Blog

McLuhan

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan... elucidated the ways our technologies at once strengthen and sap us. In one of the most perceptive, if least remarked, passages in Understanding Media, McLuhan wrote that our tools end up "numbing" whatever part of our body they "amplify." When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance ourselves from the amplified part and its natural functions.

When the power loom was invented, weavers could manufacture far more cloth during the course of a workday than they'd been able to make by hand, but they sacrificed some of their manual dexterity, not to mention some of their "feel" for fabric. Their fingers, in McLuhan's terms, became numb.

Farmers, similarly, lost some of their feel for the soil when they began using mechanical harrows and plows. Today's industrial farm worker, sitting in his air-conditioned cage atop a gargantuan tractor, rarely touches the soil at all—though in a single day he can till a field that his hoe-wielding forebear could not have turned in a month.

When we're behind the wheel of our car, we can go a far greater distance than we could cover on foot, but we lose the walker's intimate connection to the land.

...

In explaining how technologies numb the very faculties they simplify, to the point even of "autoamputation", McLuhan was not trying to romanticize society as it existed before the invention of maps or clocks or power looms. Alienation, he understood, is an inevitable byproduct of the use of technology. Whenever we use a tool to exert greater control over the outside world, we change our relationship with the world. Control can be wielded only from a psychological distance.

In some cases, alienation is precisely what gives a tool its value. We build houses and sew Gore-Tex jackets because we want to be alienated from the wind and the rain and the cold. We build public sewers because we want to maintain a healthy distance from our own filth. Nature isn't our enemy, but neither is it our friend.

McLuhan's point was that an honest appraisal of any new technology, or of progress in general, requires a sensitivity to what's lost as well as what's gained. We shouldn't allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we've numbed an essential part of our self.

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

Pancake People

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pancake People

I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. And such multi-faceted evolved personalities did not hesitate – especially during the final period of “Romanticism-Modern” – to cut down, like lumberjacks, large forests of previous achievement in order to heroically stake new claim to the ancient inherited land – this was the ploy of the avant-garde.

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.” A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance – as we all become “pancake people” – spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment of “super-consciousness”? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so – and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.

Richard Foreman

Phaedrus

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Phaedrus

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts.

But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.

Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

PHAEDRUS: Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country.

Plato, Phaedrus

LLMs and Decay

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

LLMs and Decay

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

I've had mixed feelings about LLMs since I first started using them, with ChatGPT 3.0 or something. I won't claim to have felt anything new - just scroll down any social media app and you'll see other expressions. I've felt everything from awe to terror to contempt to amusement to defiance, etc.

I think I need to stop using them. That's not a particularly easy decision to make. Or, rather, it's easy in the same way that it's easy to decide to eat right and to exercise. The follow-through is somewhat more difficult. The sound of "LLM go brr" is really satisfying for a guy like me who tends to have much more inspiration than time in which to write things.

They make me dumber, and I can't afford to be dumber. A few weeks back, I needed to do something in a repository and got an error back from Claude Code. I don't remember the error - exhausted usage plan, random 500, whatever - but it errored. And I thought, "well, shit, now I can't [do the thing]." And I sat there and I started to wait, and then I realized... I knew how to [do the thing] myself. It was a trivial series of commands. And I was more than a little horrified, and ashamed of myself, and not for the first time.

I'm already concerned about my attention span. I'm prone to doomscrolling, and sometimes I'll do it for hours. I don't know if it's depression or ADHD or what. But if I'm not doomscrolling, it's likely that I'm tabbing back and forth between instances of Claude Code, doing a bunch of things that create a lot of lines of code but that I don't really learn that much from.

And I need to be learning. I intend to move to France in 2028. I intend to be a damn sight more attractive to employers in France than I am now. And failing that, a damn sight more attractive to employers aux États-Unis. Or some other country. Farting around with little proofs-of-concept hasn't really done a whole lot for me so far, and I don't think it's likely to do much for me in the future.

You might suspect that I've been waiting a while to write this post, and that's true. It's part of the core premise behind this blog, which is "Nug Doug: Doing Better." Reading more books and thinking more about what I'm reading. Practicing writing in French (even though, I have to admit, I have used LLMs to check my work there. I'm not really sure of a good alternative). Relearning mathematics conscientiously.

So what's my new approach? Work doesn't change. My employer actually explicitly demands I "default to AI". So this can't be a total break, which makes any kind of change substantially more difficult to achieve. But personally, I still have control.

Well, I'm trying to spend less time programming outside work, for one. We'll see how that goes. But I'm also renewing my LeetCode subscription and practicing DSA.

LeetCode?! I hear you cry in dismay. Yes, LeetCode-ish coding interviews are stupid. But I've found that I actually really enjoy LeetCode. There are no libraries. There's no frontend. There's no CI or CD. There're no tickets, no planning, no prioritization, no meetings, no code review. There's just me, a problem statement, and the syntax and semantics of the language at hand. It's completely unlike actual engineering, and so is actually really refreshing. If I enjoy Wordle, Clues by Sam, logic puzzles, etc, why wouldn't I like LeetCode?

And some dumbass companies still use it as a hiring thing, so it ends up seeming mildly fiscally responsible as well.

Chiron

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Chiron

Everyone understands how praiseworthy it is in a Prince to keep faith, and to live uprightly and not craftily. Nevertheless, we see from what has taken place in our own days that Princes who have set little store by their word, but have known how to overreach men by their cunning, have accomplished great things, and in the end got the better of those who trusted to honest dealing.

Be it known, then, that there are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the former of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A Prince should, therefore, understand how to use well both the man and the beast. And this lesson has been covertly taught by the ancient writers, who relate how Achilles and many others of these old Princes were given over to be brought up and trained by Chiron the Centaur; since the only meaning of their having for instructor one who was half man and half beast is, that it is necessary for a Prince to know how to use both natures, and that the one without the other has no stability.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

My Difficult Relationship With Mathematics

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My Difficult Relationship With Mathematics

Shortly before saving and publishing the first draft of this post, I realized I wasn't being honest. It's not like I took a vow of honesty prior to starting this blog, but... this is something I need to be truthful about.

I recently took some time off from working through calculus again on Math Academy ¹. Well, okay, three months. And yesterday I mentally slumped in defeat, returned to the site, and took the placement exam.

I said "mentally slumped in defeat," but that's not right. I fucked up, and yesterday, I admitted it on some level. But subconsciously. I slumped in abject shame. This blog post is the rest of that admission, the conscious and public part.

The placement exam told me I needed to do large chunks of calculus again. I knew that. Because I fucked up.

My first draft centered, as the title might suggest, on my history with mathematics in an educational setting. TL;DR: It was bad. Bad enough that I'm not entirely sure how I graduated high school. Bad enough that it took me three or four tries (I can't remember for sure) to pass Calculus. Bad enough that I still doubt whether I really earned my grade in my Applied Statistics for Engineers class, the last and most challenging math class of my Computer Science degree.

I don't remember a time when I ever paid attention in class. I have ADHD. And I've blamed ADHD, and blamed my mother and my teachers and the school district for not having me tested. But my son has ADHD, and he still gets his books out and tries to do his homework. I never did that. My son, at sixteen, with additional learning challenges I never had, is far ahead of where I was at his age. And is probably far ahead of where I am now.

I started using Math Academy last year as part of my midlife crisis. Basically, I've decided that I'm not living up to my potential, the same conclusion that everyone around me reached when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. And I was benefiting a lot from it, and then, as we've established, I fucked up.

How did I fuck up? I focused on speed rather than comprehension. I avoided reading. I avoided writing down laws, theorems, formulae, and derivations. And I cheated.

I started cheating by double-checking my answers using online tools before I submitted them. The goal was to prevent re-work, since Math Academy penalizes wrong answers by assigning extra problems. I allowed a couple of questionable cases, where the wording wasn't perfect or a validation function was a little too strict, to take over my mind, to make me resentful, to view the relationship as oppositional rather than collaborative.

I set goals for myself in terms of points per day. This meant that, if I got a question wrong and missed the bonus points for that lesson or review, I viewed that as time stolen from me. So I felt justified in double-checking my answers so that as little time would be "stolen" from me as possible.

The next step was to look up things on the fly. If I forgot a cosine law, or the product law, or whatever, I would flip back to that section. Math Academy makes this straightforward. But you can't do that during a university exam. You can't do it during an interview. And I shouldn't've allowed myself to do it, not without acknowledging that it is problematic and taking additional steps to correct the problem, i.e. doing additional problems to build understanding.

I started cheating on quizzes, too; because if you get a question wrong on the quiz, you get extra review assignments to complete about the questions you got wrong. I viewed that as more time being taken from me, rather than the logically necessary additional practice that my mistakes and lack of comprehension warranted. "What's the point of quizzes?" I asked, though I knew the answer.

Shortly after that started, I became discouraged. It was a struggle to keep going. I didn't feel like I was learning anything anymore. And so I stopped doing it at all.

Is that just about the stupidest thing you've ever heard? It's really, really stupid, and I'm deeply ashamed of it.

I started smoking cigarettes when I was 19, and mostly quit (with a few brief, occasional lapses) when I was 31. I haven't smoked a cigarette in several years now. I'm very proud of that fact. But I'm also deeply, deeply ashamed of things I did and said when I was trying and failing to quit smoking. I did foul, disgusting things for the feeling that nicotine gave me.

But it's not just nicotine... I'm willing to lie to myself about all sorts of things to make myself feel better. I'll make any excuse. I'll take any out. I'll cut any corner. I still try to avoid discomfort, and I'll lie to myself or anyone around me to do so.

So now I have to back up quite a bit and do some things over again, and this time do it right. It's kind of the story of my life at this point.

Although I have my complaints about Math Academy, I think the value provided by the site is top-notch, and one of the things that makes it so valuable is that the placement exams are lengthy and fairly fine-grained, and that I don't have to spend too much time going over material that I do understand fairly well. ↩

Chary

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Chary

Word of the Day: chary /ˈCHerē/ cautiously or suspiciously reluctant to do something.

There is a too common tendency to regard history as a specialist subject; that is the primary mistake. For, on the contrary, history is the essential corrective to all specialisation. Viewed aright, it is the broadest of studies, embracing every aspect of life. It lays the foundation of education by showing how mankind repeats its errors and what those errors are.

B. H. Liddell Hart, Why Don't We Learn From History?

Vacuum

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Vacuum

The Taoists claimed that the comedy of life could be made more interesting if everyone would preserve the unities. To keep the proportion of things and give place to others without losing one's own position was the secret of success in the mundane drama. We must know the whole play in order to properly act our parts; the conception of totality must never be lost in that of the individual. This Laotse illustrates by his favorite metaphor of the Vacuum. He claimed that only in vacuum lay the truly essential. The reality of a room, for instance, was to be found in the vacant space enclosed by the roof and walls, not in the roof and walls themselves. The usefulness of a water pitcher dwelt in the emptiness where water might be put, not in the form of the pitcher of the material of which it was made. Vacuum is all potent because all containing. In vacuum alone motion becomes possible. One who could make of himself a vacuum into which others might freely enter would become master of all situations. The whole can always dominate the part.

Kakuza Okakura, The Book of Tea

Value

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Value

Hide yourself under a bushel quickly, for if your real usefulness were known to the world you would soon be knocked down to the highest bidder by the public auctioneer. Why do men and women like to advertise themselves so much? Is it not but an instinct derived from the days of slavery?

Kakuza Okakura, The Book of Tea

Theatre

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Theatre

Last year, or the year before, IDK, I had the idea of a swarm of autonomous agents that would live in my Goldentooth minilab. I didn't end up actually getting very far with the implementation, but I was far from the only person thinking along those lines, as OpenClaw has shown.

I've now implemented something a bit along those lines in theatre, which is a nursery for agents. They start out as wisps or husks, something like Miriam's former lovers in The Hunger, and have to accrete gradually over the course of many wake cycles.

An interesting thing was that, while working on this, I came across @void.comind.network, which led me to comind. The concepts I'd already thought through for representing different layers of personality accumulation mapped pretty much 1:1 with its system, and so I thought it would be good to integrate the two.

Nebhos is the first... character? wisp? husk? in theatre. Check it out if you're interested!

Segregation and Coincidence

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Segregation and Coincidence

I've been reading Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling, which reminded me of Nicky Case's fantastic Parable of the Polygons. I wanted to create a simple p5.js sketch illustrating the same idea, so voila: Schelling Segregation.

I've been walking and practicing my French at morning and lunchtime yesterday and today. I think more frequently lower-intensity exercise really helps my rheumatoid arthritis.

In fact, I have a (possibly crackpot) theory that the stress and repeated minor injury and inflammation of connective tissue caused by exercise without adequate warmup might be what triggered my rheumatoid arthritis in the first place. I don't know if that's true or not, and there's probably no way to know if it is true, but if it is, it makes sense.

I was 36 at onset, but I was quite fit - I'd quit smoking five years before, I'd lost about ninety pounds, I was running half-marathons regularly (though slowly), and I had just done my first pullups in about 15-20 years. To suddenly lose my ability to run, to develop a chronic degenerative condition... just as I was really delighting in my body and in exercise for the first time as an adult, seemed so incredibly cruel and unfair! Like the universe reaching out to squash me like a bug.

But if it was indeed triggered by joint inflammation caused by not warming up sufficiently prior to exercise (not caused; I suspect that it was years of abusing my body prior that set up all of the necessary conditions, and that the physical strain of that year was the final straw), then that at least makes sense. It seems less cruel.

In keeping with my recent strong interest in AI systems and their formal verification, compliance automation, etc, I reached out today to a coworker who has relevant experience and works in an adjacent capacity, and asked her to keep me in mind if anything like that came across her desk and she thought I might be of some use. She replied that there was actually something she had in mind, so that's very exciting.

When I was in college, I read The Celestine Prophecy - I don't really have a high opinion of that book, but I do think there's something about trying to actively pursue your own destiny and be open to opportunity that the book expresses well. The idea, essentially, that there's no such thing as coincidence.

So several days or a week or two ago I went on this AI-formal-verification spree and started checking some things out, and then earlier today I came across a blog post on HackerNews saying, basically "your manager isn't going to spend their time babysitting your career; you need to take the initiative" and I thought, yeah, that's absolutely right - and that's what I haven't been doing! And so I reached out to my coworker, and got an exciting response.

Great stuff. That's the kind of small step that turns into a good, healthy jog.

Hello Again

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hello Again

I decided it might be good for me to keep a blog.

I've done this a few times in the past, and (spoiler alert) it has usually tapered off after a while. Part of that is that I tend to write a lot and most people don't have much patience for reading. It's entirely possible that I have some form of hypergraphia. So I write for other people, they don't read it, and so after a while I lapse into a hurt silence.

I've also tried the "write for yourself" thing a time or two. The problem is that I don't particularly enjoy writing for myself. I don't normally find it particularly fulfilling. Write about what? Well, I'm exhausted enough by living through politics and current events; I don't necessarily want to write about it. I don't feel qualified to write non-fiction and I'm not sufficiently inspired to write fiction.

But, nevertheless, here I am thinking it might be good to keep a blog, and the reason is simple: I think it might be a good way to improve my self-education.

While I'm an autodidact, like most other geeks, I never got along well with technical books. I tended to learn by trial and error, cobbling together snippets from free websites and blogs, etc. When I was young, I tended to blame this on poverty. Now that I'm a well-compensated adult, I can afford technical books, but I still tend to struggle with reading them. I blame neurodivergence. Anyway, I'm hoping that a blog will help me structure and retain more of the information that I read.

I'm learning French, and I realized earlier today while responding to a comment that my actual production of written French is rather limited. I practice listening a lot, and I'm starting to practice reading a decent amount (I think it's my strongest area), but I'm not actually writing much. So I've forked my blog entries and will try to write an entry per day en français.

So let's see how this goes!