I think I’ve now recommitted to using iTerm2. I had been using Ghostty for a couple of years, long enough to have forgotten why I switched. But two things about iTerm2 made me come back:
With Ghostty, I was always looking around for the right preferences file and trying to figure out how to declaratively state the preferences.
Worked much of the early morning on a reliable backup process for my Indigo data. For many years - at least a decade - my Indigo instance has run on an old “Trashcan” Mac Pro. I honestly cannot believe that the thing is running still. It’s from the Intel Mac era of course, circa 2014 and produces an incredible amount of heat. Yet someshow it just keeps on ticking. But I imagine its days are numbered, so I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what will happen when it dies completely. Obviously recreating my Devices, Variables, Actions, Triggers and Schedules is the most important. With dozens, maybe hundreds of bespoke and interlocking scripts, it would be a major undertaking to create it all from scratch.
Here’s an idea for Indigo scripting - instead of creating a profusion of variables, why not store bundled related data as a JSON string inside of a single variable? For example, today I was working on a state machine for garage door automation. While I could have used multiple variables, it made better sense to stuff all the related state data in GDO_STATUS e.g.
{
"version": 1,
"doors": {
"LEFT": {
"phase": "idle",
"original": "open",
"expected": "closed",
"movement_seen": true,
"started_at": 1788969098.0042272,
"deadline": 1788969128.0042272,
"next_check_at": 1788969115.1878028,
"finished_at": 1788969114.1878028,
"result": "closed"
}
}
}When U.S. Republicans talk about “six genders,” do they really mean “cis-gendered”? Are they really that stupid? Rhetorical question.
I cancelled my Cursor subscription today. It was a great application when I first began using it. When first starting out using agents for coding, having the agent and chat window embedded in the IDE made it easy. But Elon Musk’s SpaceX company bought the company; and I could no longer ethically justify handing money each month to the very man who is attempting to destroy U.S. democracy and who is openly racist and a fascist.
I ran across this the other day. I get it. The ubiquitous interconnection of everything is exhausting. The holy principle of “frictionlessness” is just a facade. Whatever has no friction just makes it easier to get to the next layer of the thing. Ultimately it usually makes things worse because there’s more to do. Self-checkout is easy until the kiosk starts complaining about a bag. A bag - what have we come to?
The point is simply that huge disparities in wealth, property, and status make a mockery of freedom. The consolidation of wealth and power over the past forty years in the United States, mimicked more recently in many states in the Global South following neoliberal policies, has created a situation that the anarchists foresaw. Cumulative inequalities in access to political influence via sheer economic muscle, huge (statelike) oligopolies, media control, campaign contributions, the shaping of legislation (right down to designated loopholes), redistricting, access to legal knowledge, and the like have allowed elections and legislation to serve largely to amplify existing inequalities. It is hard to see any plausible way in which such self-reinforcing inequalities could be reduced through existing institutions... Democratic institutions have, to a great extent, become commodities themselves, offered up for auction to the highest bidder.
The last strand of anarchist thought I definitely wish to distance myself from is the sort of libertarianism that tolerates (or even encourages) great differences in wealth, property, and status. Freedom and (small “d”) democracy are, in conditions of rampant inequality, a cruel sham as Bakunin understood. There is no authentic freedom where huge differences make voluntary agreements or exchanges nothing more than legalized plunder.
Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, and socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.
Zygmunt Bauman on the anxiety of modernity:
“there is always a suspicion … that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met, or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever.” — Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (2003)
I would like to propose a constitutional amendment that prohibits Sen. Ted Cruz (F-TX)1 from speaking or tweeting for seven days after a national tragedy. I’d also be fine with an amendment that prohibits him from speaking ever.
The “F” designation stands for Fascist. The party to which Cruz nominally belongs is more aligned with WW2-era Axis dictatorships than those of a legitimate free civil democracy. ↩︎