Google AI Overview is a literal pox on civilization.

But you have my permission to use it.

Of course, you don’t need my permission. The only power I have over you is the power that your tendency to overestimate the intelligence of people in glasses gives me. Give me a pair of contact lenses and you render me inert. Samson was much the same.

My goal for this post is to help the information snobs and the information slobs get along better—and ideally to get them to pick names for themselves that don’t rhyme. Let’s start with the snobs…

I’ve rebuilt my blog.

Yes, my old blog was perfectly serviceable. It did what I needed it to, which, given my actual (not aspirational) posting frequency, was precious little. I rebuilt it because I’m a cliche developer who does cliche things. We all do it; that’s why it’s cliche. I’m sure you understand. It’s just basic maths.

What you might not know is that I’m recovering from some health issues that resulted in significant cognitive dulling. I’ve been having trouble reading books, writing code, and basically anything that pegs the ol’ CPU core at 100%. It was so bad that I’ve had to take time off of school and work. So if you thought I was rather a dumb fellow before, boy howdy—you should have seen me a few months ago.

I’m starting to recover, and I thought my fingers would remember their old strength better if they grasped my sword. And by sword, I mean keyboard. I’ve been out of the development game for a while, so I figured a fun (cliche) project would be a good way to see how things have changed…

If you don’t believe that New Testament believers receive the blessing of spending one whole day in seven being relieved from their worldly labors and getting to delight in Christ, this post is not going to try to convince you. There are plenty of other articles for that.

But assuming you are already convicted about the fourth commandment, or perhaps you’ve been convinced of it by reading the embarrassment of articles I’ve just linked to—either way, this article is a tip for how to get your technology to help you delight in the Lord on his day, instead of hinder you from that delight, as it is wont to do…

I’m somewhat frequently asked by less experienced photographers how they can grow in said craft. I have another whole post forthcoming that outlines a variety of exercises one can do toward that end, but before that post comes, we need to discuss what is actually meant by “better.”

I don’t mean to go full Bahnsen (never go full Bahnsen), but when people ask me how they can get better as a photographer, I’m almost always inclined to reply “BY WHAT STANDARD?” I apologize for the all-capital letters. Whenever I see all-capital letters, I read the text thus set in a shouting Cookie Monster voice, which is how I intended you to read that question in quotes. If you didn’t read it like that, please do so, and then we can move along to what I mean by it.

Different kinds of photographers have different goals for their pictures, sometimes vastly different goals. Journalists often wish to capture precisely what was happening at a fixed point in time; their goal is the transfer of a great deal of highly accurate information. Product photographers want to make a product look as appealing as possible; they wish to make people want to purchase…

This post is arguably the post that brought this blog into existence. Well, that and Medium becoming an increasingly terrible platform—that was another big factor. But leading up to the announcement of the M1 Macs, I had a lot of thoughts and theories about what kind of performance and battery life these chips would have. I started building a Strapi + Nuxt blog, which took surprisingly little time. I just had surprisingly little time to spend actually working on it. The blog wasn’t going to be ready in time for the Mac event, so I just tweeted about it… extensively.

My semi-educated guesses were surprisingly accurate, honestly, and I was a little surprised. But then, I spent an inordinate amount of time researching this, or at least that’s how it appeared at the time. But the new Macs are out now, and they’ve shown us that Apple has not simply matched Intel performance. They didn’t even just beat Intel performance. They changed the rules of the game and then set a new high score without even really trying. There are a lot of reasons for this, and I’d like to write about all of them at some point, but this…

In Aaron’s Rod Blossoming, George Gillespie wrote what is arguably the definitive case for presbyterian church government. It’s exhaustingly thorough and is likely one of the most important books in presbyterian history (although I’m in no way qualified to make this assessment). Anyway, my favorite part of it is when he says,

“

I Have often and heartily wished that I might not be distracted by nor ingaged into polemick Wri∣tings, of which the World is too full already, and from which many more learned and idoneous have abstained; and I did accordingly resolve that in this Controversall age I should be slow to write, swift to read and learne.

Pardon his spelling, iPhones didn’t have autocorrect in 1646. Anyway, the sense of the quote (and what follows) is a very humble man saying that he only begrudgingly wrote this seminal work on church government because he was pretty sure it would be helpful to the church. The world already has way too many polemical books (books that argue for a particular position); he didn’t want to throw his into the mix unless he was sure it would provide something important that couldn’t be found elsewhere.

It’s always interesting when someone says something relatively simple, mundane even, but something that has consequences that kick you in…