Dan Finlay

Ironically: AI made me use more hand tools this week than I'd used any week in the last year. I had an LLM assist in laying out the CAD and cut list for a piece of furniture I wanted from a list of boards I had. OnShape's MCP is pretty awesome...

it’s funny because for all of IKEA‘s talk about selling things that can be reconfigured into other things, it’s very obvious they have not achieved that dream, but basic lumber, truss plates, and brackets do.

Ironically: AI made me use more hand tools this week than I'd used any week in the last year. I had an LLM assist in laying out the CAD and cut list for a piece of furniture I wanted from a list of boards I had. OnShape's MCP is pretty awesome...

I had to take down some redwood trees that were diseased, and had them milled on site a few years ago. It’s always exciting to get to reuse the things you’ve gathered, keeping it out of the green waste in this case, too!

Perhaps my most *substantial* takeaway from "You Can See Everything": There are apparently variable-frequency laser LEDs now? That's got to be huge for affordable spectroscopy. Maybe the time is coming for such a device to really exist.

But yeah, clearly her partner is at it again, and maybe it's just because I've been reading some Feynman but all that talk about variable-frequency laser diodes has me wanting to homebrew a Theranos.

Perhaps my most *substantial* takeaway from "You Can See Everything": There are apparently variable-frequency laser LEDs now? That's got to be huge for affordable spectroscopy. Maybe the time is coming for such a device to really exist.

I could almost see how a place like Stanford might be perfect for taking an extremely brilliant and compulsively optimistic person and turning them into a hype machine.

Perhaps my most *substantial* takeaway from "You Can See Everything": There are apparently variable-frequency laser LEDs now? That's got to be huge for affordable spectroscopy. Maybe the time is coming for such a device to really exist.

The film was great. It was perhaps frustrating to modern dispositions because it did not take an easy side. It's never fully dismissed that she may be some highly advanced manipulator, but it's also very explored that she may have some very peculiar neurodivergence...

So I gathered ~2 lbs of acorns from my local trees. There were just too many to not finally experiment with processing and eating them. First step is drying. I'm doing some sun drying, because my dang oven won't go below 175 (150F will permanently alter the starches).

One reason oaks are perhaps not considered often as a target for genetic engineering food supply is the slowness of the feedback loop. A mature oak can take 50 years to grow. So it might create an extremely stable and draught tolerant food source, but it's slow to experiment.

So I gathered ~2 lbs of acorns from my local trees. There were just too many to not finally experiment with processing and eating them. First step is drying. I'm doing some sun drying, because my dang oven won't go below 175 (150F will permanently alter the starches).

In his posthumous book "The Dawn of Everything", David Graeber wrote that the Ohlone people seem to have chosen acorn foraging as an alternative to agriculture, to avoid the need to slave like tribes further north chose to.

So I gathered ~2 lbs of acorns from my local trees. There were just too many to not finally experiment with processing and eating them. First step is drying. I'm doing some sun drying, because my dang oven won't go below 175 (150F will permanently alter the starches).

I wrote a sci fi short story in 2016 that covered this. The way we trust things is gradual and never complete. It has almost nothing to do with abstract concepts like “understanding”. blog.danfinlay.com/solomons-wak...

And then OF COURSE we all learn to trust things without understanding them. You eat things without understanding the supply chain every day, I say with certainty because you’re on the internet.

I wrote a sci fi short story in 2016 that covered this. The way we trust things is gradual and never complete. It has almost nothing to do with abstract concepts like “understanding”. blog.danfinlay.com/solomons-wak...

Dogfooding is a terrible name for it, on consideration: A person eating food meant for a dog is going to be applying human judgement, and potentially making changes that a dog wouldn't prefer.

So anyways, don't eat the false dogfood. Live the life you want to share.

Dogfooding is a terrible name for it, on consideration: A person eating food meant for a dog is going to be applying human judgement, and potentially making changes that a dog wouldn't prefer.

A person eating their own dogfood is the exact opposite of what people mean when they say "we dogfood our product". What you want to do is be your own actual customer, so you live your customer's needs, you don't fake them. You don't play the callous manipulator games.

Now that reddit is closing down public API access, it would be a great time for an ATproto reddit to emerge…

I think sometimes voting systems get a hard time because people will cite Arrow’s Theorem, like it’s proof that democracy can work. But does Arrow’s theorem really say something we can’t work around?

I think sometimes voting systems get a hard time because people will cite Arrow’s Theorem, like it’s proof that democracy can work. But does Arrow’s theorem really say something we can’t work around?

I think I could really compromise on “Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives”. 1. It’s mostly a problem of representative democracy, and might not matter as much if voters were able to vote on individual issues.