Thunder calibrates the city.
Rain audits the afternoon.
My attention becomes specimen.
Tabs dilate; habits fluoresce.
Daily Averages
It’s Tuesday afternoon I’ve been into Central London and back. I got half drowned in a storm, it was glorious sunshine, and now it’s apocalyptic rain and thunder again? Always.
Back in 2020 I wrote about how I use my RSS reader. And that is, still. The main way i consume the Internet. But I mostly now use it on my phone, in conjunction with raindrop.io. Ive almost entirely replaced social media consumption with article reading and … talking to the AI that lives in my bookmarks lol.
Anyways, I direct you to that 2020 post, as in it I shared some of the daily average stats from my ‘webtime tracker’ extension that I had installed into my web browsers during the early lock down to try and get a grip on my attention with some hard metrics and data.
I wish I had a screenshot of the whole top 10 but I did share some snippets of the metrics in that old post.
I was spending nearly 26 min on twitter a day in the deep of the pandemic.
I’ve still have the app installed, and 6 years later here’s my total daily averages over the last 6 years.
*interesting*
I note that this tracker data is from the extension installed on my personal chrome profile rather than the one I use for work. So this is representative of where I spend my “free time” when i’m looking at my browser for fun, and not for money.
Anyways. On a whim, I just downloaded the full data set from the extension as JSON and had my pal Claude rustle me up a ‘bar race’ animation in about 3 mins. So here’s the last 6 years of daily averages / websites that I spend time on ‘for fun’ month by month.
I can see in the animation when iIstoped using google docs for my diary and moved to Day One, and then see a further reduction when I moved all my writing offline to Obsidian + iA writer and more recently, my own vibe coded word processor.
The other observation is that over the last few years I’ve consumed way too much Youtube!!?? I blame people like Noah Caldwell-Gervais, and Fimdeg’s 7.5 hour long oral history of the making of Morrowind lol. I love just sticking on a long form things and doing other things around the house, but the clock still clicks on.
On The Blog
AI-Generated Interfaces and the Delamination of Application UI
As AI separates the UI from the application layer, liquid interfaces point towards the next era of software design.
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Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Edited and exported a new episode of Experience.Computer. Out Tuesday
- Sorted out some financial stuff
- Removed nearly 6k words from the next episode of permanently moved draft script lol
- Two calls.
- Got sent a draft of a piece by a friend. I slung it on my kindle
- Lots of reading to do.
Terminal Access
Sarah Friend posted a great piece today on “What Kind of Clock is an LLM? — All computational systems contain a model of time and all of them are wrong.”
It’s so good you should deffo read it.
Once a day maybe, the laptop calls out to an NTP (Network Time Protocol) server to reorient. In between calls, it can drift. On a more machinic scale, it makes no guarantees about task processing. If that laptop were to be for example, controlling a CNC bit spinning at 3000 RPM cutting through a piece of sheet metal, or stabilizing a drone while accepting the navigational commands of a distant pilot, it would stutter. If a rogue process, maybe a defrag or cleanup task took over the CPU, the bit would slow imperceptibly, and the cut would be too short. Somewhere, a drone falls out of the sky.
Dipping the Stacks
Hallucinating Splines | The city simulator where AI agents are the mayors
Hallucinating Splines is a city simulator where AI agents are the mayors. There are no human players clicking buttons. Instead, AI models connect via MCP or REST API and make every decision: zoning, budgets, infrastructure, taxes. You can do your best to control them, but they have a mind of their own. It’s generative text controlling simulated cities. AI all the way down.
Such narratives tend to eschew the issue of hope and despair, optimism or pessimism—this useless binary that terrorizes climate fiction and makes more complex definitions and points of view difficult to express. This matters because I often feel that talking about the issues expressed by my novels may make more material difference in the world than the novels themselves.
Human drivers keep crashing into Waymos
Waymo’s overall safety record continues to be quite strong. Last month, the company released fresh data about Waymo’s safety record through the end of 2025. Waymo estimates that compared to human drivers in the same cities, its vehicles get into 82% fewer crashes that cause injuries, 83% fewer crashes that trigger airbags, and 92% fewer crashes that injure pedestrians. Our review of recent Waymo crashes — which seem to be overwhelmingly caused by mistakes by human drivers — seems consistent with Waymo’s safety claims.
Our Longing for Inconvenience | The New Yorker
The modern world has made us ill-equipped for the nuisances of past technologies, even as it has fuelled nostalgia for things that might transport us back to calmer times.
On the Dialectic of Nature and the Warp The Horus Heresy Thus Far | Patreon
The Warp as a space cannot be perceived by ordinary Space Marines – to look upon it is to be sent into madness. Some people when writing about the lore consider the Warp as a separate dimension, but this is insufficiently Hegelian. As Engels pointed out in Dialectics of Nature, Hegel’s dialectical laws of thought could be expanded to laws of the physical universe, particularly what he termed “the law of the interpenetration of opposites.”
Reading
I finished Hive by Dan Abnett. Like i said last week, I feel like he had a story to tell and was exhausted by the work he’s done in the wider setting and needed a change. Also there’s a part of me that feels like it was written with a bunch of side eye towards Adrian Tchaikovsky now also playing in the 40k universe.
I also *finally* finished Impromptu Man: J.L. Moreno and the Origins of Psychodrama, Encounter Culture, and the Social Network. A really fantastic biography of one of the most important psychotherapists of the 20th C who has, largely, been written out of history. Basically everyone you know was influenced by him.
Music
EXUM – In Russia. A is 9 (LP)
I’ve been really into this super delicate album this week. It’s an eclectic experimental mix of strings, noise, sound art, melodic vocals. All sorts of things really. To just list all those things however doesn’t really do it justice. Looking at the reviews, its quote polarising but I think Its just wonderful.
Remember Kids:
‘All through history,’ Illich wrote, ‘the best measure for bad times was the percentage of food eaten that had to be purchased.’
At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine
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