... works as a web developer in Hveragerði, Iceland, and writes about the web, digital publishing, and web/product development
These are his notes
The photographic highlight of 2023 so far was the raven parliament
Raven youths congregate occasionally in one place to play, hang out, and pair off. We call these meetings “hrafnaþing” in Icelandic (“raven parliament”). This year we had one in Hveragerði
They were everywhere
“Advanced NLP with SpaCy | Hacker News”
The world cannot migrate all its current NLP models for text classification and NER to ICL. There are nowhere near enough GPUs in the world for that to happen
“Pixels of the Week – September 10, 2023 by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer.”
“Storing UTC is not a silver bullet | Jon Skeet’s coding blog”
“On productivity metrics and management consultants – Surfing Complexity”
Now that the starlings have discovered my bird feeder my balcony railing has become a bit of a location, a place to stop and check the surroundings for predators.
And poop. Way more bird poop now.
“OpenAI confirms that AI writing detectors don’t work | Ars Technica”
Yeah.
The only real opportunity I got for photography in 2022 was a trip to the caves near Hella. They’re fascinating evidence of early celtic settlements in Iceland that might provide an alternate explanation for the 40% celtic-originated genetic mix of modern Icelanders
Now we’re in the depressing part of my photographic history. Things got pretty rough after the pandemic started and, despite improvements, we’re still nowhere near where we were, personally or as a society
Still, funny moments still happen and sometimes you capture them
“Silicon Valley’s Slaughterhouse”
This, in my mind, began tech’s age of empty innovation, where software poisoned every aspect of our lives without making them appreciably better.
“Microsoft announces new Copilot Copyright Commitment for customers”
I see that some of Microsoft’s big enterprise customers have finally forwarded the “WTF!” email they got from their legal department to Microsoft’s sales
I’m not pessimistic about technology. I’m disappointed and let down. The distinction is important because “pessimistic” implies that things haven’t already turned to shit.
This here is the last picture I took in 2021. It’s also my grandmother’s favourite because that’s her window. New year’s eve.
The place is also a stop for the raven population in the sout of Iceland. We don’t have that many of them year-round but Icelandic ravens tend to winter in urban areas and Hveragerði is one of their stops on the way there (and back).
This is one flying over my building
Hveragerði itself can be pretty picturesque, though. There’s something photogenic in pretty much every direction.
So it’s not entirely surprising that I don’t have that many photographs to show from that year. Most of them are from a trip we took to Laugarvatn lake in the summer.
The view from my balcony of the industrial greenhouse next door. Nice folks
Another turn in 2021: my dad had a very serious health scare. He’s better now. As a result he ended up moving in with me and we’re now in one of those Frasier-type situations. We make it work
We’re up to 2021 in my photographic history. I had just found an apartment in a small but nice town called Hveragerði, and things were supposed to be getting better.
As we all know, that was wrong. 2021 was, for most, just as bad as 2020. But at least there were ravens
“Read terrible books, too - Austin Kleon”
Terrible media is can be fearless and inventive despite being incompetently put together. That can be an inspiring combination.
Where my mind is at regarding web dev. github.com/baldurbja…
Going to see how well this works on a project over the next few days.
“Why are we not still using tables-for-layout? – Rachel Andrew”
“Remembering Molly, one of the greats - The History of the Web”
“The room-temperature superconductor that wasn’t | Ars Technica”
Oh, well.