dylan baker

A screenshot from the r/xteinkereader subreddit, posted 16d ago by reddit user Wheel_Extra, titled Xteink X4 + Muji A7 Compact Notebook. It is captioned "Talk about the perfect duo ;)". The picture is of a light-skinned hand holding a green notebook the size of a palm with an e-ink reader of roughly the same size mounted on it. On the reader is a display showing two disembodied hands floating in the middle of a glowing aura.

A screenshot from the r/xteinkereader subreddit, posted 6d ago by reddit user cacheofthought, titled "Reading Quran on Way to Umrah on Xteink. Love this thing Read More Quran this Ramadan than I ever did." The picture is taken in the interior of a vehicle, where a light-skinned hand holds a small e-ink reader with Arabic writing on it.

A screenshot from the r/xteinkereader subreddit, posted 2d ago by reddit user trendli, titled "How the X4 fits on a iPhon 17 Pro Max with MagSafe". The picture is of a salmon-colored iphone with a small e-ink reader mounted squarely on the back of the phone.

I'd rather call my social media timelines "targeted" so I am reminded that I'm not *actually* the one doing any deciding

and let whatever bizarre and delightful hacking is going on over at r/xteinkreader be "personalization".

(seriously, it's such a delight to see what people are up to over there)

Like, I want less "personalized" like "algorithmically tuned optimizer based on our hyper-surveilled behavior"

& more "personalized" like "that which we ourselves make personal"— personalization that implies agency.

The Xteink X4 Is The Cheap, Hackable eReader That's Just Enough It has no touchscreen, no light, and it's under-powered. But the Xteink X4 has a devoted community that wants to make it sing.

"I have seen the word “flawed” used to describe it. As shipped and on a basic technical level this is true, but spiritually it is not."

Honestly, I want to reclaim the idea of "personalized" tech to refer to stuff like this.

aftermath.site/xteink-x4-ch...

like it's not that LLM-assisted coding in the hands of an experienced developer is useless. but there are so many (usually very human) problems it can't address or actively makes harder, which severely limit in how far vibe coding will get you.

This whole thread is 🎯

If you've written software with a team, you know that most of the time, most of the work is having meetings sorting out minutiae. & even in the coding, SO much work is in the testing, maintaining, documenting— where "vibes" won't cut it.

god a total aside but if the longtermists are sooo preoccupied with the hypothetical lives of billions of people in the distant future, why can't they be obsessed with like, ending single-use plastic production 😭

Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage. PLUS: 10,000 drivers call on Uber to repay stolen wages, a man is arrested at a public hearing about a data center and more.

Across the US, people fed up with Flock cameras surveilling their communities, and with local governments that are often unwilling to listen to concerns over privacy violations and ICE data sharing practices, are taking matters into their own hands—and tearing them down.

A meme image of three spidermans pointing at each other.

anyways if you've ever met me and found me to be remotely unique, I urge you to find a queer zine fair because I assure you you will find 1000 of me there

A picture of beaming Dylan, a white transmasculine person with dark hair, sitting behind a table at the Olympia zine fest. They are wearing a grey patterned button-down, a nametag reading "DYLAN!", and pronoun pins that read "he/him" and "they/them". In front of them are a bucket of multicolored laser-cut pronoun pins, a pile of pink mini-zines, a stack of white zines with a black-and-white collage in the center, and a pile of art books with a laser-cut cover with leaves printed on it, reading "one I never thought to ask."

this zine fair reminded me that tboys really do love to go through our first year of T and make a twee little zine about it huh, there were so many 😭💕

(pictured: me in 2018 at the Olympia Zine Fest, tabling with *my* twee little transition zines)

Anyways, zines delight me, analog media delights me, queer and trans people delight me, and I just thought I'd share.

Now, for the Dylan lore...

A small black-and-white art book. The cover is entirely black, except the title which reads "MULCH" in white, with the outline of dirt around it.

A top-down view of the book, showing that it has only 4 pages.

The final page of the book. On it are two drawings of cupped hands. The first hands are holding mulch, and there is text above it reading "when he came back the next day". The second hands show a dashed outline where the mulch was in the preceding picture. The text below it reads "we told him he was a ghost".

4. Mulch, by Eliza Harris (elizaharris.com)

I like its simplicity. It's small— 4.5"x5.5"— and only 4 pages long. It tells one poignant childhood story with just 53 words and small diagrams of mulch; a boy eats a flower, gets sick, goes home, and the other kids hold a fake funeral.

Another, partially-unfolded view of the book, this time from the front. You can see poetry on the first visible page (which comes from the middle of the book), and some black-and-white images on the subsequent pages. The text on the first page reads: "Limestone is known commonly for its commercial importance as a building material for flooring, building facades, monuments, landscaping, something ubiquitous its high fossil content has long fascinating researchers. When heated to temperatures of 1,700-1,800 degrees C its component parts are forcefully teased apart in a process called dissociation the stone is suddenly no longer a geology but an industry dissociation occurs largely to extract calcium carbonate which has the ability to neutralize or reduce acids to prevent corrosion, decay a vital ingredient in the production of concrete, plant fertilizer, glass archival paper, official documentation the ingredients to build an empire and write its history"

The back of the unfolded book. It is all blue cyanotype prints, with the shapes of netting, stones, string printed in white on the vibrant blue background.

The materiality of this book is so thoughtful— it feels like such a fitting medium for a dense and layered rock-poem, from its speckled off-white paper to its cyanotype backing bearing the imprint of rocks, string, netting.

A beautiful piece from start to finish.

A small, square art book. It has a blue cyanotype cover, which looks like a blue background with white outlined prints of different objects (in this case, some string, some netting, and some hard-to-identify shapes). Around the book is a bright orange paper strip that reads "A GEOLOGY BREAKS IN HALF TO GROW/ willa goettling".

The unfolded book, viewed from above. It folds out like an accordion, with a front and back cover and 3 accordion folds in between. In front of the book is the removed orange paper strip that had been holding the book closed.

3. A GEOLOGY BREAKS IN HALF TO GROW by willa goettling (www.willagoettling.com)

Another non-traditional book format, a concertina/accordion book. It is unbound; you unhook the outer paper fastener and the book, like the poem, unfolds.

"what quantifies limestone is its/ high quantity of calcium"

The cover of a fold-out zine/art book. It is square, with blue tape on the left and bottom edges. It has a pattern that looks like black-and-white newsprint, cut up in triangles to resemble a geometric quilt square, or perhaps an unfolded fortune teller. The center is highlighted with a bright pink risograph overlay. In the very middle, slightly off center, is the title, reading "wind up like this?"

An unfolded corner of the book. Printed vertically is a title, "4 Quilts by Rebecca Ann Jordan." Below that are instructions, which read "a suggested reading: BEGIN AT NOON, then continue clockwise until instinct compells you otherwise. there is no wrong way to enter". Printed horizontally next to this text, you can see some of poem titled "How did we wind up like this?", although much of the text is out of frame.

2. wind up like this? by Rebecca Ann Jordan

I am a sucker for non-traditional zine/art book formats, and this is no exception.

Four beautiful risograph quilt-like square panels, taped together with rocket ship-print washi tape, which you unfold to reveal a collection of poems.

The cover of a black-and-white, photocopied mini-zine with handwritten text. It reads "How to make a homemade canvas board with these materials: old t-shirt, powder milk, ruler, hardcover book, paint acrylic matte, peanut butter lid from jar, pencil, state spoon, 2 sheets of cardstock. By: Incarcerated Artist: J.C.H. [instagram logo] jch_convictedart". There are small drawings of each material next to its name.

A cropped image of one page inside the zine. There is a drawing of a spoon stirring liquid in a peanut butter jar lid on one side. On the other, you can see some instructions, which read "A) using your index finger scoop up some paste (if it sticks to your finger it's good consistency if not then its too watery) and spread it evenly on one side of the cardboard. B) Place the cardboard (paste side down) onto the cloth right on the outline. Press down. C) Turn board over and add paste to edges wrapping cloth over." Below this text is a small hand-drawn diagram depicting these instructions.

1. How To Make a Homemade Canvas Board, by Incarcerated Artist J.C.H. (instagram: jch_convictedart)

This, to me, embodies the core of zine-making. A black-and-white, pen-and-ink, to-the-point, photocopied microzine. It's thorough, it's practical, and it's deeply poetic.

A stand containing a wide variety of zines. In the background you can see the room is crowded, but can't see any faces.

A scrolling break of artistic delight:

I went to a trans art show/zine fair and got some new gems for my zine collection! Wanted to share a few of my favorites 🧵

(and stay for some Dylan lore at the end)

truly! take it from me, an engineer with many lefty engineering friends, there are many of us writing longingly about high-speed rail and building stuff like this www.hackster.io/news/a-porta...

incredible, no notes

🧵 1/ It’s hard to find hope amidst so much collapse.

But in the wreckage of today’s crises, people are also powering solutions — and The 51st, backed by the community of D.C., is one of them.

Will you help us build a local newsroom that a billionaire can’t break?

sigh

Not every question needs an instant answer. We can stay curious. We can reach out and help each other, not just locally, but in solidarity across languages and continents ✨

The website responded quickly to questions that drew on residents' cultural knowledge, like how to make Chilean sopaipillas, a fried pastry. When they didn't know the answer, they walked around the room to see if someone else did. “Quili.AI isn’t about always having an instant answer. It’s about recognizing that not every question needs one," Antiman said. "When residents don’t know something, they can say so, share perspective, or respond with curiosity rather than certainty.”

This work is a vivid reminder that the stakes of generative AI are very human: real communities are experiencing environmental and economic devastation at the hands of data center developers.

What I love most is that it's a reminder that to resist genAI is deeply human, too.

A screenshot from the quili.AI site showing a still from their intro video. A group of 10 Chilean people of various ages, ranging from a young child to older adults, are standing knee-deep in water. A man in the center of the group is holding a laptop. Closed captions read "For one day, we'll become your AI".

Asking the Quili.AI website to generate an image of a “sloth playing in the snow” didn't instantly produce an output, as ChatGPT or Google's Gemini would. Instead, someone responded in Spanish to wait a few moments and reminded the user that a human was responding. Then came a drawing about 10 minutes later: a penciled sketch of a cute and cartoonish sloth in a pile of snowballs, with its claws clutching one and about to throw it.

That's the landscape the residents of Quilicura are working in, trying to raise awareness and protect their water.

Cut to a few weeks ago, where a handful of residents invited people to send prompts to them, rather than to an AI chatbot. Behold: Quili.ai.

abcnews.com/Business/wir...

How We Investigated the Backyard of AI in Spain, Chile, and Mexico Leer en español. In October 2024, I came across a video in which Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, spoke bluntly about the environmental costs of artificial intelligence (AI). Schmidt, one of...

Looking at what it takes to even uncover what these tech companies are doing in Chile is eye-opening.

Think: data center developers establishing shell companies to hide identities, making local authorities sign NDAs, lying about their water sources.

pulitzercenter.org/resource/how...

AI’s backyard: A map of the 21st-century gold rush Internet giants are extracting basic resources and grabbing land to build their new data centers in Mexico, Chile, and Spain. This is a look at the impacts of several projects by Microsoft, Amazon, an...

Quilicura, Chile is an area with a lot of data centers. These massive air-conditioned buildings guzzle clean water in areas experiencing historical, long-term drought. Residents and activists are in prolonged battles over protecting their water.

english.elpais.com/technology/2...

A young Chilean man, captioned "Benji", holding up a hand-drawn picture of a dog eating spaghetti. There is an older Chilean woman in the foreground.

I wanted to write more about this recent piece of art I love from a few weeks back.

Quili.ai, or, a town's ambitious initiative to save its water from AI.

Want a picture of a dog eating spaghetti? Ask Benji. 🧵

(h/t to @karenhao.bsky.social for posting about this initially)

Reframing "Frugal AI" Timnit Gebru What happens when scale isn't treated as the ultimate marker of progress?

@timnitgebru.bsky.social tells us how “frugal AI” is actually an old concept—what’s new is the billionaire pipe dream of building a machine god. www.themaybe.org/reframing-im...

Ok technically this is only half not in English but I will always take the opportunity to plug one of my fave artists, if you don't listen to Lana Lubany she's a Palestinian artist and her music is SICK

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q701...

I think the way around the Seattle Freeze is to just wait until we win the superbowl

aww everyone's honking and people are cheering in public and interacting with strangers