⚾️ For the first time in over a year I have a baseball game on in the background as I work. I hope to get by the with MLB “free game of the day” offering this year, rather than paying to subscribe to the season package. There was no free game for the season opener yesterday, though, so I’m watching a spring training game.

Today I was very happy to find a command line todo.txt app that works on Windows.

My wife and I started watching The Sopranos a few days ago, and we are hooked. Both of us watched the show sporadically while it first aired, but didn’t catch much of it. Back then, I subscribed to HBO only during free trials I received from switching cable providers after I moved, so you could imagine I didn’t catch that many episodes. Now we subscribed to HBO Max to watch something else, and are likely sticking with it for a long time now.

After a few evenings of work, I completed an update of my Simple Call Blocker app and submitted it to the App Store tonight. It feels good. Now I plan to start the revision of my other apps' website.

🎵 I’m enjoying the new album, Obviously, by Lake Street Dive. I think, though, that if I heard this album when I was a kid I would have hated it. My music tastes have broadened considerably since then.

After a few days of work, I just published my new, Hugo-based website for one of my iOS apps: Simple Call Blocker. The site is not as beautiful as I would have liked, but it is way better than it was, and now I have a framework I can use to add more content to it if I need to.

James Vincent reports in The Verge:

The best-known AI text-generator is OpenAI’s GPT-3, which the company recently announced is now being used in more than 300 different apps, by “tens of thousands” of developers, and producing 4.5 billion words per day. That’s a lot of robot verbiage. This may be an arbitrary milestone for OpenAI to celebrate, but it’s also a useful indicator of the growing scale, impact, and commercial potential of AI text generation.

The obvious industry target for auto-text is journalism. It is already being used there for sports reporting, and could probably be used for local government reporting too. There are other areas it will encroach on that are news-adjacent (think financial news or business book digest services like Blinkist), like education and entertainment.

I’m an auditor, and I think that, eventually, auto-text is going to destroy about 50% of our billable hours. Auditors spend a ton of time writing. We document our procedures. We record our work. We summarize our findings. We write reports for our clients. Making sense of all the work, both for our own understanding and for our client’s, for the sake of writing it down, takes a lot of time. Moreover, the simple act of typing it out and, especially, hyperlinking everything together so we support our conclusions, requires a lot of manual work. Some of this work is communicative, but a lot of it (like the hyperlinking part) is mechanical. Consequently, much of it is ripe for automation.

I think, though, that transforming this laborious and time-consuming writing process into something auto-generated by a bot would produce a lot more information but a lot less knowledge than we had before. You gain a lot more understanding how a company, business process, or control works by writing about it than by reading about it. Why? Because writing is thinking. To write well is mentally strenuous. It requires you to think how you would communicate an idea to someone else, notably someone else with a different perspective and different knowledge than you have. At the end of the writing process, you should understand your subject backwards and forwards and from all sides; you could probably describe it in a number of different ways; and you will likely remember the gist of it, and specific nuances about it, for far longer than you would if you had just read about it in a report.

The world won’t end, and few will shed tears, when AI writes audit reports and work papers. Audits cost money, and businesses mostly don’t think they benefit from them. If it makes the auditors less knowledgeable, however, side effects will develop, and those will be long-lasting. Knowledgable auditors help make good control environments possible, which leads to more stable and more solvent companies. Decreasing the understanding of auditors could make systems and processes more unstable and less trustworthy over time. Additionally, knowledgable auditors often move to the business side and go on to manage well-controlled organizations. While the auditor-to-manager career path will likely continue, such moves would not result in the same level of management quality if the auditors don’t have to think as deeply about what they are auditing as they did before the AI text-bots took over. Neither of these side effects bodes particularly well for the people the auditors and the audited companies (and their fancy AI) serve.

One inexplicable thing I discovered today was that the git repo for one of my iOS apps did not have a working remote defined. It was pointing to a repo on BitBucket that doesn’t even exist any more. What the heck I have I been doing with it over the past couple of years?

I am putting the finishing touches on the website I am rebuilding with Hugo. I hope to go live with it sometime next week. I forgot how much work there is in building a website—even when you are not coding its theme.

Today was mostly about family time and the Passover Seder. It was a great day.

I stayed up late last night drafting a new, Hugo-driven version of one of my websites. I went from having nothing at all built to having about one third of the site done in a couple hours. The result, I think, will be more plain (and maybe more ugly) than the existing site, but it will be less janky on mobile devices.

I sank a lot of time over the past week looking for a Hugo theme that is perfect for my needs, but I couldn’t find one. For the sake of achieving my simple goal of refreshing my tiny websites, I gave up the goal of visual perfection, and am driving forward with a theme that I think is OK that works well enough for me.

From my perspective, I want my site to be easier to maintain and add content. That is more important to me than having a site that looks really slick. My old websites don’t look slick anymore, anyway: No one is fooled by outdated HTML templates into thinking that my very niche apps are developed by a huge, sophisticated software corporation.

This is a short, short version of what happened to me over the past week when I decided to get organized.

1. Form a desire to organize my project files differently.
2. Discover the Johnny Decimal system.
3. Create a taxonomy for my files in a text file.
4. Start writing PowerShell script to switch folders based on the Johnny Decimal number
5. Start writing a PowerShell script to index all the Johnny Decimal numbers in my folder tree
6. Think about working with files from the command line more often
7. Install Midnight Commander for a command line file manager
8. Learn a lot of Midnight Commander shortcuts and customizations
9. Learn about Far Manager, which is a lot like Midnight Commander but works much better on Windows
10. Run into keyboard shortcut conflicts with Windows Terminal
11. Learn about assigning and removing keyboard shortcuts in Windows Terminal
12. Start thinking about using todo.txt from the Windows Terminal, because my TaskPaper file has been too big for months and is awful to work with
13. Tried to find a todo.txt command line app for Windows that works on my machine
14. Thought about writing my own todo.txt command line app using an old C# library I created

And…I still haven’t organized anything yet. 😅

I watched episode one of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier this week. It’s a show about two MCU characters I don’t particularly care that much about, so it wasn’t something I was really looking forward to, but I pay for Disney+ anyway and thought I may as well check it out. Reader, I liked it!

My first impression is that it looks like it cost a zillion dollars. Special-effects-wise, it looks on par with the Marvel movies. Based on that alone, I could see why Disney originally wanted it to premiere first, before WandaVision and whatever other Marvel shows are being developed.

My second impression is that I appreciated that it was trying to tell a Black story as well as a super hero story. I am not optimistic that Sam’s (The Falcon’s) family side story is going to be anything but predictable, but it is nice to see an attempt to give the character some grounding in reality. Race is an issue that touches everything in American life, unfortunately. In some ways, it would be disrespectful to Sam’s character and to the audience not to address that in some way.

I don’t have anything bad to say about the Winter Soldier part of the show, but it isn’t as interesting to me. I expect it to follow a predictable “antihero almost, but doesn’t quite, make good” formula, but maybe the writers will surprise me.

Predictability aside, I’m just glad to have something new and fun to watch.

I was thinking about creating a training presentation to help my coworkers with keyboards shortcuts, but was dismayed to see that our Lenovo laptop keyboards (which I never use, because I work from home and use external peripherals) don’t even have a menu key. Someone decided that Print Screen was more important, which may even be true, but it doesn’t help me make a good presentation for my coworkers. The menu key alternative, Shift+F10 is going to be a very hard sell, especially because F10 on the laptop requires the Fn key to be pressed, too.

I have gone from someone who did not use the menu key on my keyboard for 20+ years (since it was invented in the 1990s) to someone who can’t live without it (on my Windows at least). I made it a point to start using it a few months ago, and now I use it constantly. I recommend that all Windows users with an ANSI or ISO keyboard layout check it out. That key is positioned right underneath your thumb when you use the arrow keys.

🎵 “Canada’s Country”: I’ve been enjoying this laid-back playlist while I work. Honestly, I didn’t know Canada made country music. Unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly Canadian about it. It would be cool if there were.

People on LinkedIn still use a lot of #hashtags non-ironically. Who are they tagging content for?

Does anybody know if scheduled posts, posted from Ulysses, show up in the timeline? I think my 1:00 PM Eastern blog post did not show up in the timeline, but made it to my blog on time.

I was not I initially interested at all in the Snyder Cut of Justice League but I ended up watching it anyway, over two nights. I’m glad I did.

I thought the theatrical release of Justice League was pretty bad, but not quite as bad as the professional movie review consensus was. I figured that the Snyder cut must be better, but I was surprised at how much better it is. Granted, it still isn’t good. It doesn’t fix its pacing problems. It still is not as brisk and pleasurable as the best of the Marvel movies. It doesn’t tell a cohesive story, but it also crams in too many story lines for a non-DC fan to keep track of. It still has some dumb script problems, such every single part of the nonsensical museum height/terrorist bombing blot in the opening Wonder Woman scene, that could have been solved by editing a few sentences of dialog. While not exactly good, it is a good bad movie now. Its reach often exceeds its grasp, but it offers a lot of interesting material to people who are already fans. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the kind of movie that would bring a lot new fans in.

It is now very clear to me that Zach Snyder’s vision was dark and wild and weird—definitely too much of all of those things to launch a successful franchise—but Joss Whedon’s contributions were just awful: tasteless, asinine, nonsensical, and insulting to the audience. Whedon’s dialog (notably Superman’s and The Flash’s) and the character moments he created, like the race between The Flash and Superman, are embarrassing to watch and make the characters seem stupid. Snyder’s cut simply had better dialog for them. Simply getting rid of the random people that Whedon put into that nuclear wasteland Russian city—the one that existed in the movie only to be destroyed in a bout of cinematic excess—made the climax bearable. Who needs to worry about a family who shouldn’t be living in a nuclear wasteland anyway when the entire world is already at stake? Whedon really did screw up that movie.

I think that the Snyder Cut works very well for fans of the comics, especially fans of the “what-if” versions of all the famous characters. Some fans, like me, believe that comic book characters are archetypes, and really can be anything, and no representation of them is truly canonical. The grim, dark version of the Justice League is an interesting thought experiment, one of many worth exploring. It is not something I ever felt hung up on as “not the real version” of Superman or whatever. The Snyder Cut isn’t the real version of the DC Universe to me, because nothing is. It’s all just ideas and entertainment anyway.

I have been using AutoHotKey for many years, and I never thought until today to map Windows+Q to quit the active app and close the active window. That creates something very similar to Mac’s Command+Q shortcut to Windows.

The default Windows keyboard shortcut for quitting an app is Alt+F4, which is a two hand operation for me. Note that in AutoHotKey, you don’t even need to send that key command; you can use the WinClose function instead:

#q::  
WinClose, A  
Return  

One of the best things Apple has ever done with their support of keyboard shortcuts was to pretend that function keys (F1 through F12) don’t exist.

Chiam Gartenberg reports in The Verge:

At the company’s “Engineering the Future” announcement today, Gelsinger announced plans to outsource more of Intel’s chip production to third-party foundries; a $20 billion investment into two new fabs in Arizona; and a new branch of the company called Intel Foundry Services, which will see Intel’s foundries produce chips for other companies.

Intel has had an awful decade, having missed out on smartphone chips and having stalled out at their 14nm process for years. Still, it is a strategically important company for my country, and I have to ill will toward it, even if I don’t prefer their products right now. I would love to see them become competitive again.

The idea of Intel fabbing chips for other companies is a big deal. Intel has never done that before. It seems to me like it could be the first step of spinning off that part of the business into its own company, and focusing on process shrinks in ways that the fully integrated Intel could not before.

Josh Berlinger of CNN reports today that the Colorado attack is the 7th mass shooting in 7 days in the US.

It seemed like there were periods in recent years in which we had a deadly mass shooting in the national news at least every week, if not several times each week. There has been something of a pause due to COVID, for understandable reasons. Unfortunately, we seem to be un-pausing now. Sadly, mass shooting rates in the U.S. seem to be getting back to normal.

But what is “normal?” It is actually hard to know what is normal for gun violence in the U.S. Here’s an interesting factoid from the article about my country’s gun problem:

It’s unclear how this number of mass shootings compares to an average week in the US.

Though some official gun violence data is available, the US federal government does not have a centralized system or database to track firearm incidents and mass shootings nationwide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks some gun violence data, nearly 40,000 people were killed in incidents involving firearms in 2019.

The article omits the reason for this: There are actually laws against government agencies, such as the CDC, accurately tracking gun violence. That’s just stupid and self-defeating. While dying due to gun violence is incredibly unlikely, statistically speaking, it is also completely unnecessary. We should treat all gun deaths as preventable and unacceptable. Only then can we have the mental and moral clarity to do something about it.

🎧 on, and getting into the ⌨️ zone now. Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed up till 1:30 last night, but that’s what ☕️ is for, isn’t it? 😅

It is amazing that Ulysses supports posting to Micro.blog now. I love the functionality, and its inclusion definitely cements Ulysses as my only writing app on iOS and macOS at this point.

Now let’s bug the Ulysses team to do some other cool things:

1. Implement publishing workflows, by which publishing a sheet can automatically trigger the sheet to be tagged with a keyword, be moved to a particular folder (such as “published”), or call an iOS Shortcut.
2. Make every command accessible via a hardware keyboard shortcut. (I’m thinking mainly of the iPad version.)
3. Add a command palette, like Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text have.
4. Support Mermaid, a text-based markup language for creating flowcharts, in fenced code blocks, like Typora does.

I have been feeling behind at work, even though I am probably no more behind in my work than anyone else I work with. It’s been a struggle the past few days. I think I am pulling out of it now, but I’ve had to work overtime to get here.

I was bummed to find out that my favorite regular expressions editor for the Mac, Oyster, completely disappeared from the App Store (and it seems, the Internet). I wish I hadn’t deleted it from my old MacBook Pro, because RegEx is hard, even if you have used them off and on for decades. After failing to find something helpful for free, I had to buy another app (Patterns) which did the trick.