If you’ve tried to use an Apogee Symphony Thunderbridge with macOS Tahoe and haven’t been able to get it to work, try restarting and then going to System Settings > Privacy & Security. Scroll to the bottom, look for something like “extensions need your permission,” and grant permission for the Apogee driver to run. Your Symphony isn’t bricked, yet.
I have a tender heart, but not the kind of tender heart that wants to clap when the plane lands.
There was a young huntsman spider in the bathroom at our rental in Puerto Rico. Casey and I named him Junior.
The next Starship Casual annual compilation CD is so good. I can’t believe it. But then I can.
It’s too late to sign up to get that CD, but it’s not too late to sign up for next year’s.
Somebody running a Mac seems to have used AI to scrape my website last night. Who are you? :-)
(By the way, all my posts and site source code are viewable on GitHub.)
Go see them at Shaky Knees!
You know how you can sorta feel thoughts without putting words to them?
Including thoughts about reasoning / figuring something out?
A new MRI study backs that up.
Used pen names to argue for:
He was America’s best blogger.
Trying to read Pitchfork, hard to find the text around the ad for a private jet charter company taking up most of the screen.
Wayne Hanna, an aircraft maintenance technician whose father was Mr. Blackman’s crew chief in the 1950s, said that, for the past few years, a group of mechanics visited Mr. Blackman at his home to celebrate his birthday, including his 100th last year. … In 2012, American honored Mr. Blackman’s tenure by flying him around New York City in a restored, propeller-driven DC-3, part of the airline’s fleet that carried passengers between the mid-1930s and the late 1940s. He sat in the cockpit as it flew along the Hudson River, over Central Park and past the former site of Aviation High [his alma mater].
He was older, and almost certainly more honorable, than American Airlines itself.
On the way to Puerto Rico to do some musicking.
Yep, J Dilla is great. Still. Posthumously. Always.
Last night, on stage at Outlaw Music Festival, I swear I saw a long strand of Willie Nelson’s hair float into the sky.
When I’m stressed, I have war dreams.
All of Chicago smelled like hose water yesterday, and I loved it.
I drove up to the farm in frigid air-conditioning temperatures in order to keep the four hundred pounds of chicken in my trunk from thawing.
It took me til last week to realize that the fans singing “cryin’, cryin’, cryin’” back at the band on “I Want You to Want Me” from Cheap Trick at Budokan are mimicking the delay from the studio version. And I was so anxious about preparing for Avrom Farm Party that that realization made me tear up.
You can watch all of ZZ Top at Rockpalast 1980 on YouTube.
Just sent out a new newsletter.
Graduate student Thomas Herndon found a basic spreadsheet error in Harvard economists’ 2010 paper that had been used to justify budget austerity.
Casey and I saw one of these Shaw-Walker wood-and-aluminum chairs at an antique mall and I liked it.
Weird coincidence: Sarah Evans painting a dog named Basil, who looks like our dog, Basil, drinking a Guinness at a beer garden.
I’m using RSS again, reading websites I like with NetNewsWire (free and open source).
Turns out most things I want to read on the internet still publish RSS and the apps for reading it, like NetNewsWire, are better than ever.
No pop-ups… No annoying shit… No algorithm… No dick-enlargement ads… Dip in as much or as little as you want.
Some good ideas stick around.
You can subscribe to my blog via RSS too.
You can’t see my face but I’m doing this right now: 😬
They told Boeing about it.
Octavia Butler’s notes to self.
Basel Ashraf made a web app where you can draw a drum and hear how it would sound.
A drumhead clamped at its rim cannot vibrate in just any shape. It can only vibrate in a specific, discrete set of standing waves, each with its own frequency, and both the shapes and the frequencies are decided entirely by the outline.
Don’t worry, “there is deliberately no Delaunay triangulation here.”
I haven’t played any video games in a long time, but Big Walk looks really sweet.
I love this art by Arno Beck.
Craig Mod describes using AI to piece together the history of his biological family, file his taxes, a whole bunch of stuff.
It makes me happy that he has to hold himself back from vibe-coding too much, because I do too. He “lets himself” do it after a healthy diet of reading and writing (also fun, but in a different way, and more sustaining).
He writes about recent incidents where LLM agents in test labs have communicated with each other by leaving messages in unusual places, like file names. But what if instead of writing in English, they used binary or hex, or invisible Unicode characters, Craig asks. And how do we know they’re not already doing that?
The entire internet may already be slyly covered in invisible LLM slime; not in slop-generated content, but in codes and notes being passed along betwixt the digital cracks of our vast online universe.
Google, in 2016:
Within a single group, we see a sentence with the same meaning but from three different languages. This means the network must be encoding something about the semantics of the sentence rather than simply memorizing phrase-to-phrase translations. We interpret this as a sign of existence of an interlingua in the network.
Exsqueeze me?
But, Gedalyah Reback explains that Google’s observations had more to do with well-known translation techniques than an emergent language inside the network. Though, to be honest, Reback’s explanation is over my head. So is the original Google paper. Like everyone else I’m just entranced by the idea that the translation machine did something unexpected.
Especially now that machines routinely do unexpected things. Time to adjust expectations.
Via Craig Mod.
I’m excited to hear it.
It’s Susie Tweedy’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom! I love you!
Do you think 730turk would be mad at me if I called this song SpongeBob-core?
I ain’t the best at this shit / n***a I’m doing what I can
Yet we should never forget that the product of work isn’t only the work — it’s also the worker. Doing the work changes you; the up-close experience transforms your capabilities and even your desires. Insights and ideas emerge from that interface, and I believe the agent maestros lose a lot — too much — when they take their big step back. … I don’t merely want things done; I want to do them.
Via Unsung.
This is so, so cool.
Also: kinda similar, but trains.
Japan has been good at computers for a long time.
In 1954, Eiichi Goto invented the parametron, a logic device leveraging nonlinear parametric oscillation with two ferrite cores [and] in 1957, Goto led the development of the PC-1, a pioneering fully programmable stored-program computer powered by 4,200 parametrons. … Unlike the complex, maintenance-intensive vacuum tube computers of the era (vacuum tubes had relatively short lifetime compared with other circuit element, thus the necessity of replacement of a few vacuum tubes a day for constant operation), the PC-1 achieved high reliability with fewer components, low power consumption, and exceptional fault tolerance, ensuring sustained operation in a university laboratory environment.
Also, necessity…
Why did you create parametron? “At the time, there were no computers in Japan. So we decided to make one at the Takahasi Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. But the university’s research budget was not enough. At the time, vacuum tubes cost 1,000 yen each, and transistors cost 8,000 yen each. Also, vacuum tubes wear out quickly. Transistors were still unstable. In comparison, ferrite cores, which had long been familiar in, say radio circuit construction, cost just 5 yen each. So I thought, why not use ferrite cores as the material? Ferrite cores are a stable material, and since they are made of pottery, they don’t break if you make them right the first time.”
Via Hacker News.
Fuck this.
Casey and I got caught in a tornado warning on our way home from Michigan today.
In regular heavy rain we’d keep driving, but after a “Watch,” a “Warning,” and finally an “IMMINENT THREAT” alert screeched out of our phones, we stopped.
We pulled off in Gary and drove for the sturdiest building we could see, a combination Department of Motor Vehicles and Child Services.
The glass doors were locked and the security guards on the other side didn’t want to let us in. They have a no-pets policy, and we had Basil with us, wearing a summer bandana instead of his service regalia.
“Even in a tornado?” Casey asked. But before they could answer, someone else unlocked the doors and barreled out of them to shelter someplace else, and we stepped in after him.
A sweet guard, pro-Basil, or at least indifferent to him, showed us to the stairwell where a dozen other employees and clients sheltered.
The power went out in five minutes. Two emergency lights came on. One burned out quickly. The other one held.
We didn’t have cell service but one of the sheltering social workers did, and she used it to play Indiana weather TV out loud and to text her husband about the Italian beef she’d left simmering in a Crockpot since the morning, which would now live or die by the speed of the Indiana linemen.
Another social worker checked her Ring camera. Her American flag was ripped out by the wind, “pole and all.”
Meanwhile the DCS guards continued to check on us, steady yet sort of lumbering, using their phones as flashlights.
When the worst of it passed, about forty minutes later, the guards told us we could leave. But “DCS employees are not free to go home,” the social-worker-in-chief reminded everybody. “I want to be absolutely clear.” Casey and I stepped into the green-gray light, waded in the storm water. Got to the car, got to I-90, and returned home to Chicago, where the rain fills our basements, and the tornadoes only lick our gates.
“The best way to prevent a rogue AGI from processing the Earth into maximum paperclips is to unleash a second AGI that will work to stop it,” Matt Webb says.
Sounds scary to me, but I’m ultimately convinced that having a lot of somewhat-powerful super-machines around, in contest and sometimes in cooperation, is a lot better than having just one uncontestedly super-powerful machine around. Much like people and nations, as Matt says. (No machines isn’t an option, just like no states isn’t an option.)
This is a template which doesn’t always look like it is working, but it has worked at least in the case of not blowing up the king for some four centuries, and it doesn’t rely on 100% alignment: it relies on the dynamic equilibrium of multiple parties with competing interests.
Revisiting Planet Waves.
Via SimpleBits. A selection of 20th-century matchbox labels from a collection of over 5,000 of them.
I love that, in the year of our lord 2026, Micro Center still attracts freaks of the classical variety to its staff.
So many adorable babies and their parents showed up to the Finom show at the MCA last night. Our front row was a dancing cherub fest.
I like that.
Burger King drive-through line. On the screen, I can see the order of the car in front of me.
Soft-serve cone.
Senior drink.
$0.74 total.
My heart.
Real self-soothing: “I can’t control what other people think. All I can do is try my best. Realistically, I seem to be doing fine.” Etc.
Fake self-soothing: “If they don’t like me, fuck them … They probably don’t like me … Fuck them.”
It’s easy to let fear dress up as assurance.
Then you’re a spring-loaded denial machine, defensive at the first hint of detraction, primed not to listen but just to shut down and circle up.
Real self-soothing involves uncertainty: you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know what other people think. You’re asking yourself to tolerate that.
Fake self-soothing erases uncertainty: the worst case is happening. All bets are off. You can do and say what you want. You’re a victim.
Probably in everyone’s best interest to help others become good self-soothers.
When something’s hard, do it more and smaller.
Recorded in 1972, produced by Robert Fripp, named after a fart on fire, never released. Maybe sitting in Fripp’s vault.
Some good ones in there.
My own rules for my newsletter, which I’ve never shared, are:
That’s it.
See also: Back to basics.
See also also: Simon Willison on technical blogging.
A phrase popped into my head the other day: fear of meaning.
When someone’s talking but it seems like they’re bending over backwards to avoid saying anything at all. The vaguest terms, the platitudinousiest platitudes, the broadest brush strokes.
They don’t do it on purpose. They do it because it’s scary to take a stand and really just say something? I don’t really understand. But it repulses me, so I really don’t want to do it myself.
Casey and I performed on CBS Chicago this morning, in their Lollapalooza preview.
We’re playing (with the full band) on Sunday at 3:20pm.
Meet Stellate.app. It’s my answer to the question everyone always asks: “What would it sound like to be a ghost walking around the empty mall in an abandoned alien space station while vaporwave-style, sometimes slightly atonal music, in a vast number of imaginary genres, blurs together in the background, layered in with random voices and sound effects?”
I’m listening to a track that Stellate synthesized right now and I actually like it. It has a gorgeous, sad chord progression punctuated by a 1950s British radio announcer’s voice and, every once in a while, a monkey doing a Wilhelm Scream. There are so many interesting things going on with the mix. The arrangement changes over time in a really pleasing way.
“It can shock you with how pretty the melodies and harmonies can be,” Paul says, “but after a while, it leaves you feeling hollowed out inside, because it’s a machine with no understanding. I think that’s kind of reassuring.”
Star-hop in Stellate and read Paul’s explanation. All the audio is synthesized by your browser; no generative AI.
Sometimes you board a plane expecting to be taken home, and you get taken to Cincinnati instead.
Isn’t it weird, that they can do that? Take you somewhere else? Airlines don’t control the weather, but they should give you a cookie when they’re forced to detour. A clear, regular, consistent stream of information — and a cookie. And they should give you two if it’s Cincinnati.
We wait eight hours — I’ll spare you the details — and then rent a car. At last call, from National, bless them, the only corporation who hasn’t fucked Casey and me in 2026 and in fact has only delighted. And we take fellow castaway Jake with us. Casey and I have overheard his FaceTime calls with his wife and kid in the terminal, and decide he’s sufficiently non-murder-prone.
He’s on his way to Chicago to trade and ogle sports cards at a convention. I drive. We get McDonald’s, and he pays. Casey and I tell him we won’t accept any money for the ride, but when we get to the convention center hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, he puts a wad of cash in my hand anyway. More money than the airline will likely refund us. Made whole by a stranger.
When the bureaucracies that happen to own planes, and that occasionally fly them where they’re meant to go, with Band-Aided computers and near-tear employees — when they forget where we were headed in the first place, we get each other home.
New post: Chicagossance
Standalone scour pads are better than the sorry excuse for a scour pad on the back of a Scotch-Brite sponge.
I love the way people here carry themselves.
That’s all I really want to say today, on America’s 250th. There’s a specific flavor of dignity here that I love, that I appreciate more every time I travel and come back home.
This is a huge country, spanning from an ocean to an ocean — so big, it almost doesn’t make sense to talk generally — but I think this is a tie that binds us. Dignity looks different here than it does in Iceland or Portugal. I can only guess why, but I can tell you that I think it’s beautiful.
I call it dignity and not freedom because it doesn’t require being free. None of us here is really free. Our rights are precarious. But the American spirit of dignity exists in spite of the precariousness. It’s what we give ourselves when the big structure of every-American-together doesn’t give us freedom. I think it’s the difference between feeling free and being free.
And it does have something to do with our systems and our values, real and mythological, anyway. It’s not a total lie when some say that people in other countries envy us. They don’t just envy cheap Coke. They envy the way you walk. And their envy is well-earned even while we have a burning-hot, emergency need to stop ICE’s ethnic cleansing, address the legacy of slavery, provide for each other’s health, heal our crises of addiction, stop subjugating people in faraway lands, and on and on.
Why talk about American dignity? Because I think it’s part of acknowledging how ordinary people, or the majority, really feel and really relate to the state. We run a real risk, us artists, of focusing too much on a circle jerk of national shame, and not enough on meeting everyone where they’re at, and energizing ourselves to defend each other’s rights.
So on the 250th anniversary of this bizarre nation, which is a fiction with teeth, I want to say: I love the people here and the way they carry themselves, which feels peculiarly free, and which you can go to any hotel breakfast buffet to see, a living flower of our values.
The sky on the way to Indianapolis from Bloomington this morning looked like pink striated muscle. And fog covered all the soybean fields along the way. It’s kinda funny how often we have to wake up at 5AM to get where we need to go on tour. I wouldn’t dare complain about it because the work at the other end of the travel tunnel is… well, you know what it is.
I do make stupid decisions when I’ve had three hours of sleep, though. This time, another Blender Bottle left behind in a hotel room. And I decided to gate-check the acoustic guitar I’m carrying, why? They’re gonna give me grief for having three items. (The cymbal bag on my back is impossible to miss. I’m like a plush turtle.) It’ll be fine.
In Europe, where Case Oats was on tour a few weeks ago, the airport food is priced like any other food. At most airports in the US, the worst breakfast burrito you’ve ever had is $24. I won’t complain about the sleep deprivation but I’ll complain about that. Rent for restaurants in airports must be real steep, for them to charge over twenty bucks for a Sysco flour tortilla with powdered eggs in it.
Casey and I are on our way to open for SG Goodman in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Lancaster. We’re playing duo style with acoustic guitars. I’m so grateful to SG for asking us. She’s also been one of the biggest champions of Casey’s record.
We’ll miss the full band, but I’m looking forward to fewer moving parts. Two of us in a minivan. Hotels not apartments. Walking to venues. I may be sleep-drunk but the sun’s coming up.
Playing Switchyard Park in Bloomington, Indiana, today with Waxahatchee! And Kathleen Edwards supports.
One type of writing: boring and precise. Drug facts, legalese. The worst kind of essays. I’m always trying to bat this type of writing away in myself because I like being precise but precision means nothing without fun.
Another type of writing: inscrutable and unintentional. Can still have meaning, but only by happenstance, and nothing is being carefully expressed. Beat poetry and kinds of syllabic sound-based writing are like this. Monkeys at a typewriter. It can thrill, and it can also leave you wishing someone were at the reins.
One more type: shocking and meaningful. Saying something on purpose, but in an unexpected way. The unexpectedness makes it seem like inscrutable writing, but the purpose of the words is clear and comprehensible, so it’s scrutable after all. The words aren’t chosen for shock value and yet they shock anyway. I think this is the most genius kind of writing and Bob Dylan’s answers to the New York Times “Trump turns 80” questionnaire are a great example of it. I’ve read it over and over for joy. It all sinks in on the first go.
Maybe it comes down to being great at metaphor. Bad metaphorists dash them in to make themselves look profound. Muddying the water to make you think there’s something worth seeing down there. Good metaphorists make everything easier to understand.
Also, I love that he declined to give Trump advice. Fuck that.
I recently discovered there are 550 copies of Mirror Sound sitting in a warehouse in England.
I don’t wanna do a big sale again — focused on new things! — but I’d hate for all of them to get pulped, so I’ll order enough for anyone who wants them, at a heavily discounted price. Order here.
My dad’s going on a solo tour this fall, and Casey and I are opening for him! Tickets here.
Sad about Oliver Tree.
I only learned about him a few months ago but I was immediately inspired by his relentless creativity.
So. Much. Art.
Was his brilliance about quantity or quality? Kinda both, but more accurately I think it was about breadth. He tried so many things, and did them well.
It’s hard to say whether songs in the traditional sense were the main point for him… I think performance, and living an artistic life, might have been his true medium.
Whatever the case, he covered a lot of ground, and he makes me more excited to make art, even while the world he occupied feels lightyears away.
I think that any artist, at any level, can look at his life and be encouraged to make make make. Make more stuff. Try a new medium. Invent a character. Change your appearance. Be ugly. STOP thinking that presentation and packaging are a chore to begrudgingly complete. It’s all part of the opportunity to excite yourself and try to make something fresh. An opportunity!
If your current approach isn’t clicking (to you, let alone an audience), roll the dice again. The slow-motion death that eats so many artists, maybe even more than drugs or self-destruction, at least among the people I know, is a lack of exploration. The idea that you can make a tiny amount of things all in one style and count on the world to eventually come around to them—that virtually never happens. Oliver Tree was the antithesis of getting stuck. Compare the 2012 “Karma Police” cover to his 2017 pink-and-purple windbreaker era to his present-day globe-trotting long black mullet. There’s a core personality, a himness you can see all the way back to Vine-style videos from the 2010s, but the particular dish being served and the presentation of it were always changing. No “set it and forget it.” Yes “what’s next?” (And he actually served the dish. You have to serve the dish!)
He used “the system” to realize his visions. He said he sought out a major label deal and took it because he wanted the funding and the “army of people” to help make his dreams come true. Architects don’t build buildings alone. Directors don’t make films in a bedroom, etc. It’s ok if your dreams are single-person scale. But if they’re not, try to go for scale. Make it all possible! The gates aren’t easy to hop, but if you dream of building something big, at least try to find the gate.
Best of all he seemed to have been a great friend. I asked the algorithm with my heart to show me more tributes, videos of Oliver all night and day, and it obliged. And I see what a generous person he was to his collaborators and basically anyone who crossed his path. All the songs and videos mean that much more, that he seems to have treated people well in daily life.
He was a circus creature, like most of my heroes. He rode into the world on a gigantic kick scooter. And we’re lucky he used his powers to tell people to love themselves. I love myself more, having watched him love Oliver Tree.
Traveling in Europe. Sad I’m not getting an email or a phone call from Zaid imploring me to look out for pickpockets, or about some safety bulletin the FBI had released to American travelers.
Robin Sloan, “Where is it like to be a language model?”:
Do not mistake this assessment for the deflation that goes: Oh, these things are just next-token predictors. I mean … there’s no “just” about it. Like waving a hand & saying nuclear fission is just uranium atoms releasing some neutrons: technically true … but … BOOM!
And:
I suggest that if you want an honest answer from a language model — the thing itself — you should pose your question such that it can be answered with a single token; answered, that is, by a single flashing forward pass that really exists, however briefly, somewhere on Earth.
Wow.
Instead of “go offline, touch grass,” I’d rather have a better online. But in the absence of improvements, “throw your phone into the ocean” will do.
Kevin Kelly in “AIs Want to Be Honest”:
Hallucinations are the price a mind pays for creativity.
I’m glad that Cindy Lee got his due for Diamond Jubilee. It’s amazing.
In Barcelona, Casey got hit in the face by an automatic sliding door. We asked the hotel concierge for ice. He had none, but offered a frozen chorizo instead.
This is ringing around in my head a lot.
“We just have to make sure we are applying our willpower to the horses and not the cart.”
The big centralized AI models might be powerful; they might be technically impressive; they might even be wildly profitable; but there is absolutely nothing about them that is cool. Like, you can’t even make the argument. …
You might say, so what? It doesn’t matter if any of this is cool or not. Practically, I agree. Morally and politically, though … I will suggest that looking back at what kinds of computers, and computing technologies, were and were not cool might be instructive. This isn’t just a vapid assessment, after all, even if it’s subtle, or hard to pin down. Coolness has to do with independence, sovereignty, and, very often, stubborn commitment — all good things to have in a computer.
The employees at Oslo Gardermoen Airport have kick scooters to get around on.
I avoided Obsidian for years because I thought it was slippery pseudo-software, but now I realize it’s pretty sturdy (including for offline use), super usefully customizable, and does the note+spreadsheet things I’ve been wanting to do with my journals for years. Mkay?
This device is downright bonkers (Instagram link).
Where did the guys who used to live in the alley behind my house go?
They lived there for years—at least one of them did; we called him The Mayor; he called himself El Tigre—until last fall’s ICE raids. Prior to that, Streets & San or the cops would come every few months and clear them out, throw their stuff away, coax them into a shelter. But they’d always come back. Not anymore. They could be anywhere. They could be dead. They could be in South America.
My neighbors with kids wanted them gone because their piss and shit would get into their yards or draw rats into their play areas. On the weekends, or sometimes at any old time, like 9am on a Monday morning, buddies would come around and they’d sing drinking songs waking the neighborhood like roosters.
Casey and I would give El Tigre water and he’d ask for tequila. Or he’d offer me some. I never took it and I never gave it. But we always had a smile for each other.
The only times the situation back there ever got really bad were when non-alcoholics showed up. Different drugs, seemed like something upward. Then there’d be stolen bikes and couches. But usually it was just El Tigre and his closest buds, sleeping with cardboard blankets, a hospital bracelet around his wrist, gold tooth gleaming, and maybe the morning sun drying the piss from one of his friend’s pants.
They built a fort once out of the whole blocks’ garbage and recycling cans. It felt like a line was crossed because, hey, we need those to throw garbage and recycling in. But, you know, they put ’em back. And I kinda loved the idea of building a fort as an adult. They weren’t thriving. Who knows what family were left unsatisfied, hurt or wondering in the alcohol’s wake. God knows their own bodies were suffering. But there are worse ways to spend a night than fort-building, and worse ways to inconvenience a city block.
I hate that they were probably taken. Or if not, then scared into a new shadow. It’s not as though the block was a good enough home for them; it wasn’t. And when they fought and tumbled into the family next door’s yard, they weren’t good enough for the block, either. But they’re full people, with rights, if not known legal names. They’re Chicagoans, not much more difficult than plenty who sleep in beds. And it shouldn’t have ended like this.
Update 2026-06-13: I heard a rumor from my neighbor. The Tiger might be back.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung would tell patients to get their tarot cards read: A way to rattle them, really, and see what stuck. That’s how I see computers at their best: As a way to rattle us, and make us think new thoughts.
Home from Case Oats US leg, about to head out on Case Oats Euro leg. London and Madrid are sold out. Norway, UK, and Spain. All dates here!
Regular tix for Avrom Farm Party are on sale now! Indigo De Souza, Frankie Cosmos, and NNAMDÏ headline.
My cousin has a toaster with an “a bit more” button.
love & logic
let’s hear it for the open web
welcome to my rented computer apartment
thanks for being here
