My unsolicited opinion this morning on AI, speaking as a computer scientist who has spent the last year working on AI-based tools: there are some things that LLMs and neural networks are very useful for. The kind of things that companies are popularly promoting AI for are not those things.
A quick online interaction this morning reminded me of this Sony clock/radio I got as a kid probably in the late 80s. As far as I know it’s still kicking around our house somewhere and still works just fine.
Business trips seem like fun, but the days get long… left the hotel at 7:30 to head to the workshop. Workshop went until 5, then group dinner until 8:30, then drinks at the hotel with a smaller group. Not back to my room until 10:15pm. Need to be out for day 2 at 6:30 in the morning. Oof.
It’s Library Board meeting time! I’ve missed a few due to work travel… good to be back. Public libraries are special institutions that serve our communities with so much more than just books. They need our support.
John Gruber: How It Went
John Gruber wrote a really beautiful piece about his mother’s death, his father’s hope, and the election. As an author who writes mostly about tech, I can forget that John is, foremost, a great writer, not just a tech guy. I, too, lost a parent this year. I wish I could write as beautifully about my parents as John does here about his.
Well, it’s been a week. Haven’t said much here, mostly because I don’t really have my thoughts sorted yet. I am thankful to have a local faith community where I will be able to show up on Sunday and be built up. And then next week will be another week. Onward.
"Leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of His family..."
Chris Green writes about the communion of the saints and Jesus not just loving us but liking us. It’s all wonderful stuff and worth a read, but his last quote, from the late Russian human rights activist Alexei Navalny, is timely and worth quoting in full:
You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old, or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself. My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.
Amen.
Small Wonders: The Pixies Are In the Attic
This short piece on Small Wonders by Azure Arther titled “The Pixies Are In the Attic” just made a real mess of me.
It’s short enough I don’t feel like I can meaningfully quote from it here without reproducing the whole thing, so I won’t. Just go click the link and read for a couple minutes. So many feelings about the challenges of raising children into wonderful, amazing adults brought about by so few words. Amazing.
Low key, work appropriate costume this year.
Tonight’s movie: Death on the Nile (1978). Peter Ustinov sounding a lot like Prince John from Disney’s Robin Hood. David Niven. Mia Farrow. Angela Lansbury hamming it up. Jane Birkin. Maggie Smith looking for all the world like Tilda Swinton. A classic Agatha Christie story. Good fun.
Life’s too short for uninteresting books
Nick Hornby, writing over at Lithub, says something that I am finding increasingly true: as you get older, life is too short to spend time on bad novels.
I try to find works of fiction, I promise, but it’s like pushing a wonky shopping trolley round a supermarket. I constantly veer off toward literary biographies, books about the Replacements, and so on, and only with a concerted effort can I push it toward the best our novelists have to offer. I suspect it’s to do with age and risk. A bad book about, say, the history of Indian railways will inevitably tell you something about railways, India, and history.
Reading a bad novel when you are approaching pensionable age, however, is like taking the time left available to you and setting it on fire.
It’s no secret that I read lots of books. For a long time my reading strategy has been one book at a time, in completionist fashion. Once I’ve put the effort in to give it a try, why not finish it so I can add it to my reading log? But more and more I pick up a book, almost always a novel, get a few chapters in, and decide I just can’t be arsed to finish it. So back it goes to the library. (Or, rarely, it gets resold to the used book store. Though I very rarely buy fiction any more when it can be borrowed instead.)
I’m at the point where my “to read” bookshelf has books that have been sitting there so long that I am no longer interested in the topics that were apparently interesting to me when I bought them. It feels like an entire next level of giving up to just throw those books in the resell pile, but, well, I’m getting older. Life’s too short to spend time in uninteresting books.
Today the blog turns 20
Twenty years ago today, October 29, 2004, my friend Geof set me up a Wordpress install on his server and sent me the keys to login. I wrote a hello world post and the rest is history. 20 years and 1477 posts later, I’m still at it. The URL has changed a few times. The original install was a shared site on rmfo.com/blogs. Then I grabbed thehubbs.net, thinking some of my family members would also want to blog. (None of them did more than once or twice.) But then in December 2007 I registered chrishubbs.com and I’ve been here ever since. (In early 2024 I migrated from Wordpress to micro.blog. I’m still very happy with that choice.)
My early posts set the tone for repeated themes over the years: a little bit of politics, a lot of music, theological rumination, and books. So many books. If I have a favorite post format, though, it’s probably bullet points. Sometimes you just need a post format to let you do a random brain dump, and then see how those random bits weave together.
There have been plenty of changes over that time, too. Shifts in political views. Going from one kid, to three kids, to two of those kids growing up and heading out. Going from a Baptist church to a church plant] to a Free Church to a little online church community, to finally the Episcopal church. Made lots of friends. (Often forgot to tag them.) Lost some, too. (RIP, Geof. I miss you.) Added family members, lost family members. It’s not all change, I guess. Through it all I still have the same wife, still live in the same house, and still have the same employer. All blessings.
I’ve never had an overarching philosophy for my blogging; I just write about things that interest me. I find the process of writing to be helpful for me to pull my thoughts together. If I can take the thoughts rattling around in my head and organize them into something that holds up when written down, maybe then I’ve really got something. I blog in spurts. I’ll write a post a day for four or five days in a row when the topics are flowing, then I’ll go dormant for a month. I’ve tried writing series (e.g. on NT Wright’s Surprised By Hope and positive politics), but usually struggle to complete them.
I’m happy to have maintained a presence online for two decades, under my own name, with content that I own. The internet has gone through so many changes in 20 years, but it turns out that a self-owned site with your own domain will let you stick around regardless of how the dominant platforms change. I’d recommend it. I hope to keep writing. If I’m still around 20 years from now it’ll be time to write another summary.
Had a really lovely time last night eating dinner at some new friends' house. Sat around and talked until way too late for this old guy. This morning: need more coffee. Also: can’t wait to do it again.
Marilynne Robinson on Community and Absence
Posting this quote from Marilynne Robinson here just so I have it at hand for later use:
To speak in the terms that are familiar to us all, there was a moment in which Jesus, as a man, a physical presence, left that supper at Emmaus. His leave-taking was a profound event for which the supper itself was precursor. Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, which Jesus promised and has epitomized, is, at a human scale, a great reality for all of us in the course of ordinary life.
I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community. I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.
In full context, she’s talking about community with fictional characters and authors here, but this rings so true to me in a world full of online communities.
When I started my keto diet back in January, I still really wanted some kind of purchasable breakfast option for days when packing two meals didn’t work. Turns out you can order a Chick-fil-a grilled chicken filet with egg and cheese on top. I’ve eaten a lot of them this year. Still tasty.
2024 Reads: Moonbound by Robin Sloan 📚
Well, this was delightful. Hints of Monk & Robot as well as Narnia. So imaginative.
My daughter is soon to need her own car, and one option is to give her my RAV4 and find something else for me. Looking around, though, not sure there’s any current car I’m too excited about. Figure I’d best just keep driving what I’ve got!
Visitor underneath our bird feeders tonight.
Cleaning up cast iron cookware with SCIENCE! (Ok, it’s an electrolysis tank.)
Just got an email from the library that I have a book available to pick up. I don’t remember putting it on hold, but it looks like a good book, so I’ll trust my past self on this one. 😂