Jerry Towler

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:24:29 -0600

These thoughts from Thought Shrapnel are in conflict:

a Japanese farmer who rediscovered the old ways, and paying more attention to the seasons

and

Essentially, everything is emergent, and all your brain is doing is making links between things. Which is why I don’t have any problem in using LLMs as part of my workflow.

Inhabiting time (“paying more attention to the seasons”) is a kairos-forward approach, and seems to have spooky emergent properties.

Using LLMs to replace, automate, or accelerate link-making is chronos-forward, and, while not bad, is very much not the same thing.

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:11:03 -0600

Brazilian sandwich for lunch at The Garage Food Hall before my flight out.

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 07:45:44 -0600

Today’s LinkedIn CrossClimb puzzle used “Patriarch in the book of Exodus” as a clue for MOSES.

Quick, name any descendant of Moses.

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:30:45 -0600

I send you out for exciting new designer drugs, and you come back with… tomato sauce.

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:02:30 -0600

I have worked very hard to eliminate the possibility of infinite scrolling eating my time.

Some days I get to the end of my RSS feed and Micro.blog and start looking for something else to read before I realize:

I have constructed my world this way, so it’s time to get up and do something else.

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:21:36 -0600

The Wall Street Journal:

OpenAI is planning to unify its ChatGPT app, coding platform Codex and browser into a desktop “superapp,” a step to simplify the user experience and continue with efforts to focus on engineering and business customers.

Smashing a quasi-IDE into a goofy web browser is so silly-sounding (and unlikely to simplify anything) that I almost believe the WSJ misunderstood what it was told.

Software developers tend to be do-one-job Unix people or do-everything super-app kitchen-sink people.

They both generally think the other group is insane.

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:46:36 -0600

The plural of “doozy” as in, “it’s a doozy” looks weird to me:

doozies.

Why does the singular look okay, but the plural looks so bad I want to write around it?

(Not to be confused with Doose’s Market, the grocery store next to Luke’s owned by Taylor Doose and pronounced exactly the same way.)

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:45:23 -0600

Wow, these plugins look amazing! Years ago I built some of this for Jekyll, but I didn’t take the very hard extra step of publishing them for others to use.

Awesome work, @rscottjones; if you need testing, I’d love to help.

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:35:07 -0600

I love all the breathless stories about data centers in space that seem to forget the biggest problem with launching compute.

You have to read to the very last paragraph of this Payload article to learn that they still haven’t overturned thermodynamics:

Of course, in space there’s no conduction, there’s no convection, there’s just radiation, and so we have to figure out how to cool these systems out in space but we’ve got lots of great engineers working on it.

Earlier, the article claims both “low-SWaP” and also 25x the performance of the H100.

And, presumably, no cooling necessary.

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:34:58 -0600

“This Is Not The Computer For You” · Sam Henri Gold:

He knows it’s probably not the right tool. It doesn’t matter. It never did.

The reviews can tell you what a computer is for. They have very little interest in what you might become because of one.

There are too many great words in this piece about the MacBook Neo (via Daring Fireball) to quote them all, so maybe just go read the whole thing. It’s short.

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:02:12 -0600

When writing that last post, I instinctively went to the Wayback Machine because it’s a post about censorship from the publication being censored.

About halfway through the process I remembered Micro.blog already auto-archives pages. That @manton is a smart guy.

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:59:46 -0600

Rose L. Thayer at Stars and Stripes:

The Pentagon has released a modernization plan for Stars and Stripes that affirms the publication’s independence while expanding Defense Department oversight, introducing new restrictions on content…

This sentence is inherently hypocritical. The gist of the article is that DOD is trying to turn Stars and Stripes into a propaganda outlet while preventing it from broadly informing service members, even about sports and world news.

I’m amused at the author’s rebellion: she calls the department “Defense” and not “War” throughout.

Well done, Ms. Thayer.

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:32:34 -0600

Speaking of puzzles, the author of today’s Apple Quartiles must be feeling pretty good about themselves.

A Brief Story of Codex and Technical Debt

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 22:03:40 -0600

Confession: my Chapter By Chapter build pipeline is a messy hodgepodge of Make, Python, Pillow, webkit2png, pandoc, Image Magick, and probably other stuff I don’t want to think about any more.

Typing make works. Usually. Well, actually, I have to type gmake because some part of my Makefile uses new GNU commands that make can’t handle.

Extra confession: it’s all stored in iCloud, not version control of any kind.

Solution: tonight I let Codex loose on it, and an hour later, the directory is organized, everything is pushed to GitLab (including source art in LFS), and that outdated webkit2png script is updated to use Playwright, and make works properly.

Oh, and everything is way more reproducible and less brittle.

Tech debt: eliminated.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:08:10 -0600

That chapter (1 Kings 17) brings me to 700 total chapters with notes. Only 489 to go!

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:46:15 -0600

I have read 1 Kings many, many times. Yet tonight I noticed for the first time that the prophet Elijah flees from King Ahab to Jezebel’s homeland of Sidon—also under drought—showing that Yahweh, not Baal, rules rain and famine, life and death, in both lands.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:06:54 -0600

Daring Fireball: WSJ: ‘Trump Administration Shuns Anthropic, Embraces OpenAI in Clash Over Guardrails’:

It’s not the place of a corporation to dictate terms to the Department of Defense regarding how its product or services are used within the law.

It’s a preposterous, childish (and almost certainly illegal) overreaction to designate Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security” in this way. Grow up.

Even-handed, and (with caveats) I agree on both counts. However, also:

Bullet 1: “within the law”
Bullet 2: “almost certainly illegal”

At least he didn’t call it the Department of War.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 09:12:31 -0600

That’s already too much politics for one morning. Back to creating good things, rather than complaining about bad ones.

Yesterday, I published my Chapter By Chapter notes on 1 and 2 Samuel, which together ask and answer the timely question,

What does true leadership look like?

Today, I’m working on 1 Kings, which starts with the same question about leadership, but is primarily about another timely question: the ultimate basis of power.

Whose Ethics?

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:01:52 -0700

Let me be specific about my complaint, using one of Thompson’s own examples.

If the US president in the 1940s were a madman and a felon who had repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to use the power of the government against his political enemies and his own people without regard for Congress or the rule of law, and a private company had developed nuclear weapons (but the US government had not), would he still prefer for that private company to kowtow to that elected government and provide them with world-ending capabilities?

What if that private company said, “Sure, use them for anything you want, but don’t aim them at your own people”—and the Pentagon refused? Is your answer still, as Thompson writes,

That is the responsibility of the Department of War[1], which ultimately answers to the President, who also is elected.

Or is it possible that being elected shouldn’t give you carte blanche to redefine both law and ethics?

[1]: Calling it “the Department of War” is telling all by itself.

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 07:37:54 -0700

Ben Thompson usually thinks clearly and well, but today’s article, despite its two up-to-the-minute examples, is written from a philosophical point of view that ignores the reality of the present moment. The breakdown of controls and ethics at the US federal level must give us a new source of pause.

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 22:47:32 -0700

Timothy Tennent:

We may not be able to salvage the word “evangelical” but the great, historic Apostolic faith will continue on. In the meantime, I await the “have you no decency, sir?” moment. We desperately need it.

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 07:53:44 -0700

I got to use the Kit app I wrote (currently in review) for the first time in this week’s VerseNotes newsletter.

No worrying about copy-pasting, or styling, or anything. Just typed /bible, then John 13:23, and kept moving. There was no step 3.

Even if it never gets approved, I’m so happy it exists.

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 07:38:17 -0700

Yesterday, I judged my first Utah FIRST event, the fourth round of FIRST Tech Challenge qualifiers for Utah.

No pictures for obvious reasons, but it was tons of fun!

Here’s the 8-hour-long official stream if you’re that bored.

Looking forward to states next weekend.

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:21:45 -0700

Important insight from Manton Reece commenting on Terry Godier:

The best products take feedback from everywhere but filter it through the original vision. Otherwise you’ll eventually get a watered down or bloated thing with no uniquely defining purpose.

There’s some sort of triple constraint-like thing going on here:

MVP/ship early and often
Respond to feedback
Remain true to the vision

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 08:27:02 -0700

I didn’t watch the State of the Union, because I was fairly sure it would be filled with lies and hypocrisy.

Sadly, I was right.

The first two paragraphs of this article are 100% worth your time, even if you stop there.

Also this:

It is as if the nation were being soaked by a torrential downpour, water rolling over umbrellas and into boats, soaking everyone’s clothes—and the leader whose job it is to lead them through the deluge insists that it is not raining at all, that in fact it is sunny, the sunniest day ever.