my M3 MBP and used ChatGPT to figure that out, because it was a bit of an ordeal. Apfel gives you access in the terminal to Apple's Foundation model, which is a small LLM built into the OS. I got it working, but I haven't done much with it. It's the model that supports text summaries, and some other services in the OS. It also knows that Paris is the capital of France.
The rabbit hole led to other models like Google's Gemma 4, which comes in a number of sizes. I have a 24GB M3 MBP, which is notionally capable of running Gemma 4:26b, which is supposedly a fairly robust on-device LLM. I didn't get around to installing it yet because I started researching windows for the house, but I hope to get to it today or tomorrow.
My thought here is that cloud-based AI is going to be the most capable system for the foreseeable future, but cost and availability may become problematic. I may not need a frontier model that has been trained on everything, if I can get a model that can help me interpret data that is already otherwise available on the web. For the moment, it appears that 24GB of unified memory is barely sufficient to run something like Gemma 4:26b. I expect that situation to improve over time, where 24GB will be a robust system for hosting decently capable LLM; but for the near term, having something with a little more RAM headroom would probably offer a greater range of potential solutions and better performance.
All of that led to a certain amount of irrational anxiety, which I addressed by buying a refurbished M5 14"MBP with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD for $2K. (The 14" M3MBP I'm writing this with was $3K with 24GB and 2TB when I bought it a couple of years ago.) The M5 gets me a couple more cores, faster memory bandwidth an extra 8GB. The higher tier processors are just too expensive, in my opinion. Though if you consider the inflation adjusted prices of all the early Apple IIs I bought back in the day, they're probably comparable.
Anyway, I freely admit that I know next to nothing about AI and LLMs; but I'm getting the very strong impression that they can be a genuine asset in exploiting the capabilities of the computer they're hosted on, and as an aid to understanding data found on the web. I want to try to explore that possibility. I think the M3 with 24GB could probably do most of what I'd like to do, but I think I'd be bumping up against some frustrating limitations.
Probably a dumb idea, particularly in light of other demands on my income at the moment. Wouldn't be the first time I wasted money on something. Wise or foolish? I don't know. Maybe time will tell.
We had a productive meeting with the designer yesterday afternoon, and I'm still feeling pretty excited about the progress we've made. Mitzi has some concerns about the windows and the west elevation, which is supposed to be the highlight feature of the design. I'm pretty happy with them now. We'll see how that evolves over time.
We should get another draft tomorrow and then we'll meet again early next week to try and nail everything down. Perhaps that's a pun?
At least all this is distracting me from the unfolding catastrophe taking place before us. I only hope that the consequences don't impair our ability to get this project to completion.
In the meantime, the beat goes on...
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