If you are reading this over here on Micro.blog, you should probably be reading it at @chipotle@mstdn.social instead!

If nothing else, I’ve improved the look of my blog on tablets and phones. I gave up on footnotes—Zola’s markup for them is terrible—and went to margin notes, which (hopefully) move inline on phones.

Creative writing and AI’s failure modes: a too-deep dive into AI “novel writing” and what it tells us about generative AI’s future coyotetracks.org/blog/ai-w…

There was an Indieweb-style cross-posting service people were talking about here on Micro.blog a few weeks ago, free with an improved paid service, but I can’t remember the name. Ring any bells with folks?

I love NetNewsWire’s speed, but I tried Reeder again after a couple years away, and fell back in love with its look. Aesthetics really do matter. (And Reeder is a much better Pocket client than Pocket, too.)

I’ve been idly wondering whether I could be a freelance technical writer without resorting to Upwork, picking up work from indie software companies that need documentation writing/editing. Pipedream? Hmm.

There are a total of eight smooth jazz songs:

1. The one with the sax
2. The other one with the sax
3. No, the other other one
4. The one with the drum machine
5. The one with both the sax and the drum machine
6. The one trying to be funky
7. The one with the weirdly subdued vocals
8. Winelight

Was it just me, or was there a noticeable lack of Stage Manager in any of the new iPad presentation video from yesterday?

Judge the AI that exists, not the AI you imagine coyotetracks.org/blog/ai-t…

I’m fortunate to have a good 401(k) and “safety net” account from my last job, but I’m kind of angry it’s made me care about the stock market.

After many years of using SuperDuper!, I am trying Carbon Copy Cloner for the first time. Wait, backup programs can look modern? Be this user-friendly? What black magic is this?

Setting up Micro.blog as my “syndicate nearly everywhere” service lets me revive my Medium account without effort, which is good, since I wouldn’t bother otherwise. Not sure about publishing posts to LinkedIn, though. On the pro side, LinkedIn, but on the con side, LinkedIn, you know?

I am creating a blogroll sidebar like it’s 2004 again!

Relieved that the website still looks good on mobile. I have to revisit the abandoned dark mode version sometime soon, though.

After noodling around with fonts, I think I’m sticking with ones from MB Type for my website—Concourse, with a few style set changes, makes a surprisingly readable body font, and Century Supra pairs well for headlines.

I also find myself with a weird desire to find a sans serif body font I like to redesign the site around. I don’t know if I will, though. (Currently it uses MB Type fonts: body text in Equity, headlines in Concourse.)

The one downside of bringing back my blog with an “archive page” format is that it shows how little long-form writing I’ve been doing recently…

The new website is up! I don’t think I can redirect the article feed from Micro.blog, but it’s available on the website itself, of course.

Next, to see if I can rescue and import a few posts I apparently only have on Medium…

And now the fun part: fixing links that have broken over the years! Yay. (Super grateful to Twitter turning all its links into 400 Bad Request errors.)

I’m not entirely sure I have any justification for rebuilding my website with Zola (a Hugo-like static site generator) other than it being fun. But it kind of is. Right now it looks almost exactly the same, but this framework might let me make more style changes down the road.

The more I dig into generative AI, the more fascinated I get…and the less practical use I see, and this is apart from ethical, legal, and environmental concerns. If there is indeed a “there” there as I suggested last week, it’s mostly broken, and possibly unfixable without changing paradigms.

Started rebuilding my personal website, which is currently pure HTML/Markdown processed with CodeKit, to Zola, mostly with an eye toward more controllable long-form blogging. (We’ll see if it actually happens or not, of course…)

I have an article I’m puttering around with exploring “Claude-Author”, a professed AI novel writer that caused a hullabaloo earlier this week. Spoiler: it does not write well. It does not write well at all.

I have a set of techie peers enthusiastic about generative AI to the point of ignoring/dismissing the myriad of legitimate, possibly unsurmountable concerns about ethics and legality, and a set of creative peers hostile to any suggestion there could ever be even a little bit of “there” there.

Working on a new novella is helping me solidify what I’d like my creative writing app to be able to do and where it might be able to bring something new to the table. I’m also becoming convinced that explicitly excluding GPT tools is now a market differentiator.