Mastodawn

You've probably seen this already, but I only discovered it today and couldn't agree more https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2025-10-11/friction

choosing friction

In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that: Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there. I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.

phirelog

Ben K 3d ago

Figured out a hack for accidentally printing a unprintable/desktop layout in Filemaker. All the objects get hidden from print. At least this way I'm not wasting a couple of sheets of paper, just warming it up. Nothing to see here, just stick it back in the paper tray.

#FileMaker #Hack #LaserPrinter

Ben K Mar 13

jacquelines 🌟Mar 12

i really liked this blog post about the macbook neo https://samhenri.gold/blog/20260312-this-is-not-the-computer-for-you/

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

Sam Henri Gold is a product design engineer building playful, useful software.

Ben K Mar 8

My hub75 based display has started having rendering issues lately. After messing around for a while and getting nowhere I believe I've finally fixed it by reducing the power supply voltage to 4.7V instead of 5V. I guess some of these displays don't really like 3.3V logic and reducing the difference helps.

#ESP32 #hub75 #LEDs

Ben K Mar 3

AI6YR Ben Mar 3

LOL true Mastodon verification:

YOU MUST VERIFY YOURSELF ON MASTODON BY:

- Posting a picture of a cat in your lap
- Random photos of flowers
- Wax poetic about your favorite episode of Star Trek TNG (or your hate of the series)
- Random, undecipherable technical blabbering about ham radio electronics
- Mention something about your favorite Linux command line
- Say hello to your many LGBTQ followers/friends here, just because you're glad they're here
- Toot a picture of some mushroom you ran into while walking in the forst
- Something something astronomy
- Random gadget/device/bicycle post
- Post a random picture of a tree or window
- Photo of your sewing/mending project!
- Hand drawn art post

Ben K Feb 26

nolen Feb 26

ssh is an obscure but widely-deployed command. It stands for Secure Snake Home and was made in the 90s to securely play snake online

I made a massively multiplayer backend for it with support for thousands of concurrent snake players

ssh snakes.run to join!

Ben K Feb 22

JWcph, Radicalized By Decency Feb 22

RE: https://mstdn.ca/@drikanis/116107120926277506

I'd like to comment on the common "AI is just a tool" thing: I'm a woodworker by training & that means a lot of machines - but almost every craftsperson knows how to do their job with hand tools, or "lesser" machines.

Similarly, a writer can write without a text editor - just as well, only slower.

If loss of a tool = loss of your skill & knowledge, then that tool isn't an asset, it's a liability. You're signing over your ability to do business to whoever sells & maintains that tool.

#AI

Ben K Feb 7

DanPerrett Feb 7

Friday is studying existentialism #robot #maker #philosophy

Ben K Feb 4

My PC doesn’t indicate when it’s sleeping, so I hacked together a small device that monitors a USB port and uses that to figure out if the computer is sleeping or not. Of course since I had some glow in the dark LEGO spiders kicking around I stuck one of them on the LED.

#electronics #LED #hack