Read a good interview transcript in the Atlantic between Arthur Brooks and Jerusalem Demasis on whether religion can make one happy. My theory about what ails us as a society is that we don't understand religion and that there is in fact too much religion, particularly relative to fifty years ago. People association religion to particular sets of beliefs, institutions, or higher power, but religion is whatever humans attach themselves to derive meaning and identity. #

Today there are many things to which one can and does attach themselves to, and one of those most popular right now in the United States is political ideology, populism/Trumpism and progressivism. (Right/left, Republican/Democrat, conservative/liberal are variations of the theme. #

Most people do derive happiness through these attachments that given them meaning, but you should see here the problem. Happiness is dependent on externalities, and therefore we are conditioned to seek these things that make us happy. I think what you really have here in religions is idolatry. #

Religion does make one happy, in fact happiness , or feeling good about oneself, is practically the purpose of religion. The problem is in the belief that the pursuit of happiness is that which ought to be our motivation, it's a problem because as happiness depends on something outside of oneself, it is fleeting. #

Rather than happiness, I think one ought to focus on joy. Joy is a state of being, one chooses or is conditioned to be joyful, by which I mean joy is not dependent on a an externality, it comes from the inside out. Idols promise happiness, but they are finite. Joy comes from within one's soul, woven in to the fabric of who we are that is more than we comprehend. It's felt before known, but once known is infinite. #

It looks like the server on which I am running Pagepark keeps running out of memory and locking up. Consequently I am going to need to give more thought to how I am going to host that site.#

While I agree with the point that Dave is making regarding our failing democracy, I think an honest assessment is that the United States has really never been a democracy. It's always been an oligarchy veiled by a republic. The republican/representative democracy instituted by wealthy white men was immediately controlled by the invention of political parties, which Washington warned us about. It has taken more than 240 years for the system to evolve to where we are today that is completely controlled by wealth. The Presidency is simply the most powerful position in the world that money can buy and SCOTUS, which is the authoritarian branch of our fine government, made that official with the Citizens United and Trump immunity decisions. #

Back home after a trip back to the home town for my 40th high school reunion. I had a great time catching up with my classmates.#

I have a negative reflexive reaction to AI writing generation tools, probably mostly because I like to write and I can't imagine why I would want an AI to write for me. On the other hand, having worked in IT my entire life I know that the lack of good documentation is one of the weakest links of IT. Sure, some documentation is written but then is never maintained nor often never read. These are reasons why I think documentation as code and software defined infrastructure are so valuable.#

Is it because I have no interest in it, or is that the Apple Vision Pro is losing steam?#

Reading about the updates in Mac OS Sequoia. What I find most irritable with OS X that when I connect my Macbook Air to my dock and external monitor the dock does not appear at the bottom of the monitor screen. I don't have my Macbook side by side with the monitor, but rather below so the external monitor is above the internal monitor and it seems OS X really doesn't know what to do about that. #

Here is a drawing of the Apple Intelligence architecture. #

The main reason why I have invested in and use Google's hardware, mostly phones running Android, all these years is that I believe the idea of "organizing the world's information" best aligns to how I think about personal computing. Years ago I wrote about these ideas and how I saw the emergence of smartphones and tablets as the true, real, personal computing moment. I defined personal computing as hardware + software (apps) + Internet + intelligence and believed then that Google was closest to meeting this definition with what was emerging as Google Assistant. I think now that Apple's description and implementation of Apple Intelligence is closer to actualizing what I imagined back then. #

I started an outline of my notes about the Apple WWDC keynote here but moved them to their own outline file.#

I bought the Macbook Air M1 back in November, 2021, and from that time up until today I had never run anything on it that impacted performance. Today I installed Ollama and and tried the llama2 model and found saw the CPU utilization jump up to nearly 70% and the YouTube video I was watching disrupted. Basically, when interacting with llama2 I cannnot really run something else on the Mac. #

Seems to me that Dave wants categories in his blogroll, seemingly not remembering that FeedLand already has categories. Is that really two great things that taste great together? At the moment he is so obsessed with blogrolls that is forcing it to be an RSS feed reader and I am not sure the two have the same use cases.#

Yesterday I learned about Fabric, which is a front end to LLMs such as OpenAI and Anthropic with packaged, pre-defined prompts. It's written in Python and uses API access to LLMs and therefore requires API keys. Basically, it simplifies practical use of these LLMs buy providing a catalog of prompt "patterns." I learned about Fabric via NetworkChuck. #

I've installed Remmina on the Google Pixelbook so that I can connect to the Debian 12 desktop, and this seems to be working pretty well, although screen resolution can be a bit of a problem. For some reason the touchpad doesn't work for scrolling in the web browser.#

The main problem I have with using the Boox Note Air 3C to take notes is the search function is really slow. My notebooks get exported to PDF files that I sync to OneDrive but I need a cost effective way to perform handwriting recognition on them that produces an index to search against.#

I wonder how well the Pixel Fold has sold?#

Feeds All Around provides a way to discover RSS feeds related to a mastodon account. The app appears to be able to dig out the RSS feed from a site. Because it uses Mastodon it provides a way to drill down to followers of followers, and therefore is a bit of a rabbit hole. I plugged in my Mastodon handle and did some exploring. #

AT&T wants to get rid of their traditional landline service. They have been sending me offers to conver to AT&T Phone - Advanced, which is a VoIP solution that primarily uses their cellular network and fails over to broadband. The service is cheaper and would allow us to keep our home phone number, but the problem is that we only get one bar of cellular service at our condo. We have a microcell that we use to strengthen/enable our cellular connectivity. What would work for us, I think, is if the broadband VoIP was the primary connection then I would just put the device in the basement. What I really wish we could so is have our home phone number forwarded to both of our cellular phones, which enable us to preserve the number while decreasing our cost.#

I am using Joplin as a documentation, notes, and tasks repository and I use it with my Debian 12 desktop and my Macbook Air and iPads. Today I ran Joplin on the Macbook and received a notification about an update (2.14.21) to download and install, which I did. Unfortunately, this version has a problem such that it never fully loads and one has to Force Quit. I see others have reported this problem on the Joplin Forums and there was instruction to revert to 2.14.20, which I did and after re-entering the Master Password I the app successfully loaded. #

I checked in today on the status of Gemini for Android and found that it still cannot start a Home Routine and so is still a no go for me.#

Wasn't Microsoft designing their own chips for the Surface Pro? Did they give that up to partner with Qualcomm? #

Dave is all in on current and future of AI, and I find it useful to observe as he writes from a user's perspective. In my own experience I find myself using Copilot on my iPad when looking for information rather than Google Search, which I used in the past. #

I was mostly offline the last week as I on the road visiting family and friends. Catching up on my feeds, I see the reactions to the reviews of the new iPads that are predictable because they have been the same for the last five years or so now. All new iPad hardware is fantastic but hampered by the operating system software. The real problem with these observations is that they are redundant and pointless unless one is reviewing a new release of iPad OS. #

All technical reviews are opinion pieces. Ultimately, the author of the review is expressing an opinion about whether the product being reviewed is good or bad and whether the reader should buy the product or not, and I think it is the later point some people are reacting to. Two types of readers/potential buyers exist, a small group of whom have never owned an iPad and another group that will considering upgrading from an older model to a new model. #

The decision to upgrade is the tougher one because there are really few reasons to upgrade. The iPad Air I bought in 2020 runs everything I need it to run and will get the latest version of iPad OS when it is released. When I read in a review that iPad OS does not take full advantage of the hardware capability my simple translation is, it's not worth the money to upgrade. (Ironic side note, the iPad seems to be opposite of planned obsolescence and there seems to be a negative reaction, which makes me wonder whether we are too condition for planned obsolescence. ) #

Should a person who does not own an IPad buy the latest one? The answer to that question is easier, if they have a need or desire for an iPad they should buy whichever model they can afford. None of the reviews I have read even consider recommending their readers buy an Android, Chrome OS, or Windows (Surface) tablet because it is generally accepted that the iPad is best tablet on the market. #

Finally, some of the reviews are really not reviews but instead editorials expressing ways in which Apple could improve the iPad or iPad OS. Editorials usually invite disagreement and so it is surprising when the authors of these articles are surprised by the disagreement as if they don't know they wrote an editorial rather than a review. If the same story is being written after every release of a new iPad, perhaps it's time for a different story or some writing the same one over and over again.#

More thoughts about the new iPads announced yesterday, and thinking that if I were to buy a new, "larger" iPad that I might prefer the 13-inch model given that I would want to use it for something other than how I use my existing iPads.#

iMore points out the irony that the new iPad Air is actually heavier than the new iPad Pro, thanks to the OLED screen of the Pro. I guess the idea that a model with the name "Air" in it should be the lightest one available is lost on Apple. Perhaps Apple re-brand the Air, Pro, and the current Pro, Max, then they would have iPads from Mini to Max.#

I have built a new Proxmox VM using Fedora 40 KDE with XRDP for remote access. The Speedometer browser benchmark shows Firefox performs a little better than Chrome, so I will be using Firefox on this desktop. #

At some point I must have configured Fedora 38 workstation for remote access because I am able to connect to it from my Mac.#

The Declaration is about revolution over government, the Constitution establishes a government.#

Is the Rabbit R1 intended to replace a smartphone or be an accessory it, like watches?#

A change to the theme I use for my blog broke the summary blog post plugin I was using to create summary entries on the main page for titled posts. I now have to manually enter the tag that tells the CMS to generate the summary post and link. To make this easier I created a simple script in Drummer to insert that tag in the next line, therefore I don't have to remember the syntax of the tag. Here in lies the power of using an editor like Drummer that supports scripts and the power of being able to use the editor of my choice to write blog posts. #

Yesterday Dave wrote about search and it reminds me about how much I miss Daytona, which died when Twitter killed their API. Some times I feel like I am the only person other than Dave who uses his stuff. When one writes daynotes like this to narrate one's work it is very useful to be able to search one's writing. I agree in principal with what Dave is thinking in regards to the usefulness of LLMs to query one's own writing. #

I fear that Google's PIxel 9 series phones may mark the end of the lower cost "A" series Pixels that I use. Reports indicate the Pixel 9 series will have three models rather than just the two, with the base Pixel 9 sound much like an "A" series phone. I am probably not going out on a limb by saying that the Pixel 8a, which we will likely see announced at Google I/O may be the last of the "A" series line. Now, if the price of the Pixel 9 is similar previous "A" series phones then this might not mean more than different branding and different launch times, but until that is announced we will not know for sure.#

I've added more feeds to my feedland.org blogger category so that they appear in the blogroll. The feeds in this category are personal blogs rather than corporate/for profit blogs. I find the process in FeedLand for going through a large list of feeds and adding them to a category is cumbersome. It would be easier if I could easily/quickly select a group of feeds and specify them all to be set to a category rather than having to go into each one individually. By the way, this type of categorization would be useful task for an AI.#

I didn't have a chance to note this, but over the weekend Dave resolved an issue that was preventing all of the blogger feeds I selected to appear on the blogroll to the right. He also made changes to the appearance of the blogroll so that it doesn't draw as much attention and I think this helps with reading the content on the page.#

First day back at work after a four day weekend. #