The reading apocalypse, protocol fiction, etc.
Et cetera #04
Since I began to publish again in August, I’ve finally got onto a weekly streak. This is one of those occasional grab-bag posts that allow me to claim I’m writing (and thus maintain my streak) without the burden of coherent thinking.
Please send me your thoughts on what you’ve liked most the past few months and what you’d like to see more of. Thanks for reading!
Recent posts
In Homelab:
In data:
Readers can see from the above list that I am finally keeping my promise to be inconsistent with this publication. I fear no one in my target audience can follow my brain through the portal-jumping between data rearing and child management (er, flip those). While I’ve never paid close attention to my subscriber numbers, I have enjoyed watching the churning waves over the past three months as I’ve published more consistently.
The numbers say I should stop publishing. I accumulated subscribers faster when playing Zelda on Sunday night than when I was writing. Common sense says I should pick a theme and stick with it. My kids say I shouldn’t eat all their Halloween candy, that it’s not mine, and it cancels out my meager attempts to stay fit.
Well, I say I’m going to keep going and that things will only get less consistent from here on out. If you don’t like that, tell your friends exactly where they can unsubscribe.
Protocol fiction
This past summer, I participated in The Summer of Protocols, a season-long fellowship sponsored by the Ethereum Foundation to fund research extending or exploring protocols. Next week, I’ll publish the research artifact from it: a short story called Below the API.
Here’s the pitch:
Marcie, a struggling potter, finds herself thrust into an unexpected whirlwind of success when her AI agent, Navi, transforms her art into a viral sensation. Quiet mornings at the wheel become a never-ending hustle as orders flood in for her black clay pottery, but as Marcie delves deeper into the surge in demand, she discovers that there may be more –or less — to her success than she initially thought. Working against financial pressures and her insecure AI assistant, Marcie must decide whether to lean into the unidentifiable digital audience for which she performs or keep her own passions alive.
“Below the API” explores what it means to be a creator in a world where even the simplest human connections are mediated by AI agents and what strange effects even the most well-intentioned regulatory protocols may have on our daily lives.
I’m grateful to the folks at the Summer of Protocols for stimulating conversation and the opportunity for a new writing challenge. It’s a little past its due date, but it’s, uh, still summer somewhere?
FutureRack
Speaking of Summer of Protocols, I wanted to highlight my favorite project from the summer. FutureRack is a fictional company that has taken the 19” server rack protocol that characterizes data centers everywhere and reinvented it for personal and domestic use.
The project nails the allure of protocols. If you could trust that every piece of furniture was compatible with the 19” rack spec, then entire houses become modular. When you move, there are no boxes: everything is already rack-compatible, so you just pop them out, install them on the moving truck (which has layers of racks), and then install them in your new home.
You can view the product catalog on the FutureRack website.
Finally, speech-to-text that works (with some effort)
I’ve been looking for a way to turn walks into docs for the past year or so, but I’ve never found anything that nailed it. Apple’s voice memos got the “just walk and talk” interface right, but they didn’t have transcripts. Transcript software produced serviceable outputs, but due to my poor diction and halting speech patterns, it required a ton of post-work—so much that I ended up just writing from scratch anyway.
With iOS 18, though, I’ve figured out a flow that is working well. It’s still janky, and it’s barely intelligent, but it’s a base I can iterate from. Here’s what I do:
Go on a walk.
Record a Voice Memo on the iPhone.
Copy the automated transcription (which is awful) into ChatGPT.
Prompt with: “Clean up this audio transcript, staying as close to the original wording as possible.”
This generates an accurate transcript of not just the words I said but what I would write (punctuation and all).
How did I miss the Earthsea Trilogy?
What a treat to stumble on the Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula LeGuin in 2024. Not that it has anything particularly salient to this specific moment; it’s the opposite. What LeGuin has to say in this trilogy is timeless: names and light and life.
Reader consensus (or marketing consensus) is that Earthsea belongs on the same shelf as Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia. All three series are serious works of literature that are as interesting to children as adults. They are, simply, good stories.
The three books follow Ged through the stages of life: adolescence to adulthood, from child prodigy to archmage. The theme, if I could state it as such, is that connection between courage and wisdom and from wisdom to acceptance. In the third book, Ged reflects on this: “But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.”
The kids particularly enjoyed the concept of true names. In Earthsea, magic and names go hand in hand. To let someone know your true name is to give them an other-worldly power over you; to know the names of all things is to be master of them. Wisdom and wizardry come from the same root.
I have convinced my children that both my wife and I have secret “true names” we cannot divulge lest they get undue power over us. The joke is on me, though — they already have it.
The Reading Apocalypse
I may have missed Earthsea as a kid, but today's kids are missing more than that.
You may have seen this article in The Atlantic: The elite college students who can’t read books. Well, Justin Smith-Ruiu over at The Hinternet is starting a whole series on The Future of Reading—what’s changing with literature, reading, and education.
I’m a huge fan of The Hinternet, although it’s not for everybody. If you ever wished you could have experienced the emergence of a philosophical scene — say, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship back when he was publishing Fear & Trembling (by Johannes de Silentio) or any of his other pseudonymous works — then I think The Hinternet is as good a place to hang out as any. Smith-Ruiu’s fully embraces the hypermedia format of Substack, through multi-language, multi-modality, multi-persona authorship.
The first piece in the series is out, and I loved it. What it means to read is changing. For better or worse, or just for the weirder, I can’t quite tell.
You want a social life with friends
There are many things I’d like to do in a week. Parent, teach, work out, read, write, play. Invest in my local community and neighbors. Listen and learn from a global community of colleagues and experts. But there’s only so much time. That’s the hard lesson I’m learning from middle age and parenthood.
I ran across this poem by Kenneth Koch the other day, and I’ve returned to it over the past few weeks. It’s a classic “pick two of three” problem, but something about the rhyme makes me feel more at peace with limits.
You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.There isn’t time enough, my friends–
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends–
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.