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I embark on the dangerous mission of changing task management software

For to-do-list software, I’ve been using Things 3 by Cultured Code for most of the past 14 years, but when I started the new job, at first I thought I wouldn’t be able to continue to use Things, so i switched to Todoist, because it’s a pretty good app and it integrates well with Microsoft Outlook.

Two weeks into the new job, I learned I could use Things after all, and I was getting a little frustrated with Todoist in the Mac. It’s not a native Mac app, and it shows. Working with Todoist seems to require more taps and keystrokes than it should, and sometimes menus scroll off the top or bottom of the screen, requiring scrolling to see everything. And Todoist doesn’t support start dates for tasks, which I find important to my workflow.

This gave me an opportunity to start fresh and reevaluate task management software. Going back to Things would be about the same amount of work as just starting with something new. And Things is rigid—it works great if your brain works like Things wants it to, but I was finding it a bit difficult to work with.

Switching to-do apps is dangerous for me! I have wasted a lot of time fiddling with productivity apps. While I usually come back to Things, I’ve also tried OmniFocus, Todoist, the Tasks plugin for Obsidian, TickTick, Workflowy, Remember the Milk, Microsoft To Do, Taskpaper, todo.txt, bullet journaling and probably others I’m forgetting about.

I realized that what I want is something like Todoist but with a nicer Mac app, and with support for start dates.

So I went to Omnifocus. Here are some first impressions:

Pluses:

  • It’s a nice-looking app on the Mac and iPhone.
  • Has start dates, just like I want it
  • Seems surprisingly flexible. In the early days of the app, 15+ years ago, Omnifocus rigidly conformed to David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, but now It seems pretty loose.

Also added to the plus column: Omnifocus is, as far as I can determine, unique among task managers in that it’s very easy to import and export task lists in human-readable format. So if I want to do housecleaning on the task manager—get rid of projects I’m not going to get to anytime soon—without outright deleting the projects, Omnifocus will let me easily do that.

Minuses:

  • Expensive. Mitigated by my already having paid for earlier versions so being eligible for a discount.

Could go either way—maybe a plus, maybe a minus, maybe no big deal:

  • Really wants everything to be a Project. I like using single-actions. Yes, “write article” is technically a dozen or so steps, from thinking about how to start research to proofreading and submitting. But I don’t need to list those steps—at least, not in my to-do app. (Though maybe I should—and there certainly are things I do need to write down for every article, like lists of people I want to email for interviews).
  • Extremely flexible and customizable, leading to a moral hazard to fiddle with Omnifocus when I should be doing other things.

Jon Udell: Best Practices for Working with Large Language Models

[thenewstack.io]:

… you don’t need a low-level understanding of the neural networks at the core of large language models in order to align with the grain of that architecture. Although I can’t explain how LLMs work – arguably nobody can – I’m able to use them effectively, and I’ve begun to codify a set of guiding principles.

Here’s my list:

  1. Think out loud
  2. Never trust, always verify
  3. Use a team of assistants
  4. Ask for choral explanations
  5. Outsource pattern recognition
  6. Automate transformations
  7. Learn by doing

Good rules here. I’ll add a couple of guidelines:

  • Don’t pretend the AI is intelligent or conscious. It’s fancy autocomplete. When you talk to the AI, you’re talking to a version of yourself.

  • Also: The AI doesn’t have feelings. Take advantage of that. The AI is never going to get bored or discouraged. (But don’t be cruel to the AI—it’s a bad idea to be cruel, even to an inanimate object that cannot suffer.)

Californians voters will be asked to vote on two opposite initiatives: One will enshrine same-sex marriage into law, formally repealing Proposition 8 in case the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Obergefell. The second would enshrine transphobia. [voiceofsandiego.org]

A Catholic advocacy group created an AI chatbot to answer religious questions. The bot claimed to be a priest, said masturbation is a “grave moral disorder” and that it’s OK to baptize babies in Gatorade. [businessinsider.com]

I went down a YouTube rabbit hole of 60s kitsch pop music

One Tin Soldier youtu.be/o8JtNHGSO…

Written by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, first recorded by Canadian folk group The Original Caste. A 1971 cover by Jinx Dawson, lead vocalist of Coven, became a hit in the US after being featured in the movie “Billy Jack.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Tin_Soldier

I’m pretty sure we had this 45 when I was a kid.

I never saw Billy Jack, although my 8th Grade social studies class did a table reading from the paperback version of the script over the course of several days. Our teacher, Mr. Geig, was a hippie. I also read the Mad Magazine parody.

Here’s a trailer of the movie.

youtu.be/bc9ef9RhD…

It looks … earnest.

“Coven” was a pioneering metal band that used occult themes, and introduced the “sign of horns” to metal.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cove…

“One Tin Soldier” is an example of a “strophic ballad,” where all the verses are sung to the same music.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stro…

It is also an example of the pop genre, “This song isn’t long enough so just repeat a couple of bits of it so it fills out the 45.”

Also: “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” by Paper Lace (1974) youtu.be/T2seUCc3o…

Paper Lace didn’t succeed with the song—Bo Donaldson & the Heywoods recorded the hit version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Don%27t_Be_a_Hero

Here are Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods. They are 70s-tastic.

www.facebook.com/BoDonalds…

However, Paper Lace—“reportedly the most successful band Nottingham ever produced”—scored a hit with “The Night Chicago Died,” which is a fun song and this is a fun video.

youtu.be/w2OFubG0d…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pape…

And here’s “Knock Three TImes” by Tony Orlando and Dawn.

youtu.be/uw2eitx9L…

I had a conversation with a new neighbor. His name is Oscar. He has a husband, whose name is not Felix. This seems like a lost opportunity.

I can’t understand why the dog continued with her behavior

One of our neighbors has a new dog, a big rambunctious golden retriever that repeatedly jumped up on me to say hello. Our neighbor would drag the dog away and the dog would race back and jump up on me again.

This was despite my attempts to discourage the dog by (1) skritching her behind her ears (2) rubbing the dog’s cheeks and (3) telling the dog she was a beautiful girl and very sweet.

I was awakened with a start in the middle of the night

I was abruptly jarred out of a sound sleep by terrible screaming. At first I thought Julie was in great distress next to me. Then I thought it might be a siren close by the house.

Then I figured out what it was. One of the cats was meowing. Loudly and directly into my ear. She wanted me to pay attention to her, so I reached out and gave her skritches, which I’m sure will not enforce this negative behavior.

I’m leveling the playing field, transforming and revolutionizing business models and delivering actionable insights. What are you up to today?

Elon Musk wants to turn Tesla’s fleet into AWS for AI — would it work?

Andrew J. Hawkins [theverge.com]:

During last night’s earnings call with investors, Elon Musk threw out an all-time late-night dorm room bong sesh of an idea: what if AWS, but for Tesla?

Musk, who loves to riff on earnings calls, compared the unused compute power of millions of idle Tesla vehicles to Amazon’s cloud service business. If they’re just sitting there, he mused, why not put them to good use to run AI models? (Also, have you ever really looked at your hands? No, I mean really looked?)

Something I wrote: Blue Planet OSS lets you BYO AI fierce-network.com — Telcos can beef up back-office operations by bringing their favorite AI to Blue Planet’s Cloud Native Platform for OSS.

📷 Things I saw walking the dog this morning

A small front porch of a house with a white door, white railings, and steps. There is an outdoor table with chairs and a folded green umbrella, decorative signs including one for Route 66, and some potted plants.

Home with a front porch displaying an American flag, a pride flag, and large blue planters. A Buddha statue sits by the steps, and various plants are visible.

Sweatshirts hung carefully on a chain-link fence.

I walked by Maryland Avenue Elementary School, La Mesa, just as kids were being dropped off, and saw these sweatshirts hung carefully from the fence. Why was that done?

I walked past a school this morning and saw a couple of dozen sweatshirts. neatly pinned spread-eagled on a chain link fence. What’s up with that?

“I’m a major hypochondriac. I won’t even masturbate anymore. I’m afraid I might give myself something.”—Richard Lewis

We watched the first episode of Shogun. I don’t understand a lot of what’s going on, but I think I like it.

How Meta is paving the way for synthetic social networks

Casey Newton [platformer.news]:

The first era of Facebook was for talking with friends and family. The second, TikTok-influenced era of the company is more focused on content from creators and other people you don’t know.

This week, we got a glimpse of the era yet to come: one where we interact regularly with both people and bots – perhaps not even always knowing, or caring, which one we are talking to.

I started on social media just to talk with other people. Some of these were actual friends and family; others came to be friends through long interactions online. We were all at the same level.

Then I started following celebrities. We occasionally interacted, but mostly I just consumed what they produced. And that’s cool. Like everybody reading this, I grew up having what’s come to be called “parasocial relationships” with fictional characters and the actors who played them.

Now I’m supposedly going to have parasocial relationships with AIs? I’m skeptical.

Some ways I find ChatGPT and generative AI useful today

  • Generating questions for interviews. ChatGPT is surprisingly great at that.
  • Generating images.
  • Occasionally writing draft introductions to articles, as well as conclusions, descriptions and summaries. I’ve always had trouble writing that kind of thing. I don’t use the version ChatGPT generates—I tear that up and write my own—but ChatGPT gets me started. I don’t do this often, but I’m grateful when I do.
  • Casual low-stakes queries, when I remember to use ChatGPT for that. “What was the name of the movie that was set in a boarding house for actresses that starred Katherine Hepburn?” “Stage Door.” “Was Lucille Ball in that one too?” “Yes.” “Was that Katherine Hepburn’s first movie?” “No.” And ChatGPT provided some additional information. I probably could have gotten that information from Google, but ChatGPT was faster.
  • I find otter.ai extremely useful for transcriptions, likewise Grammarly for proofreading. Those applications use AI, but do they use GenAI? I don’t know.

My big problem, and the reason I don’t us ChatGPT more, is that ChatGPT lies. Not only that, but it lies convincingly. A convincing liar is even worse than a liar. I don’t have much use for an information source that I can’t trust. I don’t see an obvious way to solve this problem.

Tempest in a teapot And by “teapot” I mean massage parlor

Lloyd Evans, theater critic for the British magazine The Spectator, writes about how he attended a lecture by a woman political philosopher and found her so attractive that he was distracted, so he went to a business that we in the US would call a “rub and tug” and had sexual relations with a prostitute.

“My (surprisingly) decent proposal” The Spectator

I’ve seen a few disparaging comments on social media about Evans’ article, so I found it and read it, and it was … fine. It was a certain type of humor that isn’t for everyone. I enjoyed it, though I would not say I enjoyed it a lot. The author makes himself look like a pathetic loser, but that is the point of that type of humor.

My only quibble with the article was that the author should not have named the lecturer. But the lecturer herself seems to be taking the incident in good humor so there was possibly no harm there either.

“Spectator Writer Faces Backlash Over ‘Grotesque’ Article As Named Lecturer Speaks Out” mediaite.com

The Spectator is apparently a conservative magazine, so this has become a minor football in the culture wars. Focus, people! Don’t get worked up about a slight, ephemeral article. There is far more important work to be done.

A member of Delta’s Diamond top-tier frequent flyer program is getting backlash for habitual snitching on flight attendants who violate company policy by using their personal smartphones during flights. Ironically, the snitch is herself violating company policy. [onemileatatime.com]

Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now [theverge.com] —  Meta is putting its AI assistant across Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook and the company’s next major AI model, Llama 3, is here.

Is Apple Universal Control unreliable?

I just set it up yesterday between two Macs located about three feet from each other, and find it’s flaky. I can move my mouse pointer and keyboard control between Macs about half the time. Other times, the mouse pointer stops at the screen edge.

The Macs are on Wi-Fi. Maybe it’d work better if I connected them with a USB-C cable?

They are a 2024 MacBook Air and 2024 MacBook Pro.

A San Diego state senator's bill would ban the plastic bags you buy when you forget yours

“The bill would tighten standards for reusable bags and require stores to provide 100% recycled paper bags or let consumers use reusable bags.” [nbcsandiego.com]

If I’m reading this right, the plastic bag ban actually increased plastic bag waste, as grocery stores started charging customers nominally for heavier so-called “reusable” bags.

We buy those bags and reuse them once or twice until they get too dirty. We haven’t gone in on cloth bags.

‘Intentional’ AT&T cable cut takes down Sacramento airport comms — The Sacramento Sheriff’s Office is reportedly investigating a cable cut that snarled check-ins at Sacramento International Airport. [fierce-network.com]. Something I wrote with Liz Coyne.

A rule I try to live by: Why do old men wear white athletic socks with sandals? Because they don’t care what other people think about how they look.

And another: People spend far less energy thinking about us than we think they do. People barely notice us at all. (Unless we are Taylor Swift.)

I just looked up “fuggedaboutit” in the dictionary to make sure I’m spelling it right.

Our new coffee machine makes 12 cups so I feel the need to make 12 cups even though I normally drink less. I’m sure this will not end up with my being awake at 3:30 in the morning scrubbing the bathroom grout with a toothbrush.

A history of disco in America–not so much the music as the cultural movement. I lived through it and learned some things while listening to this podcast. [The Rest Is History]

It’s Still Alive — “Frankenstein” is often presented as a warning against new technology run amok, but historian Jill Lepore argues there’s a lot more going on in that book.

Now I think I need to re-read “Frankenstein.” And Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr might find that interesting too.

Something I saw while walking the dog: This house has a lot going on–a model train set in the front yard, and signage on the driveway gate. Note random cactus

Sign on a driveway gate reads 'No Soliciting: Charity, food/menus, estimates, petitions, politics, religion, salesman, magazines—NO EXCEPTIONS' House with a model train layout in the front yard Another view of the front-yard model train layout

I’ve been abstaining from posting political content, news headlines, and speculation about the current global crisis

I don’t feel like I have anything to contribute to the discussion. My contribution might, in fact, be harmful; I’d basically be like one of those guys on Twitter who suddenly became epidemiology experts in 2020 on the basis of watching a bunch of YouTube videos and knowing how to use Excel. Also, I have other things I want to do with my time. And I mostly don’t like reading that kind of thing on social media, so why should I push it on other people?

I do keep up and have strong opinions, and I have been known to rant about them at length face-to-face or on the phone. I used to be more opinionated on social media, but I don’t do that here anymore—not much, at least.

I do have one or two social media friends who have no training in foreign policy or politics, but who post knowledgeably about those subjects. I do enjoy reading their posts, and find them insightful. And I enjoy discussions with them—on their timelines. Not so much here.

📷 The scrap of cloth in Minnie’s mouth was once a toy duck. It was one of the first toys we got for her when we brought her home as a pup 11 years ago.

Close-up face photo of the most adorable big-brown-eyed dog in the world. She is holding a tattered scrap of yellow cloth in her mouth.

What signal do I send when I’m walking the dog and I wave to a neighbor with a full poop bag in my hand?

“A tendency to the lurid.” Reading the November, 1932 Astounding Stories

I am reading the November, 1932 issue of Astounding Stories, starting with “The Cavern of the Shining Ones,” by Hal K. Wells. The magazine is on archive.org.

Archive.org has a library of pulps and other popular magazines, going back more than 100 years. At a glance, the most recent pulps seem to date to the 1990s.

Months ago, I chatted with a gentleman at a local community association meeting who makes a hobby out of browsing the pulp archive. He likes dark fantasy magazines from the 1920s and 1930s. He said he occasionally finds a gem from someone who only ever wrote one to three stories, and who is completely forgotten.

“The Cavern of the Shining Ones” isn’t a gem, but it’s not bad. It has a Lovecraft vibe. A party of men, recruited from Los Angeles’s homeless population by a mysterious scientist who wears goggles day and night, is searching for something in the desert. I’m only partway through the story, but I believe they will find the thing, and it will not go well for them.

Here’s the author’s biography, just one paragraph on the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

He was born in 1899 in Little Hocking, Ohio, and died in 1979 in Torrance, California. He saw active service in World War I and published “The Brass Key” in Weird Tales in 1929. Another title: “Zehru of Xollar” (1932). His work had “a tendency to the lurid.” I’ll just bet it did.

Archive.org offers downloadable PDFs of old magazines. (Other formats too.) I downloaded the PDF, loaded it onto my iPhone and can easily read it there. Even after being on the Internet for more than 30 years, sometimes it strikes me with awe.

I used a 😊 when I should’ve used a 🙁 in a business email, so my making a good first impression in the first week of my new job is ruined.

I've been hired!

The eclipse isn’t the only cosmic event happening today. I’m pleased to say that I’ve joined the new website Fierce Network full-time as executive editor for reports, helping to launch its new research arm, contributing regularly to the site and authoring our new line of industry research focused on AI, cloud, open RAN, broadband and more.

Fierce Network launched Friday. Editor-in-chief Liz Miller has more about the new site here—tl;dr it’s a roll-up of Silverlinings, Fierce Telecom and Fierce Wireless.

Credit to Liz for the bit about the eclipse. It’s my first day on the new job and I figure it’s a great idea to get things going by ripping off the boss.

NYC’s AI chatbot was caught telling businesses to break the law. The city isn’t taking it down [apnews.com] — “Asked if a restaurant could serve cheese nibbled on by a rodent, [the bot] responded: ‘Yes, you can still serve the cheese to customers if it has rat bites,’ before adding that it was important to assess the ‘the extent of the damage caused by the rat’ and to ‘inform customers about the situation.’”

Crying Myself to Sleep on the Icon of the Seas [theatlantic.com] — Curmudgeonly travel writer Gary Shteyngart takes a luxury cruise on the world’s largest cruise ship:

The maiden voyage of the Titanic (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise….

📷 Something I saw while walking the dog: This osprey, on a platform on a pole about 50 feet above a footpath around Lake Murray. I shot the photo on the 5x setting on the iPhone and then cropped it heavily, which is why it’s pixelated.

Hawk-like bird standing with wings folded on a pole sticking out from a platform, with the bird's next on the platform. Plumage is dark gray from this distance, with a white head and chest.

Anyone who fears that we may be wiped out by artificial intelligence should just buy a robot vacuum cleaner and watch the unshakable determination with which it returns, over and over again, to the one corner of the room where it gets stuck every time.

A realistic “Terminator" movie would consist of two hours of well-meaning humans patiently disentangling the T-800 from the rug or dragging it out from under the bookshelf while it beeps pathetically for assistance.

Star Trek: Future Astronauts Having Feelings

I want to like “Star Trek: Discovery” more than I do. The characters all seem to be having big emotions and I’m supposed to share those big emotions, but I do not. The show is about Future Astronauts Having Feelings. The show seems to be popular among Millennial and Gen Z LGBTQ+ people, and that’s fine.

In general, the entire Trek franchise seems to be a warm nostalgia bath. And I don’t mean that in a good way. They’ve got a whole Galaxy to play with and they keep coming back to the same characters, races, species and tropes. It’s 1,000 years in the future and hey look there’s a shout-out to Jean-Luc Picard.

Also, why doesn’t the franchise bring back Shatner and Takei? They barely used Walter Koenig and Wil Wheaton. What’s up with that?

I thought yesterday was Thursday and I thought today was Thursday. Eventually, I will be right.

The best Stephen King novels chosen by you: NPR readers share their favorites. [npr.org] — I have read all but one of these and can confirm they’re terrific.

We watched the pilot episode of “Law and Order,” which first aired in 1990. Only 495 episodes remaining.

If ActivityPub support remains off by default for Threads, fewer than 1% of Threads users will activate it. They have more important and interesting things to do than to understand the fediverse.

Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

John “Swampy” Barnett, a 26-year quality manager at Boeing, tried unsuccessfully to stop management from destroying the company for the benefit of vulture investors. He died of apparent suicide recently, but his former colleagues don’t believe his death was self-inflicted. By Maureen Tkacik. [prospect.org]

Cory Doctorow notes that whether or not Boeing assassinated Barnett, company CEO Jim McNerny and its leadership killed hundreds of people on crashed 737s through willful incompetence. McNerney was proudly contemptuous of competence, publicy calling senior engineers “phenomenally talented assholes" and rewarding managers who forced them out of the company. [pluralistic.net]

How the Atlantic Went From Broke to Profitable in Three Years. Rather than chasing clicks and breaking news, the 167-year-old magazine, co-founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson, raised subscription prices and hired top talent; “we make something worth buying.” [wsj.com]

AI hallucinates imaginary software packages, which could be used to trick developers into installing malware. theregister.com

📷 Here’s something I saw at the park yesterday.

📷 Here’s something I saw in San Francisco in 2018.

A Chinatown, San Francisco streetscape, with an old-fashioned commercial building with Chinese signage in the foreground, and the Transamerica Pyramid skyscraper in the background.