D&F 2026-05-23

I love a long weekend. If I had my druthers, every work week would be four days, with three days of rest, but until we get a better policy for worker’s rights I’ll cherish the few holiday weekends we do get. On Monday I’m going to a bbq at my friend Haley’s and from what I’ve heard, the ribs will be absurdly good. The rest of my weekend will either be on the bike, watching the Giro di Italia, the Montreal Gran Prix, or The Burroughs (Stranger Things meets Cocoon). Sports are back, baby!

This week I’m also testing solar charging for my ebike. Between my induction stoves, ebike charging, and working from home, my small apartment’s electricity bill has been high for a while, and I remembered that I have a portable solar panel. Charging a big external battery at 30W is not the quickest way to handle charging a bike, but it’s cheaper! If I lived in a house, I could install solar panels on the roof and live mostly on that power, but sadly apartments don’t invest in that kind of progressive infrastructure.

Links

Last year I read my first JG Ballard novel, after seeing a number of adaptations of his work over the years. He’s a weird author. Not only is he writing about very post-modern topics and parsing through the challenges of capitalism, he also imbues everything with a psychosexual miasma that accurately reflects the motives of the horrid little men in charge of our current global order. His novels are not escapist in the least, but they are funny and strange in an entertaining way.

Here’s two apps I saw that seem fun:

• Piripiri, a picture-in-picture floating screen for any app on your Mac.\
• Outerline, a new writing app that combines simple markdown editing with a few neat touches. This is pretty close to a copy of my beloved IA Writer, so I’m not quite sure if there is a selling point yet, but I’m curious to see what kind of decisions the developer makes that set it apart, if any.

Recently, I read about micro forests, which are amazing and resilient alternatives to typical reforestation. Much like utilizing solar and wind power to support a more ecologically sound future, it’s also pretty clear we need to bring forests and nature back into our devastated urban landscapes to help with erosion and flooding. Trees are also pretty great at carbon sequestration—think of the opposite of data centers.

And on the topic of data centers, this essay in N+1 speaks to the absurdity of giving in to what many see as the distasteful inevitability of LLMs overtaking all creative work. I work in the tech industry, and have seen a few actual uses of LLMs in helping check for patterns, find bugs, and speed up some of the meta-work that we end up with in my industry. I’ve also seen relatively pointless LLM summaries of meetings, needless transcripts, and arbitrary usage goals that attempt to burn money in the hopes that something sticks:

An extraordinary amount of money is spent by the AI industry to ensure that acquiescence is the only plausible response. But marketing is not destiny. The simplest reason to refuse resignation is that resignation can only harmonize with the tech-industry narrative of AI inevitability. When we give in, we join the sales force.

And later,

We retain some power over the terms and norms of our own intellectual life. We ought to stop acting like impotence in some realms means impotence everywhere.

It also refers to a Thomas Pynchon essay I hadn’t read before, called Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite? in which he prophetically sees ahead 41 years to our coming crisis:

If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long.

It’s worth considering to what extent we’re culpable in further enshrining a vanishingly small number of rich white men to extract the value of all labor and joy from the world. What is the breaking point for our societies? In my dark moments, I fear we’ll largely roll-over and accept our fate as disposable and short-lived peasants; tilling the virtual fields for the TRT-infused billionaire tech fucks until we die of preventable illness. But, in my more lucid and hopeful times I remember there are more of us than them and our ability to collectively organize and resist their false inevitability will be our salvation. Or something. I honestly don’t see how capitalism survives the next fifty years of ecological disaster at the very least, but hey.

Closing

If you’re a Bay Area person, you should come see my pal Danny launch his third novel next month, and Craig Mod’s event in Asheville, NC if you’re up that way. It’s really fun to see people I know make things they’re passionate about that we all get to enjoy. I think one of the other antidotes to the dismay I feel when I consider the state of the US and broader world is to think about passion and community. It’s cliche, but relationships are one of the only things that I think matter in this world, and being in relation to smart and caring people feeds my heart. Since it’s a long weekend, I recommend reaching out to someone in your life and spending time on a project or hobby you love—I guarantee it will be worth it. And, until next month, keep on keeping on, space cowgirls~