Noise Between Stations

  • Fewer False Dichotomies

    When I wrote To be a Scribe in 1492 I only thought of it as analogy, as if to say: it is highly difficult to both imagine a new future and to overcome our anxiety to be accepting of a new future.

    Another interpretation of my post is that we were forced to make a tradeoff: beauty for efficiency. Printed books, while spreading knowledge far and wide, are simply not as beautiful as hand-scribed books.

    Funny enough, we don’t need to make that tradeoff anymore. Here’s an AI-generated image of To be a Scribe in 1492 in Carolingian minuscule:

  • Our Short Attention Spans are Now So Useful…

    …as we dodge from process to process, watching agents and robots work.

  • Watching agents and robots work

    …the lines of code scrolling by, the images processing, the arms washing dishes, the bot rolling over to serve you a drink… it’s June 3, 2026 and I’m wondering if this is what work will be like in the future: prompting and watching, prompting and watching. Because it’s starting to feel like that now.

  • Navigation as Home Page

    This is wonderfully simple in a “Don’t Make Me Think” way. And it must silence all the arguments about what to put on the home page!

    https://hfbk-hamburg.de/en

  • To be a Scribe in 1492

    In the mid-1400’s movable type printing catalyzed an explosion of human knowledge: the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, political revolutions, standardization of law, language, & education, and egalitarian access to public discourse.

    But to people who made books by hand in the 1400’s – monastic scribes, university copyists, and manuscript illuminators – movable type was a scary, existential change.

    Some scholars distrusted the flood of books. There are records of intellectuals worrying that cheap printed books would spread errors, nonsense, and shallow learning. The complaint “too many books are being published” appears almost immediately after printing becomes widespread.

    Scribes sneered at print as cheap and ugly. They criticized paper as an inferior long-term medium compared to parchment.

    In cities such as Paris and Venice copyists petitioned authorities for protection, or complained about printers undercutting them. 

    Some scribes became early print entrepreneurs. Manuscript illuminators started decorating printed books. Scribes became proofreaders, editors, type designers, or printers themselves. A few monasteries even operated presses.

  • Maybe AI Will Be Nicer?

    If the trees and birds could talk, maybe they would prefer that artificial intelligence take over from humans?

  • AI as Augmentation

    There’s so much fear and hype around us losing our jobs to AI that we’re not hearing about the quiet wins. In my case, building a product, my AI use isn’t replacing anyone, it’s augmenting my abilities. I can do the research (and enjoy it) and so won’t pay someone else to do it, but doing it with AI is much faster. I can create the financial model and so won’t pay someone else to do it, but using AI is so much faster.

    I’m reminded of Apple’s Knowledge Navigator video from 1987. We haven’t quite caught up to it, but we’re very close and could probably build that today.

  • Learning to cook…

    …is not learning to follow recipes, I now realize. Yes, one can lead to the other. I learned a little about how to cook via my Italian family. By “learning to cook” I mean how to physically prepare foods, how to heat them, how to flavor them i.e. techniques. With that knowledge I could easily prepare new recipes, and then informally learned more techniques in the context of learning more recipes.

    But it seems that in the usual parlance that “learning to cook” means learning to prepare recipes, and people start there. It’s not easy or obvious that certain food can be heated in certain ways and flavored in certain ways, and how to mix things in proportion, etc. So without a recipe they are clueless.

    Therefore, in my ideal world all cooking classes would start with a piece of food and why you cut it a certain way and why you heat it a certain way and how you flavor it a certain way, and then repeat with other, complimentary foods, combining foods into meals, and so on. And somewhere at an advanced stage cover, btw, how to document all this in the form of a recipe.

    It is, incidentally, how I would teach music as well.

  • Girgentana

  • Maybe Also What AI is Good For Now

    While Paul Ford recently argued that AI might best be used “…to clean up the mess made by the old technology,” Josh Clark argues that the biggest opportunity is to, “elevate design through invention rather than replace it with automation.”

    Paul’s agency primarily offers technology services, and Josh’s agency primarily offers design services. So maybe we just want AI to help us continue to put food on our tables.

  • How Hi is Too Hi-Fi?

     “Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment”–Alan Parsons

    I consider myself both a musician and an audiophile. I was hooked on good equipment around the age of 14 when I heard my friend Robert’s older brother’s system. I don’t remember the amp, but he played Talking Heads and King Crimson on a Technics turntable and, most impressively, a set of Walsh Ohm speakers which are omnidirectional and sound astounding. Reviewers still choose them as their favorite speakers 40 years later.

    When I decided to move to Europe I sold off almost all my audio equipment, either because it wouldn’t work on 230V or I was curious to try something new. As the digital world becomes more wonderful and oppressive, I feel the desire to retreat back into the analog. So I converted my father’s 1970’s Sansui 1000x receiver to the new voltage and bought a Rega P1 turntable and Dali Oberon 5 speakers.

    Why those components? Because they sound great by normal people standards. They definitely don’t sound great by audiophile standards. Once you’ve spent, say, over 2000 bucks on a system, it’s able to reproduce audio with a certain clarity that has a certain sound, a sound that tells my brain to listen to the characteristics of the sound, to listen to the equipment. But that’s not what I want to listen to, at least not now.

    Spending about 1000 bucks I think is the sweet spot. The turntable was a great deal at 350, the speakers also a great deal used at 400, and if I was buying an amp I’d pick up a Wiim Ultra for 400. That will sound hi-fi without sounding too hi-fi.

  • Maybe What AI is Good For Now

    Paul Ford advises: “The first use of this new technology should be to clean up the mess made by the old technology.” e.g. fix the data errors, do the data migration, make the website accessible, eliminate the PDFs. For consultants, that’s definitely a place they can reliably deliver value.

  • I’m Predicting Trump Won’t Finish This Term

    …if only because of his age (79), the stress of the job, and the physical demands, such as traveling to China.

    There’s a great chart on Wikipedia showing lifespan and time in office for all U.S. presidents. While it’s not unusual for recent presidents to live into their 90’s, Reagan and Biden are the only other presidents to spend their 70’s in office, and Biden’s health wasn’t good.

  • Experimenting with Guitar Over Maracatu Beats

  • The Coming Insurance Crisis

    Just capturing this prediction for the future…

    As climate change leads to more frequent and powerful weather events—at the moment I’m thinking about Hawaii’s $1B in flood damage—there will come a point where insurance companies, despite having culled policies and reinforced their re-insurance, will have to stop covering entire geographic areas that are otherwise commercially active and important, e.g. Hawaii.

    The government will step in to help somehow, but that won’t be sustainable given the scale and frequency of losses. Unless politicians somehow hoodwink the vast majority into paying for a minority that insists on living and working in disaster-prone areas. New Orleans and parts of California will be the test cases, and eventually Miami etc.