James Fairbairn

This pale moon ebony model is a limited edition (basically) that came out last year and was discontinued the same year. We stumbled across a floor model in Guitar Center.

It was missing the knob on the selector switch and needs new strings. But since it's out of stock almost everywhere, I […]

Ibanez QX527PE-NTF - a 7-string headless guitar with a beautiful pale moon ebony top that has lovely contrasting black and brown grain and angled gold frets. Gnarly axe.

Got my son his new guitar today - he had been saving up and asking family for guitar fund money rather than birthday presents. There are few feelings more satisfying for me than seeing and hearing him engrossed in his new instrument. He's been composing and recording all evening.

One fun thing about working in a foreign country ("two nations divided by a common language" etc) is that you can just make up idioms as you see fit, and the locals will just assume that's one of those quaint British sayings

Like, “<outlines complex and thorny issue>... ... So I wanted to ask […]

@phae this is automation I can get behind!

In a way I think luddism makes people better engineers.

It’s quite likely that your stock portfolio will hold its value longer than you’ll be able to buy food reliably.

(I’m sure I’ve said this in some form elsewhere but that was probably on the bird site)

Turkey vulture with ruffled feathers perched on the end of a roof

@billseitz we get a lot of them over here (SF Bay Area)

@billseitz turkey vulture?

David Suzuki, one of Canada's greatest voices on climate and the biosphere says that it's too late and that the fight against climate change is lost:

https://www.ipolitics.ca/2025/07/02/its-too-late-david-suzuki-says-the-fight-against-climate-change-is-lost/

"The units of survival are going to […]

There’s always going to be a guy above you in the energy consumption hierarchy who isn’t going to reduce his demand on the system. That doesn’t absolve you of reducing your demand below a level compatible with a habitable planet.

Capital is busy completing the construction of a no-escape two-tier economy society. And LinkedIn thought leaders think they can get in on that upper tier if they are loud enough in their support of “disruptive change”

Reading Kingsnorth’s “Against the Machine” and Kemp’s “Goliath’s Curse” back to back is quite a trip

Recommended, so far :)

Design can help tilt what we do towards who we want to be We should design for moral coherence. If we design for anything, our designs should aim to bring our habits and actions into line with the values we truly hold, or perhaps more accurately, the values we wish we were able to hold. “The type of self I am capable of being is incredibly constrained by my context.” – Taylor Guthrie, https://overcast.fm/+AA2tlVFUsQs/45:28

“The type of self I am capable of being is incredibly constrained by my context.”
https://exitmusic.world/design-can-help-tilt-what-we-do-towards-who-we-want-to-be

I love how the default assumption of how we solve the problems caused by libertarian-motivated AI takeover is that we will implement fiscal and monetary communism

My thought here is beyond the individual yearning for homestead life, what conditions make the shift towards a radically lower-impact way of life both desirable and feasible for many of the heaviest consumers in the world today? #permaculture #degrowth #subsistence #postindustrial #downshifting […]

Who has written on the implications and practicalities of rehabilitating subsistence, in preparation for the transition of heavily-financialized economies to a post-growth world?

#permaculture #degrowth #subsistence #postindustrial

The technological mindset _We have such a poverty-stricken understanding of what life is, that when we create new technologies that replace living processes, we can’t even comprehend what it is that the technology replaced._ It’s tragic that ideas such as “harmony” and “flourishing” are mostly now written off as feel-good eastern mysticism, or even worse, new-age woo, even while western science itself is only just beginning to discover them for itself. That mycorrhizae are essential to soil ecosystem health and thereby fertility, and that trees are essential to the presence of mycorrhizae, are now accepted in botany and ecology, is still irrelevant to agricultural industries that look at soil as a porous medium for the conversion of seeds into crops by the addition of nitrogen compounds produced with unimaginable quantities of fossil fuel. That people have, for thousands of years, had practices that keep soil alive, able to hold water, and a fertile bed for the cultivation of plants without the help of the Haber-Bosch process, is irrelevant to those who see feeding 10 billion humans in a dangerously warming world as an engineering challenge. The problem with ancient practices, of course, in a modern world, is that the processes that ancient practices supported are no longer the means by which industrial humans make their living in the world. Our connection to the physical is largely mediated by machines – machines that cause or require the destruction of natural systems and traditional practices. We have evolved our machines to have effects at ever-larger scales, and in so doing have pushed living systems, which exist in definite and local places, to the margins. All of nature is grist to the mill. Well, if we have evolved technologies with global footprints, surely we should have evolved practices of care with global footprints too? But of course, no – the very cast of mind required to produce these kinds of machine is that which devalues care and other such old-fashioned inclinations. We act as if, as long as we produce enough, efficiently enough, we can outrun the need for care. We just need to keep designing new artificial components of the pyramid of human technology to replace the few remaining natural systems that are keeping us alive, as, one by one, they give up the ghost.

I spammed this out last night, and tonight, coincidentally, I was reminded that Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, has just come out. Downloaded it and taking it in in deep draughts.

https://exitmusic.world/the-technological-mindset

Revolutionary insight: no amount of smarts can put a limit on the amount by which you can be wrong

Random org design thought: should you design your processes and practices such that an individual person can make a disproportionate difference to the outcome, or not? Under what conditions? And how?

These days seem full of tragic irony.

I bet @RuthMalan has a good answer for this :)

Is it generally the case in complex systems that, while complexification can happen gradually, simplification tends to happen quite suddenly?

Spade-toothed whale - Wikipedia

The spade-toothed whale has never been seen alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spade-toothed_whale

#Marine #Whales #Science

Has YouTube video playback been incredibly flaky for anyone else the last couple of days? Videos not stopping when navigating to another page in the browser; Shorts not starting in the iOS app…

It occurred to me that, beyond the LLM/software/platform nonsense, in the world of physical industries, new technologies are emerging that remove many good reasons for big companies to have monopolies on the means of production.

So this is what I mean by convivial sociotechnologies disrupting […]

In the last 24 hours, I've shifted from

"we must go from disruptive industrial technology [back] to the convivial"

to

"convivial sociotechnologies must disrupt the industrial"

and I feel a lot more hopeful as a result

Speaking of the Fediverse making strides recently, I'm pretty excited about Ghost's ActivityPub implementation. After a bit of a struggle (docs are barely existent) I have got AP working on my self-hosted Ghost instance!

Can anyone tell me how these companies are actually measuring that X% of the code they write is AI now? Seems like bullshit to me

Maybe I’m oversensitive, but I find these behaviors kind of soul-destroying. Actually, I think they are carefully calibrated to make you _think_ you are being oversensitive, and that you should just be tougher.

Sadly, this is part of a set of behaviors that I might call the American Leadership […]

Coining the term PASSIVE EXECUTIVE:

When they insert your name (or “team” or whatever) into what they’re saying in order to assert their dominance. It uses their status to shift into an order-giving frame in a way that it’s hard to push back against without seeming petty or defensive.

Eg1 “I […]