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    🚀 I’ll never stop blogging: it’s an itch I have to scratch – and I don’t care if it’s an outdated format | Simon Reynolds | The Guardian

    I miss the inter-blog chatter of the 2000s, but in truth, connectivity was only ever part of the appeal. I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel _zero _responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.

    “Ramble” is the right word. When blogging, I can meander, take short cuts and trespass in fields where I don’t belong. Because I’m not pitching an idea to a publication or presenting my credentials as an authority, I am able to tackle subjects outside my expertise. It’s highly unlikely I could persuade a magazine to let me write an essay comparing Bob Fosse and Lenny Bruce, or find a thread connecting Fellini’s Amarcord, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Jacques Tati’s Playtime. (…)

    Freedom and doing it for free go together. I’ve resisted the idea of going the Substack or newsletter route. If I were to become conscious of having a subscriber base, I’d start trying to please them. And blogging should be the opposite of work. But if it’s not compelled, blogging is compulsive: an itch I have to scratch. And for every post published, there are five that never get beyond notepad scrawls or fumes in the back of my mind

    I think I have read, even shared, this piece before, but I just revisited it thanks to David Enzel and it resonated again with me, so here it goes.

    #tech #eng

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    I really wish I could invite a few of you for lunch. This ground meat-red pepper-green-pepper-tomato sauce spaghetti smells quite good.

    Spaghetti with tomato and meat sauce sits in an orange pot on a stove. Español: Espaguetis con salsa de tomate y carne reposan en una olla naranja sobre una estufa. Euskara: Tomate eta haragizko saltsa duten espagetiak laranja koloreko eltze batean daude sukaldeko plakan. #eng #nice

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    Scary.

    A metallic plate on a red base, holes and slots resembling a face. Spanish: Una plancha metálica sobre una base roja, agujeros y ranuras que asemejan una cara. Basque: plaka metaliko bat oinarri gorri baten gainean, aurpegia irudikatzen duten zulo eta ranurak ditu. #eng

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    Scared.

    A red plastic cut out with a face-like design. Una pieza de plástico rojo con un diseño que parece una cara. Plastikozko pieza gorri bat, aurpegi itxurako diseinua duena. #eng

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    Posting a picture after uploading it using @jarrod’s uploader and AI alt text shortcuts. #eng

    A grayscale sketch of a figure with floral elements, possibly a person with flowers, depicted in a loose, impressionistic style on a textured background. Spanish: Un esbozo en escala de grises de una figura con elementos florales, posiblemente una persona con flores, representado en un estilo impresionista suelto sobre un fondo texturizado. Basque: Lore-elementuekin marrazki grisezko bat, agian loreekin pertsona bat, estilo impresionista laxoan irudikatuta, texturadun atzealde batean.

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    US Supreme Court reconsiders longstanding doctrine on agency power - Financial Times

    🚀 US Supreme Court reconsiders longstanding doctrine on agency power Liberal justices argued that agencies’ experts, rather than judges, were often best placed to craft rules. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that striking out Chevron could turn judges into policymakers. “There’s a real separation of powers danger here,” she said. “I’m worried about the courts becoming uber-legislators.” If the Chevron doctrine were overturned, rules “are much more likely to be invalidated by a court, and so the agency will have to be much more careful about which options to choose and how it selects between various possibilities”, said Jonathan Masur, professor at the University of Chicago’s Law School.

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    The Good Ones

    www.youtube.com/watch

    #eng

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    If a human does it – Manu

    🚀 If a human does it – Manu Except that if fucking Disney were to “just take inspiration” and steal designs from smaller artists we’d all be enraged, and for good reasons. So please, cut the bullshit. Train your goddamn AI on whatever you want, steal all the content, but at least be honest and feel some shame. What can I say, I usually like everything Manuel writes. This is the case, too.

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    I believe that requesting ChatGPT to “rewrite it in proper English” is proving to be an instructive experience for me, albeit frustrating. I should be capable of improving my writing skills on my own.

    This is the original text I wrote: I think asking ChatGPT to “rewrite in proper English” is teaching me a lot. It sucks, too. I should be able to write better myself.

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    True Detective, Night Country

    I really enjoyed True Detective’s comeback, episode 1 of season 4, dubbed “Night Country”. Main characters are Liz Danvers, police chief, played by Jodie Foster, and Evangeline ‘Gi’ Navarro, Trooper, played by Kali Reis. They both play really interesting rols, strong confident women. I think Peter Prior, a police rookie, played by Finn Bennett, is going to be a good one, too. And above all, the great Fiona Shaw is a great addition to the drama.

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    Today I have not advanced one inch towards this week’s deadlines, I have taken upon myself three new commitments and I still have 30 emails to answer. Something needs to change.

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    I’m a LaunchBar guy. I tried Alfred for a while. I even used it alongside Launchbar for a few months. Now the winds from the sea bring me songs filled with praises for Raycast. And I may try it some day, yet I know I’m a helpless LaunchBar guy.

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    One thing led me to another, while I plan the week, so I wanted to share this mix by Joumana with you. It made me happy.

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    Ladies and gentlemen, I give you George Sakellariou playing Take Five on the guitar.

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    Nina Zumel on alternative search engines

    🚀 20240114 | Short Thoughts But I from all these articles, and the associated comment threads, I’ve found a lot of alternative search engines, and I tried a few. I’ve started using Startpage as my Google proxy, for more anonymity. I’ve found that the results are not the same as directly querying Google, but they are pretty good and sometimes better (less sploggy, even). DuckDuckGo and Startpage/Google are still my go-tos, but I’ve added a few more back-up engines, too:

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    My Blogroll page is small and personal, but I’m happy with the gradually growing collection of websites it contains.

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    I can’t stress enough how much I like the app Callsheet by @caseyliss@mastodon.social. The movie database I’ve always wanted, in a wonderful, easy to use and pretty app. No spoilers, no cheating, no adds, no BS. Just a terrific film and TV information hub. Please, do yourself a favor and check it out.

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    Tell me your life is sad without telling me your life is sad. I’ll go first.

    I want to learn to play D&D, which should make me a proper nerd. But I don’t have friends to play with. What level of nerd does that make me.

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    Ladies and gentlemen, I give you one Jackal.

    And, of course, here’s THE Jackal.

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    🚀 The web is yours | James' Coffee Blog

    There is one more question to answer: how do you start a website? I have a few recommendations.

    1. Read the 32-Bit Cafe “Creating Your Own Website” guide.
    2. Read the IndieWeb Getting Started (“Get Your Own Site”) guide
    3. Join a Homebrew Website Club meetup and ask how you can start building your own website.

    No coding is necessary to build your own website.

    What platform should I use, James? That is a personal question, but I have a few recommendations:

    • Micro.blog (no coding required)
    • WordPress (no coding required)
    • omg.lol, a tool that has many tools to create websites that you can use with no coding experience. You can make link pages, blogs, and more!
    • Neocities, a free place you can publish HTML sites. There are over 700,000 websites hosted on Neocities.
    • Make your own website with plain HTML (for new coders)
    • Make a website with a site generator like Eleventy (for coders who know a bit about HTML and JavaScript.

    The web is yours.

    We live exciting times again. And James makes excellent points to add up to the ever growing conversation: own your space in the web and come out to the world from the place you build yourself. #tech #eng

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