Gal Costa: Cantar (1974)

• Barato Total: funky groove; percussive singing; everything tightly in the pocket
• Flor Do Cerrado / Garota De Ipamena (Medley): two songs get supeimposed; fun interlocking rhythms and offbeat landings
• Jóia: fourth harmonization
• Até Quem Sabe: João Donato-style sustain chords and instrumental singing

You may have seen Andrej Karpathy's post on his "LLM Wiki" — Markdown notes in a Git repo, edited by an LLM, and read in Obsidian. It's a very effective pattern.

TiddlyWiki turns the vault into something live. Index files that LLMs have to keep manually in sync become computed views that always reflect reality. YAML frontmatter becomes a small queryable database the LLM can sort and filter against. And the LLM can author not just notes but small interactive views — dashboards, glossaries, journal indexes — that compose with your own customisations.

In short: a notes folder becomes a programmable surface.

Louis Cole: Outer Moat Behavior

seems like the same material repeats for almost two minutes, but still interesting; cool "rising" sensation in the bass with these complex chord changes in the background

João Donato: Doce de Amora

childlike silliness, playful but not superficial

nowhere

Nowhere encodes an entire website into a URL fragment. The site lives in the link itself and is never stored on a server.

[Option enabled by authors of paywalled articles to let a benefactor "buy it for everyone".]

Rara in Haiti / Gaga in the Dominican Republic (1978)

generally explosive.

• Bourg Champagne: reminds me of samba
• Carrefour du Fort: hypnotic, trance-inducing
• Cemetary at Bizoton: "only in 4" but somehow sounds more complex

Brad Mehldau: Jacob's Ladder (2022)

unexpected wacky, out, prog rock. Pedro Martins' voice on Vou correndo te encontrar / Racecar.

Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival

[Moving software from interface to outcome means a pricing shift from seats to results (per closed ticket, sale, etc…).]

How to correct git reporting detected dubious ownership in repository

git -c safe.directory=* <your sub-command here>

Barbells

A barbell strategy is when you put most of your money into extremely safe assets, and invest a small portion in high-risk, high-reward bets. A common split is 90% treasury bills, cash, short-term bonds, and 10% options, venture bets, and volatile stocks. You avoid the middle entirely.

much of incumbent tech is looking like the kind of middle-risk investment that a barbell strategy tries to avoid.

I’m also budgeting for conference travel, since the downside of living in a low-burn locale is missing out on the network effects of a city like San Francisco or New York. Conferences create condensed versions of this network effect. So, 90% building, 10% high-intensity networking. Another barbell.

Who needs to grow tomatoes when we've got pasta sauce?

Mestre Lua Rasta e o Bando Anunciador: Roda do Terreiro (2000)

want to find the lyrics for the songs at 6:48 and 7:40.

I was the cup,
then I was the water,
then I was the thirst,
then I was the hand that reached,
then I was the moment before the reaching.
I am trying to go further back.

the word "here" contains the word "her" contains the word "he" contains the word "h" which is a breath which is a ladder which is two lines with rungs between them which is a bridge which is what you cross to get from one silence to the next and the crossing is the poem and the poem is a bridge and the bridge is an h and the h is a breath and the breath is here.

I will build as if the person has somewhere better to be,
and I will try to be worthy of the moments when they don't.

the cup holds tea.
the tea holds heat.
the heat holds the sun.
the sun holds the universe.
the universe holds the cup.

the hand that lifts the cup
lifts everything.

water does not remember the shape of the jar.
water does not remember the shape of the river.
water does not remember the shape of your hands.
this is why you trust it.

[CIOs misestimating AI capabilities fire engineers they don't realize they need, then claim to have "reduced operating costs by X million". They leave for the next company before trouble hits, which opens space for new CIOs to talk about how they "spearheaded strategic recovery of a failing engineering department".]

A Visual Guide to Simple, Compound and Continuous Interest Rates

[5% annual percentage rate (APR) compounded monthly returns 5.12%. 5% annual percentage yield (APY) returns 5%.]

[Mortgage payments might be due at the end of the month, but paying at the beginning will accumulate less interest.]

speed, change, delta, difference, differentiation, derivative, gradient

Control

[AI companies are so overexposed to debt and market correction that their success relies on everyone using it. When it isn't working for everyone, the next best thing is making usage mandatory. They can require it by crippling local computing power and supply to force people through cloud services.] Want storage? That'll be another $20/mo. Want graphics for games? Another $20. You want to perform data science and fit ML Models?! You're going to need the Professional plan, starting at $200/mo. It's a rent-seeker's dream.

Why fight to get one of the few remaining laptops in inventory with onboard horsepower when you can get an OpenAI Terminal just for subscribing? Sure, all it does is provide you with a single interface, a blinking chat box through which your entire digital experience is mediated, but plans start at only $20/month! Isn't that easier? Look how shiny it is. Just relax. Don't resist. It hurts more when you fight it.

The Ma of a New Machine

[LLM chatbots generate "deep cognitive work"-level complexity with an interface for reaction and intuition.] It spits complex text at you, you skim it quickly, and you immediately type a reaction to keep the momentum going.

We’ve been looking at this problem entirely from the technology’s point of view. The LLM is driving us, pushing a specific interaction model and veering us towards making mistakes. We are not computers; going fast isn’t our superpower.

Filó Machado, Cibele Codonho: Correnteza

wicked chord substitutions. my version was based on a recording by Joyce and Toninho Horta.