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100days
Every article tagged 100days across the Atmosphere.
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stopping 100 days
Almost a month ago I wrote about the slow decline in frequency of my attempt at a hundred days of blog posts. I think, given that I'm down to a less-than-weekly cadence, I cannot call this a hundred days project in earnest any longer. In the spirit of "learning in the open" and being honest about failing and doing things poorly I thought I'd officially declare that I'm throwing in the towel.
I'm not terribly torn up about this - if you've been reading, you are well aware that it's been a hell o100daysquitting
Rationality and Doubt
I've been reading Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason. It's a bit surprising I haven't read it before, given my whole deal, but I'm glad I'm finally getting to it. The book is primarily concerned with the ways that the rigid logic of computers reinforces the allure of behaviorism and physicalism (as well as making it easier for a certain type of compulsive person to come to conceive of themselves as godlike). The logic is thus: at its lowest level, a Turing machine is a symbolic 100daysPhilosophy
I don't like being on the computer anymore
I quit social media again. I do this every few years, deactivating or deleting accounts or abandoning platforms entirely after either the platform itself becomes too evil for me to justify my presence on it or I just see a post or a trend so bad that I decide being online is just bad for me. This time I just saw a Bluesky reply argument that was so stupid I decided to deactivate my account immediately. Bluesky has a bit of a problem with constant context collapse: leftists and irony posters are 100dayspersonal
State of Nature
Graeber & Wengrow's Dawn of Everything opens with a discussion of the (admittedly one-sided, since Hobbes had been dead for a a century) debate between Hobbes and Rousseau on the state of nature: the way humans are in the absence of society. Hobbes holds that humans are, by nature, in a state of war against all others: in the absence of a social contract or bodies to enforce it, everyone's only incentive is to seek their own benefit. Rousseau contrasts this with an Edenic vision of true freedom,100daysPhilosophy
So Far It's All Still AI
People online collectively lost their mind yesterday over this video a Reddit user generated with Google's Veo 3. It's built with Google's new multimodal model, Veo 3, that can do video and audio from a prompt or a source image. Depending on who you talk to, this is the newest frontier in hellish AI slop and/or the future of video content writ large. I try to avoid goalpost-moving too much, so I'll be the first to admit this is wild. As a flashpoint moment it's comparable to the original Dall-E 100daysai
If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Poorly
It feels appropriate that in sitting down to write this I intended to reference something I read recently and realized I had forgotten to bookmark it. I have been trying to be better about keeping a "second brain" with Pinboard and Obsidian but I still forget to bookmark things, forget to write things down, lose them somewhere in the sea of tabs and browsers and devices that are a part of my daily life. I have always aspired for this site to be something like Simon Willison's blog - a constantly100dayspersonal
I just want people to not have to be so afraid
Every now and then I come across something that reminds me how deeply out of touch I am. This week it was this trend piece about West Village TikTok girls. Ultimately it is the same story that gets written once every few years: young people are terrible and they change neighborhoods for the worse. In other news the pope is Catholic.
The article made me think about this Brian Philips essay about the constant feeling of financial safety and comfort being out of your reach, a feeling that so many 100dayswhy-are-things-like-this
The Joys of Undercommitting
I terminated the lease on my art studio today. I feel pretty sad about it: I'm very fond of the space and its people, I've made good friends and cool work there, and especially while I was working from home it was great for my mental health in a lot of ways. But once I started working hybrid it became a lot harder to make it in - on my work from home days I wanted to like, do laundry and dishes, not schlep half an hour there and back - and once my mom got sick it became functionally impossible. 100dayspersonal
Mother's day
People talk a lot about milestones in the grieving process. The first month after someone dies, the first birthday you miss. I guess Mother's day is my first major one.
You don't really think about how losing someone can change your relationship to the calendar until it happens. The very existence of the holiday felt like a slap in the face this time. All these people rubbing the fact that their moms are still alive in my face.
Obviously this is not anyone's intent and I have no desire for peo100daysgriefposting
Who Is To Blame?
I think about responsibility a lot. Though the relevant muscles have atrophied quite a bit I did start out as a philosophy student after all. In a time when it feels to me like whatever threadbare moral fiber our nation used to have has eroded to nothing I wonder how much any one of us is to blame.
The thing about moral responsibility is that it necessarily requires agency. If it's not possible for us to have acted differently than we did, we can't really be blamed for our actions. If someone e100daysPhilosophy
The ChatGPT Cheating Crisis Was Inevitable
Once again I find myself writing about the latest AI outrage cycle, this one sparked by an NYMag article about the rampant abuse of ChatGPT in higher education. It should surprise no one that kids are using AI to cheat constantly and we are about to see a generation of functionally illiterate college graduates hit the workforce. Seems bad!
I feel obligated to point out that the article is a more than a little sensationalist and references a study claiming that 90% of students are using ChatGPT llmsai
Maybe this is enough
Lately I have been feeling what I think might be contentment. This is a bit of a weird thing to be feeling given the general state of affairs outside of my little slice of the world and I find myself second-guessing it pretty often but for the most part the ambient sense of crushing guilt and dissatisfaction that has accompanied me for most of my life appears to be significantly reduced.
About a year ago I set out to try and stop being so stressed out all the time. I stopped saying yes to so ma100dayspersonal
Reading/Playing/Watching, 5/5/25
Stuff I'm Reading
I'd rather read the prompt - great blog post about LLMs in a university environment. Nicely sums up a lot of my thoughts about LLM-aided writing, which is that using an LLM defeats the point! "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly." Write bad essays! That's how you learn!
Bizarro World - a 2007 essay on the competitive retro gaming scene, in which the author discovers his wife is the best Gameboy Tetris player in the world. Really wild to revisit a time before Twitch w100daysreading
Surely the Second Coming is at hand
I decided to revisit Yeats last night. I guess this is what you do on a Saturday night when you're in your 30s. It's getting more relatable as the gyre widens.
The strange thing about being alive at this time in human history is that I feel like I've been waiting a decade for things to start getting bad for me personally. Things have been getting worse for a while now. I am very aware that as the meme going around puts it we are already about three lines deep into the Niemoller poem and it's no100dayswidening-gyre
I don't really think we were supposed to work this much
I'm sick again today. I get sick a lot - always have as far as I can remember. I didn't exactly win the genetic lottery for immune systems and I am also not exactly a paragon of health.
I am lucky to have a job that gives me what is, for America, a pretty good deal in terms of paid time off. I accrue a sick day every month, I get 15 days of vacation time, and I get summer Fridays. A lot of people can only dream of being in this position. But then I look at, say, Austria, which mandates at minim100dayslabor
The Boring Stuff Is Worth It
I've spent the last few weeks setting up a Plex server on a Synology NAS drive and I have finally gotten it working reasonably well. I haven't set up the arr suite or whatever yet because I can really only tolerate spending so much of my free time debugging docker containers but I'll get there. This was a long and mostly tedious process, but now I have a self-hosted media library I can access anywhere through Plex.
I struggle a lot with making myself do stuff like this. If I'm not working on a 100dayssysadmin
Just Because It's Useful Doesn't Mean It's Good
Independent of yesterday's dive into a "useful" application of AI, discourse erupted on Bluesky over Hank Green saying he didn't think the "useless" critique holds water anymore. For the most part people are very angry at the perception of ceding any rhetorical ground to Big AI, which is a fair position to take. Green also put it in a fairly condescending "just asking questions" kind of way, which doesn't necessarily help his case. I don't love the phrasing but there is something to his point: p100daysllms
Research Models and the Future of Search
In my self-appointed role as moral and practical judge of artificial intelligence and its uses I have rarely come across a product that I didn't end up finding boring or uninteresting after its novelty wore off. Most base or chatbot models are unreliable. Code models can be nice for tabbed autocomplete or boilerplate but I usually don't find them very helpful in the context of the large, complex, and often legacy codebases I work with professionally. I believe people who say they've found ways tllmsai
Most people are just people
A hard thing to wrap your head around is that most people aren’t particularly bad or good. I mean I think most people would like to be good but it really depends on how they’re feeling that day or what else they’ve got going on. Like, I try to give cash to beggars in the street but I’m not usually going to go out of my way if I don’t have cash that day or I’m in a hurry or they rub me the wrong way. I’d like to think this doesn’t make me a bad person but then again I guess if I were genuinely co100days
Why This Isn't A Newsletter
Occasionally people will ask me why I have a blog instead of Substack (or a Buttondown, or whatever else is popular now). Ghost, the hosting service I use, is functionally designed to be an open-source version of Substack - I just disabled all the email functionality.
First, I don't actually like reading newsletters very much. Even though I have been making myself blog most days for the past few months I have very little desire to have someone else's writing in my inbox at a regular cadence. I 100daysblog
Touching peace
I've always had a fantasy about becoming a monk. I'm not wedded to a particular kind of monk, I just figure a life of peace and solitude dedicated to pursuing a relationship with God or internalizing the Four Noble Truths might be the thing that fixes me.
This is an idle thought that I have not seriously pursued. I love my little treats and abandoning all material attachments sounds hard. I assume I will be stuck in the cycle of samsara for some time yet.
All the different schools of thought o100dayspersonal
The Death of Learning
I've been thinking more about vibe coding lately and getting pissed about the whole concept. I think there's something deeply wrong with the mindset behind "prompt, don't read the code, don't think about it." I have written in the past about how artificial intelligence is a tool that accelerates the worst impulses of capitalism, and vibe coding is the latest iteration on what is possibly the one I hate the most: sacrificing understanding for efficiency.
Here's the thing. I like learning. I knowllmsdespair
Using lazy.nvim in VSCode on Windows
I've been using VSCode Neovim for a while, but had been irritated at the tradeoff of access to the VSCode ecosystem at the cost of losing my once-heavily curated .vimrc setup. Turns out you don't have to live that way!
A lot of doing dev work on Windows feels like making a Rube Goldberg machine to make it behave more like Linux, and this is not particularly different, but I do wish I'd moved faster to replicate my preferred IDE setup in VSCode. You really can have your cake and eat it too, sortvimvscode
Please Don't Call It A Metroidbrainia
I, like a lot of dorks with similar tastes, have been playing Blue Prince. It's a really well-designed mix of two types of games I love: Gone Home-style "walk around and find environmental clues" and deckbuilding. The cool conceit is that you're building a house, rather than a traditional deck of cards: every time you open a door, you're given a randomized pool of rooms to pick from, with the goal of finding the mysterious 46th room in a house you inherited from your uncle.
Blue Prince is fun, Videogames100days