Summer Guitar Lull

I’m in a bit of a summer lull with guitar.

Bad: I’ve totally fallen off my discipline, and haven’t accomplished even one thing on my summer goals list

Good: I’ve been having fun. Playing riffs with totally incoherent tones, and having a blast — Lemme tell you, there’s a punk cover of Cissy Strut waiting to happen I’m sure.

I’m sure I’ll find my discipline again. But maybe I’ll go dig my loop pedal out until then.

Redefining Prosperity

I really hate the term prosperity — no one means the same thing when they say it, and a heck of a lot of people think it means “I’m gonna be a {million,billion,trillion}aire”.

Maybe it’s time for a new definition of prosperity:

  • The ability find friends, make friends, see friends.
  • Time to enjoy the changing of the seasons.
  • The time and money required to have a hobby, or three.
  • Time with your kids; the resources to have kids if you want them.
  • The freedom to feel like a hobby is worth doing rather than a dereliction of your duty to the machine.
  • Access to people who make you feel whole; access to community that makes you feel whole. Encouragement and support to grow our communities, and build bonds.
  • Jobs with dignity, jobs without moral injury.
  • The freedom and safety to explore different versions of yourself; intentionally low costs for decisions.
  • The ability to stop feeling like the machine is grinding you down.
  • The ability to become ill or disabled without fearing for your life falling down around you because you have become useless to the machine.
  • The freedom to make art if that calls to you.
  • The freedom to partake of art if that calls to you.

What does concrete policy look like that chases this kind of world? I don’t know that I have great answers. There’s a few things:

  • 30 hour work weeks?
  • Job Sharing?
  • Community business support?
  • Basic Income?
  • Wealth taxation?
  • No more billionaires? Wealth maximums?

That certainly feel aligned, but I can’t say I have all the answers.

I yearn for a politics that fights for these sorts of things. I yearn for a prosperity that focuses not on what you’ve got in your bank account, but the lives you’ve touched, the fun you’ve had, and the safety you’ve felt while doing it.

A letter to the ministers of Environment and AI

Just sent this letter to the ministers of the environment for Canada and Alberta, as well to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation.

Honourable Ministers,

The momentous rise of AI has many people wanting to build data centres. While I personally am skeptical of the long term impact in terms of jobs, even if you take claims at face value it is incredibly important that we not let a burgeoning industry push us backwards on climate goals, as neat as it seems.

We’ve already seen bad outcomes in the US and Canada from the chase of data centres:

- In Memphis, you have xAI building illegal gas turbines [1]

- You have AI data centres draining water from communities [2]

- Data centres being built in Alberta [3], which has one of the least green electricity grids in the nation.

A nation we need to establish some ground rules. New data centres need to be

1. Using renewable energy, or create appreciably more green generation than they are expected to consume. Carbon Capture, if deployed, must be required rather optional.

2. Be tightly regulated on their water consumption.

3. Have incentives provided to use waste heat from them for secondary purposes. Every data centre is an opportunity to build a district energy system and heat storage system to help heat homes through the winter, providing climate impacts.

We have an opportunity to set our regulatory environment to minimize our regret in the future.

We also should encourage the industry to change. We should be working with international partners to start labelling model hosts with a “tokens-per-tone” measure of CO2 intensity, and encourage the development of time-of-use token pricing to build efficient use of renewable resources into models.

[1]: https://www.selc.org/press-release/new-images-reveal-elon-musks-xai-datacenter-has-nearly-doubled-its-number-of-polluting-unpermitted-gas-turbines/

[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/

[3]: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/property-report/article-new-data-centre-will-be-one-of-canadas-most-powerful/

Style in the Age of Robots

who — who - wants to bet that — in the age -robots- we’re going to see ]reams[ and ]]reams[[ of stylistic evolution. <broken tags, for effect, syntax;;;;;;;;;;;;;;with’‘‘‘‘‘style. howbettter to show ur hu👨 than being [[u[n[g[o[v]e]r]n]a]b]l]e] by style.

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\\\\\F\u\r\t\h\e\r\m\r\e stYle vill =>=> move <=------ fast; AFTERALL; ‘‘‘‘models’‘‘ tak tim to 🚆.

Dittttttttto the vIS-yu-al arts?

Too Many Ways to Make a Link

It’s become exhausting how many different ways I have to remember to make a link in editors:

  • Select text, ⌘-K, paste link
  • Select text, paste link over top
  • Type [markdown](link syntax)
  • ...

Of course, these are all mutually independent, so half the time I try one, hit ⌘-Z, then try again.

Anyhow. Gripe.

Finished Finnish

After about 11 months or so of poking at Duolingo, a few weeks ago, I finally finished their Finnish course. So now I blog, as is my tradition.

I originally started in anticipation of a trip to Helsinki last year, and then I continued on my return because frankly, I was having fun stretching my brain in a new direction. Something that I have learned about myself is that I enjoy challenging myself. I do it with guitar, reading classics, and more, but languages have really not been an area of stretch in a long time -- I basically gave up learning languages after a pair of semesters of German in highschool. Every time I do spend the time to push myself on something I am always gently surprised at the out-sized reward for it.

Finnish

As I said, selecting Finnish was rooted in travel, but continuing was because I found it fascinating. There are so many pieces that are wildly different than English, and yet, here and there little bits of sharing.

Here’s a few things that really stood out while I learned Finnish:

  • No articles: no ‘the’, ‘a’, etc. “pöyta” rather than “a table”
  • No implied gender in their “she/he” word: “Hän on onellinen” is “she is happy”... or “he is happy”; not determined by “hän”.
  • A very straightforward spelling to sound mapping (phonology?) -- for them most part, so long as you hear the word correctly you can spell it, even if you have no idea what it means, and similarly with practice, you can pronounce words even if you don’t know what they mean. This doesn’t mean everything is easy, but compare to the nightmare that is English (row, row, roe, tear, tear, shower, tower) and it’s a breath of fresh air.
  • At least for the verbs I learned, conjugation was super simple and reliable. For example “me” means “we”, and most things conjugated for the “we” form in turn end in “-mme”, like “olemme” or “juoksemme”

For more interesting reading, this seems neat, and I wish I’d found it a heck of a lot earlier!

Duolingo

I have weird complicated feelings about Duolingo. On the one hand, the gamification and social pressure really does help someone come back day after day after day. As a real believer that skill acquisition is driven by putting in the time, this is a good thing for making someone actually successful in trying to acquire a language. However...

Where Duolingo falls down is that it fails to teach in places that teaching would be profoundly effective. Duolingo prefers to show example after example, hoping that after time you gather enough context to form a rule in your head. This to my mind horribly slows down your ability to succeed. Sometimes a one paragraph explanation is a super power.

Since I have finished their Finnish course, I’ve been trying out the maintenance track... and I have to say, I’m generally underwhelmed. I can feel the skill atrophying a bit already, about 3 weeks in.

ChatGPT

Work got the whole AI-all-the-things bug, and so last year they encouraged us to get ChatGPT enterprise licences. So I signed up. These days I’m starting to figure out there are places it’s helpful, but it was a long fallow period.

Where I did find it helpful was explaining and -naming- bits of Finnish grammar. While everyone is mad at AI for hallucinations and errors, what’s incredibly helpful is it’s ability to provide a name for a pattern. A pattern I got into was getting a question wrong in Duolingo, then conversing with ChatGPT about why what I said was wrong. It was both helpful and motivating.

A side note on Temporal

Despite reviewing a huge number of patches for Temporal, writing this was the first time I’ve used it. It’s pretty nice :) 

trip = Temporal.PlainDate.from("2024-06-11") 
recollected_duration = Temporal.Duration.from({days: 77}) // also approx
estimated_original_start = trip.subtract(recollected_duration).toString(); // "2024-03-26"

Arrian: Oh Bother

Lost to the ether of the internet, and bad decision making at Mozilla, is a toot I made in August of last year. My local archive has a copy though:

Nobody:
Nobody:
Nobody:
Nobody:
Me: … maybe I should read Arrian

So yeah. I read Arrian. Or more specifically, the Anabasis of Alexander.

Arrian seemed like a good choice. After having read Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon’s Hellenika the next chunk of Greek history chronologically was (almost) the story of Alexander the Great. Now, something I’ve appreciated about previous histories is when they’re written by contemporaneous sources, but I don’t think there’s much extant from contemporaneous sources about Alexander. Instead, the best ancient historical source seems to be Arrian, a Greek of Roman citizenship writing about 400 years after Alexander’s demise.

I read ancient history because I like to understand how ancient peoples saw the world. I find it fascinating to see the continuity of human experience over the last couple thousands years. I like insight into the people and players remembered by history. Pieces of their personality preserved in amber.

In Arrian I got almost none of that.

Honestly, Arrian is the most disappointing ancient history I have successfully finished. Of course, there is the alternative possibility: Arrian is boring because Alexander is boring, since his personality traits are not laudable or enjoyable to me as someone living through another era of rapacious conquest by the powerful.

The Story

Arrian attempts to faithfully recount the life of Alexander III of Macedon, starting from the beginning of his reign to his untimely demise. Unfortunately for me and my interests, his history is thorough and focused on finding a chronology and recounting the tales of battles and slaughters... so many battles, so many slaughters.

The basic thrust of Alexander’s life (as told by Arrian) seems to have been that after firming up Macedonian dominance in Greece, he set his sights eastward, and led an empire building expedition east for a decade. Finally, in India, he overwhelmed his troops ambition, and was forced to turn back. On his return to Babylon he planned to turn it into an administrative centre, before departing on an African campaign. Alas, through illness (or conspiracy says perhaps poison) he died there at 32. Shortly thereafter his empire broke apart, as there was no successor who could hold it together.

Despite being King of Macedon, as near as I can tell, he never returned to Macedon once he left, instead ruling his empire from afar.

The History

I find it fascinating that Alexander the Great is mentioned with sufficient frequency in modern discourse that I think many people, even if they know no details, are aware of his existence. Yet, I was interested to discover from this book and it’s introduction that despite his outsize influence over the ancient world and modern discourse, in a lot of ways he’s way less attested in sources than you would expect. Many primary sources were lost, and it seems he was a little particular about how he was portrayed. As a result, in a lot of ways we don’t have a great view of the real Alexander. This is made worse by the existence and popularity of the Alexander Romance, a heavily fictionalized biography tradition about Alexander which grew and evolved for a thousand years after his death. More on that below.

Apparently Arrian had access to a number of contemporary sources; at the outset of his history he lays out his sources as mostly being Aristobulus and Ptolomy I; their accounts are largely lost to us today. It is through Arrian that we have the best insight into these sources. To his credit, Arrian highlights where his sources diverge, and tries to weigh how he sees them.

Apologia

By the end of Arrian, I was pretty clear that Arrian was writing apologia. I am not sure how Alexander was viewed by the audience Arrian was writing for, but you get the distinct impression that there is a rehabilitation of image happening. Perhaps the most clear happening of this is where Alexander kills Kleitos in a drunken rage.

During a drinking session, Kleitos who I take to be an older soldier, insults Alexander by championing Phillip II -- Alexander’s father -- during the debacle. At some point, he insulted Alexander sufficiently that Alexander grabbed nearby spear, and speared him to death.

Arrian when recounting this has two goals: To make it clear that Kleitos’s behaviour is sufficient to justify his death, and make sure that we recognize Alexander’s overwrought grief that followed his act is sufficient to clear the stain from his reputation.

There are a number of other cases where Arrian seems to underweight or discount loathsome behaviour from Alexander:

  • His potential involvement in the burning of Persepolis
  • Numerous slaughters of civilians, particularly during his Indian campaign.

Compared to others I have Read

One interesting contrast I found between Arrian and Thucydides was the connection between campaign and the seasons. In Thucydides there was essentially “war season”, and then in the winter everyone went home. There was a cycle of the years. Arrian barely covers the cycle of years, and it is occasionally surprising the amount of time covered with relatively little mention. Only in a couple of places does Arrian bother to connect his narrative to nature, such as when Alexander departs too early in the spring for one campaign, facing winter weather to the detriment of his men.

Another contrast between Arrian and other authors I found was a fair amount of disinterest from Arrian about logistics. It’s mentioned only at a few points (for example, as Nearchus is failed by logistics sailing back from the Indus), but I have to imagine that the challenges of ruling an empire the size of Alexanders, feeding armies on giant marches, must have been true challenges, yet Arrian scarcely touches on it. He is focused on Alexander and his great deeds, not on the minutia of how it was actually done. I feel like logistics came up more in other histories as the authors were more involved in the

The Edition

To read Arrian I returned to the Landmark edition. I continue to appreciate the overall high quality of these editions (though the cover has a quote from the NYT Book Review: “The most thrilling volume in this fine series”, which I find truly laughable). The background provided by the fine introduction and prefaces was very helpful for situating Arrian, and the appendixes dug more deeply into things helpfully, without going on too much at length.

Alexander Romance

A major new thing I learned from reading Arrian actually has nothing to do with Arrian: The existence of the “Alexander Romance”. This is a literary tradition, started shortly after Alexander’s death which situates Alexander as mythical figure, giving him a supernatural conception (Mom gets laid by a Pharaoh who find his way to her bed in the shape of a dragon) and then tells a heavily fictionalized biography of him, as he encounters sages and fantastical figures over his journey, discussing philosophy and more with them.

I call this a literary tradition because the story, as it was retold, translated and copied, seems to have continuously grown adding new tales and new places for Alexander to weigh in.

Reading about this, I was struck by the parallels between this and fan-fiction, musing that Alexander was the first subject of fanfic. After finishing the book, I did some further reading on this, and found this wonderful essay “The 21st century Alexander Romance and Transformative Fiction (aka is it fanfic?)” on precisely this topic, by Reimena Yee, who has a graphic novel retelling of the Alexander Romance available. Yee’s take is “Maybe”, but she quotes at length from a Tumblr post which I think makes a pretty great case that Fanfic is really a 21st century phenomenon and trying to apply it ahistorically is a mistake.

What is particularly fascinating about the Alexander Romance is the scale and breadth of its impact, being well known for thousands of years. It seems to me that it is the Romantic Alexander who is fairly well known, not the historical one!

Conclusion

The story of Alexander seems to be the story of someone born with an unslakable thirst for conquest. I was left at the end of Arrian without any motivation, any clear reason, beyond conquest for conquests sake. I found his life to be a boring meaningless slog. As Arrian approached the end of Alexander, and the omens began to turn, the livers without lobes, I was struck by a palpable relief: “Thank god, he’ll be dead soon”. I was utterly unconvinced by Arrian that there was anything valuable, anything worth emulating in Alexander.

We live in an era filled with shades who share this unslakable thirst. We call them billionaires, and they shape the very bones of the world we live in today. We are surrounded by people like Arrian, who look on what they have wrought on the world, and seem to assume that simply because they have outsized impact they are therefore worth emulating.

Assorted Bits and Bobs

  • The assassination of Philip II is in some sense prologue to Arrian, but is told elliptically through Arrian nevertheless. The narrative is so bizarre and full of weighted allusion: So, Philip is assassinated. The assassin is then executed, but Alexander’s mother, Olympias, gives him an honourable tomb. Later we find out that Philip and Alexander were on the outs a bit because Philip married another woman, Euridike. So I guess we are to take from this (and it appears others do too) that Olympias might have had a hand in the murder of her husband.
  • The city of Tyre in Lebanon has existed since antiquity. I found it particularly interesting to discover that it was an island when Alexander came to conquer it. To enable siege machines to work his troops built a mole or causeway from the shore to the island. This causeway then began to gather silt, and now 2350 years later, the city of Tyre is now a peninsula. This kind of “Thing in the world you can point to as being part of history” is definitely my jam, in the same way as I love the story of the Tunnel of Eupalinos.