And the Rest of It

Affirming Against the Slovenly

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Waking Up to Minds of Metal and Wheels

It seems I’ve slept through a revolution, and the machines have all but taken over. Does anyone write code by hand anymore?

This blog rebuild was accomplished using AI significantly—mostly Claude Design and Claude Code. I built not only the blog but also an entire visual language. I plan to make little personal apps for myself using this blog’s visual style.

The main thing I’ve noticed with this new superpower is that I can add small features, extra ornamentation, internal tools, embellishments, etc. that I never would have taken the time to do before. The little animations and flourishes you see on this blog are things that I’ve always been able to do myself, but never thought it made sense to bother doing before because the time-to-reward ratio made the idea quite silly.

Naturally, this is a real temptation for a pixel-peeping perfectionist like me. But I think it’s definitely a net benefit.

This brings me to what may be the thesis for another post. I’ll state it here and perhaps defend and explicate it in a future post.

I think that ‘AI slop’ is not a necessary outcome of using AI. Lazy people have been doing sloppy work since Cain and Abel (there’s a pun in here about ‘cAIn,’ but I’ll refrain—you’re welcome).

Can you use AI to make more than slop? We affirm against the slovenly.

AI makes it possible to work very, very quickly. And AI does tend to be sloppy. But if you’re not a lazy slob and you take your time with it, you can use its speed to increase your iterations. Building beautiful things usually involves trial and error. People who release slop skip trial and just ship error. If you’re careful, you can ship more and better versions of the things you love to make.

Speaking of more and better, that’s my hope for around here. AI certainly gives one a lot to write about, and I’ve got something of a backlog of post ideas that aren’t related to AI that I need to start on. What I can say is that I’m more optimistic about writing regularly than I have been in some time.

David looked at how shiny the blog he had made was and smiled. “How can I not write on this shiny new blog? I’m sure I’ll post more now,” he thought. But even as he smiled, he knew that having a shiny new blog has never stopped him from neglecting it before.

The Phone Was Made for Man (Not Man for the Phone)

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Your Attention is Valuable

I’m sure you’ve heard this a hundred times, so I’ll keep this point brief. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and the rest of their ilk all want your attention. They want you to look at the content on them, and they want you to then come across ads they think are relevant to you while looking at the content. They want, and because of their shareholders, they need you to constantly be engaged in commerce and worldliness—even on the Lord’s Day and even when you’re trying to do private and family worship. Six days a week isn’t enough for them; they want it all.

In addition to that, your friends who don’t agree with you about the Sabbath—whether because they aren’t convicted of the doctrine or because they aren’t Christians—they also want your attention. They want to chat about the meat packaging industry in Uganda, or show you a funny cat video, or ask you to drive them to the airport next month—all stuff that’s fine on any other day, but all stuff that you’d prefer to talk about on any of those other days.

Your phone is a tool for these people and companies to break into your edifying discussions, your prayer meetings, or even the preaching of the Word, all to steal your attention. They might not intentionally be trying to take God’s place, but you know the net result is that it makes your obedience harder than it needs to be.

Maybe you’ve tried to take drastic action, like leaving your phone in a drawer at home. That can work. But what if your aged relative tries to call? What if you drove separately and your spouse tries to call after getting in an accident?

Thankfully, there is a non-nuclear option.

Focus Modes (on iOS Anyway)

I know a lot of people don’t like Apple. They are quick to take your money—and they want a lot of it. Personally, I prefer to give my money to someone who is a bit greedy and wants to directly take a known quantity of my money. That’s more appealing to me than working with someone who is greedy and wants to collect all kinds of data about me (sometimes data I don’t even know they’re collecting) and sell it to the highest bidder. We each, I suppose, choose our own poisons.

So this post is about iOS, but my understanding is that you can do similar things on Android.

Focus modes are a feature in Apple operating systems that let you control things like: your home screen, what contacts can notify you, and what apps can notify you. They effectively let you turn your phone “off” to certain people or companies during certain times.

Blacklisting vs. Whitelisting

An important concept to understand before you can make full use of this is Blacklisting and Whitelisting. I’ll define them below:

- Blacklisting: Allowing everything, except those things which you put on a list of forbidden items. - Whitelisting: Forbidding everything, except those things which you put on a list of allowable items.

When Focus Modes first came into existence, they only allowed whitelisting. That limited their usefulness significantly.

The list of people and apps you choose to let through will be unique to you, different from mine. I’ve found that whitelisting is the most effective way to use focus modes for a Sabbath, and I suspect most users will be similar—but if (for example) you are in an emergency service role where many people may have reason to contact you, you might find the blacklisting approach to be more useful. That way, you can say, “allow everyone through, except these people I know cause unwanted distractions.”

My Sabbath Mode Filters

I’m not an officer (or the son of an officer) in my church, but I am the chairman of the A/V committee. That means that if something is wrong with the sound board or recording computer, the A/V worker will likely contact me. I also might be contacted with special requests by my session or deacons. So my list of people to whitelist (allow through) looks like this:

- My wife - My deacons - My session - Anyone on the A/V committee at church.

Your list, will, of course, look different from mine. For example, I imagine if you were taking care of an elderly or sick relative, you may want to include them and/or any relevant medical staff.

I also find it helpful to allow notifications from my to-do list apps (Due and Reminders), my Calendar, and… that’s about it. You might need to add more here, but my advice is to keep it minimal. If you do add Calendar and to-do list apps, be careful about having recurring reminders for worldly things that don’t need to be done on the Lord’s Day.

Lastly, there is an option to disable the little red badge that shows on app icons to indicate how many notifications that app has. I’ve chosen to disable this because I find it also to be an unnecessary distraction.

My Sabbath Mode Home Screen

!Sabbath mode home screen

Focus modes also allow you to choose which of your home screens are visible, so I’ve created a home screen with the apps and widgets I’m most likely to need on the Lord’s Day. That way I’m not bothered with Outlook or Facebook when I’m trying to open Relight. Anything I don’t put here can be found by swiping to the App Library.

My advice is to try to put anything you might need on this page. If you end up needing something and it isn’t here, you’ll need to swipe over to the App Library, where you’ll be faced with icons for all the distracting apps you don’t need. You want to avoid that as much as you can, so if you put even apps you won’t usually need (but might need) on this home screen, you can avoid being faced with all the apps you definitely won’t need. Just try to avoid putting apps in here that you know will encourage distraction. If you need to, you can create a second home screen for your Sabbath mode, so don’t feel like you have to be stingy.

My home screen is mostly things that serve the purposes of edification, but you’ll note I also have the weather here and info about device charging states. Even though the Lord’s Day is practically heaven on earth, I still need to know if I need a jacket and when I can take my Apple Watch off its charger for the day.

My Sabbath Mode Naming and Timing

When I initially created this focus mode, I called it “Lord’s Day.” But I realized quickly that the mode could also be used during daily private and family worship. I renamed the shortcut to Sabbath because those times are a bit like a Sabbath rest in the midst of the week.

I’ve set my Sabbath mode up to automatically be on all day every Lord’s Day. I’ve also set it up to automatically turn on after I stop my alarm in the morning, and to stay on for an hour. You also have the option to toggle the focus mode manually, but I definitely find it nice to not have to remember to do it most of the time when I want to use it.

Tutorials for Using Focus Modes

Honestly, a text-heavy blog post is not the best place to provide a tutorial for using Focus modes. For this reason, I’m linking to some articles and videos on how to use Focus Modes. They’ll go over how to implement each of the things I’ve talked about.

- Apple’s Focus Mode Overview Video - A Video on Setting Home Screens for Focus Modes - An iMore Overview Article of All the Focus Mode Features - A Video Overview of More Advanced Features for Focus Modes

I mentioned that Android does seem to have focus mode support. As I’ve looked into it, it seems that (as usual with Android) different devices and versions of Android will cause your configuration options to vary significantly. For this reason, I’d suggest just going to Google and searching for “focus modes” and then the name of your particular device.

A Philosophy of Photography

Sat, 03 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

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 whatever they’re photographing. I’m sure you can imagine that these goals can be, and often are, at odds with each other. Photojournalists tend to make poor product photographers (at least initially) because their photos highlight the flaws of a product just as much as they do the, ahem, highlights. Likewise, a product photographer trying to photograph a particularly ugly car accident in exacting detail for the local news would have a hard time with it.

But most people who ask me this question are not professional photographers. They’re moms, dads, uncles, aunts, people who like to travel, people who like to take photos of their friends, and occasionally they’re wedding photographers or portrait photographers. What these all share in common is that they generally are not trying to photograph products or news stories. They’re trying to photograph memories. This is a pretty different skillset from the above two. Of course, you often want to capture the best of whatever it is you’re photographing—so they share something in common with product photographers. And they are often trying to capture something that happened. They want to get the timing right and fire the shutter just as their nephew is blowing out the candles. In this regard, they share something in common with photojournalists. But they are different from both of these, because memories are funny things.

Memories are not simply facts. They are facts, to be sure, but they are also the way we felt about those facts—at least they often are. If a photojournalist used his professional skillset to photograph your nephew’s birthday party, you would be able to count how many root beers Uncle Phil had, and you’d know how many candles Timmy blew out with each breath. Heck, if he’s good at what he does, you might even know how many spit particles landed on the cake. But it’s very likely that most of these photos would not fill you with the same kind of excitement that you had when the gift you labored long and hard on Amazon to pick out was opened.

Sadly, though, many aspiring photographers fall into the trap of shooting like a product photographer, or shooting like a photojournalist. In this post, we’ll talk about each of these problems, then we’ll discuss the correct way to think about and achieve memories-as-photographs.

Timmy’s Party as the Product

How would a product photographer shoot a seven-year-old’s birthday party? I’ve only got limited experience in this field, but I’ll attempt to answer this. First he would find some great light, or he might have brought it with him. He’d then take each gift, in its wrapped state, and photograph it from a flattering angle—making sure the rectilinear solid boxes look as rectilinear and solid as they can. Of course, he’d turn them so that as few seams in the wrapping paper show as possible, maybe even adjusting the wrapping when he can’t find a good angle. He would do something similar for a cake, but the cake would get different lighting because the lighting he had for the packages was too blue, and food looks honestly quite nauseating under the wrong color light.

He’d find Timmy, the birthday boy, and take him to some great light, too. He’d photograph him smiling. He’d do this for each of the parents and, if time permits, for each of the guests. Then of course there are the group shots, and we need to get Aunt Phyllis on some kind of crate to stand on because she’s only four-and-an-half feet tall, and she only comes up to Uncle Allen’s navel.

When it comes time for in-party photographs, if he had his way, he’d have some sort of fan or large-lunged adult out of frame and ready to blow on the cake at the same time as Timmy. That way all the candles would go out at once and everyone would have the best impression possible of little Timmy’s respiratory system. Needless to say, during the opening of presents, the messy wrapping paper all over the floor would send him into convulsions and he would leave in an ambulance foaming at the mouth shouting unintelligible things about staging and gestalt.

Alright, obviously it wouldn’t go precisely like this. Most humans have the capacity to read a situation and adapt to at least some degree. But the point here is that the correct way to capture memories is not to simply make everything look as good, as idealized as possible. Sometimes the flaws are what make the memory good. When Timmy finished blowing out the candles and dove into the as-yet unsliced cake with both hands—utensil free, like a bear—that’s not a moment to stay your shutter button and wait for things to get back to some semblance of sanity. That’s the moment to fire as quickly as possible. We’ll all laugh at these photos later when you post them on social media, and they’ll be valuable later, if he ever tries to date a girl who wants to become a mime for a living.

Someone with a product photography mindset needs to understand that life isn’t perfect. He needs to think less in terms of hiding flaws, and less in terms of highlighting the best things (although there are some elements of this to a good photograph). He needs to think in terms of how he (or those who will receive the photographs) would like to remember the event. What things will they remember fondly and how can he capture those things in a way that will facilitate reliving that memory in a pleasant way?

Timmy’s Party as the News Story

At the risk of stretching this metaphor so hard I wear out the elastic and have to buy a new one, I’d like to take the same approach to the errors of the photojournalist that I did with the product photographer. How would a photojournalist capture little Timmy’s birthday?

There are actually two fundamental errors here: capturing the wrong kinds of photos, and capturing the right kinds of photos wrongly. These are important to distinguish because an inexperienced photographer of memories can easily look at his own work and determine “I shouldn’t have taken this shot,” when really he should have taken that shot—just somewhat differently.

Capturing the Wrong Things

This is similar to the product photographer, and I mentioned it in passing above. This is when we have managed to chronicle every single little thing that happens at the party, no matter how forgettable it was. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for taking a lot of pictures and getting rid of the ones that weren’t worth taking. I probably take something on the order of ten times more pictures than I actually end up keeping, publishing to social media, and/or giving to my client.

The limit on how many photographs you can take during a two-hour birthday party is practically non-existent, given enough batteries and a big enough storage card. But the limit on how many photographs you can take at once is exactly one (unless you dual-wield, but this works poorly and results in poorly composed, blurry photos; trust me). If you’re photographing Timmy’s dad giving some kind of speech thanking everyone for coming, you can’t be photographing little Timmy making it look like he’s pulled a Twizzler out of his nose. Likewise, if you incessantly document Timmy’s movements, no matter how boring, you’ll miss his parents playfully throwing balloons at each other while Timmy pokes some dirt with a stick. In each case, one of these is a memory worth preserving and the other is less so.

You need to try to develop an ability to have at least an ambient awareness of as much of what’s going on at a given event as possible. Obviously you will miss things. We’re not omnipresent or omniscient. But you can, for example, follow the laughter. You can realize that if a three-legged race and a card game are going on simultaneously, one of these presents itself with a lot more potential for funny memories than the other. You can even ask questions about what sorts of activities will be happening and when in advance (this is obviously quite crucial for wedding photographers). Just being aware of this distinction when nothing is happening and asking yourself if you can see anything happening in your peripheral vision or hear anyone laughing and shouting “how did you get that on your head to begin with?” That’s usually a clear winner.

Photojournalists have an expression: “ƒ/8 and be there.” This refers to the kind of lens and lens configuration they want to use, as well as to the importance that they be, well, present. Photojournalists typically use a fairly wide angle lens, something like the 28mm lens in everyone’s iPhone (although I believe they most often use a 35mm, which is not that much more zoomed in). They do this because they want to capture everything. It’s important to them. They don’t want to think long and hard about composition. When the mayor’s shih tzu makes use of the governor’s shoe as an improvised fire hydrant, they just want to throw the camera in front of their face so fast they get a black eye, slam the shutter button, and know they got the shot. They can potentially crop it a bit later.

Honestly, they don’t even want to have to worry about focus. That’s what the “ƒ/8” part of the expression refers to. They set their lens up in such a way that virtually everything is in focus. It really would be a shame if the photo of the aforementioned canine faux pas were unusable because it was too blurry. Or maybe it wouldn’t, actually. But you can imagine other cases with fewer bodily functions being photographed where it would be a shame.

You might be thinking, “What’s wrong with this method for capturing memories? It seems great! You have a much higher probability of capturing memories this way.” And you’re right in one sense, but this is where what I said about memories being funny comes in. Our brain does something odd with memories. Actually, it does a lot of odd things with them. But the thing it does that’s related to our current topic is that it forgets pretty much everything. Think about it. You’ve probably spent dozens of hours even just at your own birthday parties. What do you remember about them? Probably mostly strongly positive or strongly negative things. Could you list all the gifts you’ve ever got? Probably not. Probably you could only list the top three or four best, and maybe the worst as well.

You might remember the first time your parents gave you those trick candles, the ones that relight themselves right after you blow them out. But do you remember what kind of ice cream you had with your cake that year? What color shirt were you wearing? Who all was there at the party? Do you even remember how old you were? Quick! What’s your name?

Alright, you get the idea. One of the main things that makes our best memories so good is that we forgot pretty much everything else going on at the time. If we remembered everything, it would be hard to sift through the mundane memories to get to the good ones. You remember the best gift ever you got because you forgot all the countless pairs of socks you’ve received (unless you really like socks).

Photographs need to work the same way as memories in order to be truly excellent. But often they contain a lot more detail than we can recall. Because still photos are frozen moments, elements that didn’t distract us in the moment (like that large purple minivan that drove by) can be incredibly distracting in print. It is the job of the photographer to remove or diminish these distractions so that the photo tells the story the way everyone remembers it. If you didn’t notice the power lines when you took in that sunrise, your photograph should do its best to minimize them as well. This can be done through changing your composition, adjusting your angle, shifting the lens’ focus, tweaking exposure, and even using the clone brush in Photoshop. The goal is not to provide an accurate visual representation. The goal isn’t to capture as much in the photo as you can. The goal is to tell a good story.

Timmy’s Birthday as a Story

I’ll be totally honest with you, when people who call themselves “creators” talk about the importance of “storytelling,” I want to gag a little. Maybe it’s just me. I feel, though, that the word is used a little too much and has become something of a buzz-word. But there is some truth to it. Telling a story means communicating that a series of events, typically involving one or more people, has occurred. This can be done by showing what’s about to happen, what’s currently happening in the shot, or by showing the results of something that has happened.

Honestly, this is a great way to think about photography. You’re not simply communicating a boring fact: “Gifts were at the party.” Truth be told, you’re not even communicating the story, “Timmy opened this gift, then this gift, then that one over there.” That’s a boring story. That’s like telling a story about a guy who once made a sandwich. That’s the story. He just made a sandwich. Alright, it was ham and cheese. Would you read a novella about a man who made a sandwich? Maybe, if you really like sandwiches, I guess.

The key here is using storytelling to tell the story of a memory that we want to remember fondly. When we tell a story, we don’t simply list events. We unfold the story in a way that makes it as interesting as possible. We do this in two ways, breaking the photo and pointing to stuff.

Breaking the Photograph

The simple fact is that there are always distracting elements in the scene you are trying to photograph. And you can’t just zoom in or get close enough to where all you can see is the subject. There needs to be enough context for people to see what’s going on. One of photography’s answers to this is basically to lie about the image and pretend the distracting element wasn’t there, or wasn’t as distracting as it was.

Some of the methods we do include adjusting our composition. This might mean shooting from above, or beneath. It might mean moving to the side, or to the uh… other side. It might mean zooming in and backing up (this results in a sort of tunnel vision that crops background out of the shot), or perhaps moving closer and zooming out (this results in more background being shown, but in each thing in the background being smaller). It might mean opening your aperture wide up so that everything in front of or behind your subject is just pretty balls of bokeh. It might mean putting something between you and the subject (the foreground) to hide something distracting in the background. Or it might mean politely asking people to move so that they’re not in the shot.

And if you can’t quite get the shot quite correct in the moment, there’s always the darkroom (or Lightroom). Here you can reduce just how orange Timmy’s cousin Caleb’s shirt is. [Stu Maschwitz] has said that he likes to make sure everything in his photos is either dull teal, or skin-colored (for people). It sounds extreme, and maybe it is for some shots, but it really does draw your eye to the people in the shot. You can also obviously crop your image. You can add a bit of vignette so that the brightest thing in your image is the subject. With iPhones in Portrait mode, the app [Focos] lets you adjust the depth of field in your shot after you take the photo, sometimes getting stunning results.

I know I’m leaving things out, but the idea here is to break the image. If you just took the photo, you would have a perfect image of exactly what you saw. You’re trying to destroy data. You’re trying to blur things, fade things, push them out of the shot, change their color, whatever you have to do to make sure nothing outshines the subject of your image. As an aside, this is one reason why, for the kinds of photos we’re trying to achieve, the megapixel and sharpness wars frequently fought by bloggers and YouTubers just are not that important.

Pointing to Stuff

The other method is using the things in your photograph that are not your subject to highlight your subject. We don’t want to be such minimalists that our subject is only ever standing against a black or white wall (although you can do that for some things). We need to use our environment to help tell the story, and ultimately to help people realize what’s happening in the story.

Perhaps there’s a spot in the room where the sun is peeking through the curtains. Can you put your subject in such a place so that the sunlight is cast across their face? Perhaps you can move to a different angle, so that the telephone lines that were ruining your sunset shot can actually be used to guide the eye to the setting sun.

Elements besides your subject can be used to draw the viewer’s eye to the subject, or to inform the viewer of some context about the subject. Your subject might be Timmy, but his sister looming in the background with a water balloon causes the viewer to perceive the story differently.

A lot of people struggle with their landscape photographs not being nearly as majestic as the scene felt in real life. I believe this is often because the photo is merely of the canyon, lake, sunset (or what have you) they were looking at, and that the photo doesn’t contain enough context to make the viewer see just how large the scene was. Having a small person in the photo can help with this, so can raising your camera up, so that the ground in the foreground of the photo takes up more of the shot. Ansel Adams used to keep a tripod in his trunk that he could put on top of his car to take landscape photos if something struck his fancy while he was driving, and I think that was at least part of the reason for that.

In any case, the summary of the idea here is not just to hide or diminish elements in your photo, but to use them to guide your viewer’s eye, or to inform them of some context. You only need to hide or diminish an element if it’s going to distract from the subject and the story being told.

One other thing worth noting, though, is that something about what makes a thing beautiful is a complexity and diversity that serves some purpose. While a single violinist can play something quite beautiful, an entire orchestra can be beautiful in a way that one instrument cannot. Further, an orchestra where instruments play different parts and harmonies is much more beautiful than one where each instrument plays the same notes in its own respective octave. All of this is to say, you can achieve a kind of unique beauty with a wide diversity of elements in your photo, all serving to tell the story and point to the subject. This is a kind of beauty that definitionally minimalist photography cannot achieve.

But bear in mind that it is harder to conduct a full orchestra than to coordinate one or two violinists. If you’re new to photography, it can be easier to keep things simple. Artists should generally understand their limitations and shoot at a level of complexity that produces good results—at least for production work. There’s a lot of room for experimentation and stretching yourself; in fact, I insist on it. But stretching yourself when Timmy is blowing out the candles, or while the bride and groom are kissing after their vows at a wedding you’re getting paid to shoot—that’s really not the time to try to orchestrate three times more elements in the photo than you’ve ever tried to orchestrate at once. Know your limits and stretch yourself when the consequences of messing up are acceptable.

Conclusion

The end of the matter is this: understand the purpose of your photographs and learn the various elements (both artistic and practical) of photography. Develop a copiousness with the language of photography, and always be thinking about what your story is and how you can use these elements to tell it. Think about the memory you want to preserve, and what the best way to do that is.

If you do your job well, you and your viewers will look back on your photos and remember the blessings that God has given them. This will afford them an opportunity to [be thankful] in a way they otherwise might not have had. This, I believe, is the highest purpose a photograph can achieve.

The Narnian Wardrobe of Juicers

Sat, 16 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

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 post is going to focus on performance per watt, because I don’t think it’s well understood, and I don’t think it’s talked about as much as perhaps it ought to be.

Less Fruit, More Juice

It’s important, at the outset, to understand that performance, power usage, and heat production are all highly related. A computer takes in electricity, which produces heat, and using this electricity it pops out numbers that will turn into cat videos, blog posts, and deep fakes of Nicolas Cage in movies he never should have been in.

The question of performance has always been about how much power we can give a chip and how efficiently it uses that power. This is why bigger, heavier, hotter computers are always more powerful. This is why if you buy a 17-inch Lenovo workstation laptop that comes with a power brick you could use to maim someone, it will inevitably outperform something like a MacBook Air or a netbook (remember those). Or at least, that used to be the case.

Let’s use a metaphor from a field I know nothing about, so I can butcher it and get emails. If you’re juicing oranges—or let’s say apples, I imagine there are two ways that you can get more juice. You can add more apples, or you can get a more efficient juicer that will get more juice out of each apple.

For the first option, obviously, with fruits, there is a physical limit on how much juice you can possibly get out of a single apple. But I like to imagine that if you bought a crummy juicer from the clearance aisle at Walmart, it might only extract sixty percent of the juice from each apple. If you bought a nicer juicer, maybe you could get more like 97% of the juice from an apple.

The other option means you either need to get a bigger juicer, or just take a lot more time reloading the juicer with more and more apples. In this sense, you might find yourself sacrificing performance so that you can have a smaller juicer. Not everyone has the space for a 400 apple-capacity juicer in their kitchen. And sometimes you want a nice, portable juicer that you can throw in your bag to use on airplanes and in coffee shops.

This may not be how juicers work at all, but it is how computers work. If they use too much power, they get bigger and hotter, and become something you want less and less to have on your lap while editing video or making cider. If you want more performance, you can either get a bigger one, or get one that is more efficient. And of course, past a certain point, you can’t get any more juice out of an apple, so too there seems to be an almost physical limitation on how much performance you can get out of a laptop. If you want a juicer that only juices one or two apples at a time, you’ll only ever get 100% of the juice each apple^[This is like the fourth time I’ve capitalized Apple wrongly in this post and gone back and corrected it. I should have used a different metaphor.] has to offer. With laptops, it’s sort of felt like we’ve had that same kind of limitation, and over the last 5 years or so, juicer technology has advanced from being, at best, able to extract 90% of the juice from an apple, to extracting more like 94.5%. And we’re all wondering if we’ll hit 100% and not see any more advancement until something that sounds sci-fi and magical comes out, like “quantum computing.”

What everyone expected from Apple^[The brand this time] was that they would jump from 94.5% efficiency to, I dunno, 99%. What it feels like they’ve done, though, is make a juicer that is—if I could quote nearly every Doctor Who companion ever—bigger on the inside. Physically it is the size of an apple, but you can just keep packing apples in there. It’s the Narnian wardrobe of juicers.

You see, the Apple MacBook Air M1 uses about 15 watts of power for both its graphical work and its more number-crunchy work (the graphics processor and the general CPU). Most of the time, it doesn’t even use that. Most of the time, it seems to hang out in the 10 watt range. The computers it’s beating are those that give 45 watts to just the general CPU—the one for the number-crunchy work. This is a juicer that looks like it holds one apple, but takes in more like five or six apples, and extracts something like 98% of the juice. To companies like Intel watching, it feels like they just broke physics. That’s why when Apple announced these chips and their performance, no one believed them. But the benchmarks are out, and now we all know better.

This power usage means that tasks that used to take up your entire battery on last year’s fastest Intel MacBook Pro will now use only 17% of your battery on an M1 Mac, and still finish in roughly one third the time.

Now, it’s important to note that this performance per-watt likely won’t scale linearly. Meaning if instead of giving the M1 fifteen watts, we give it thirty, it won’t literally double in performance. In some cases and in some ways, it might come close—but not in all. And that’s due to the fact that certain kinds of computer operations scale much more linearly than others. But the notion that some kinds of computer tasks perform better with certain kinds of chips is another reason to be really excited about Apple Silicon. And it’s also the topic for a future post.

Why Mark II

Fri, 25 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

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 the diaphragm and leave you making that weird “I can’t breathe” moaning noise for a few seconds. That was my experience when I read this. George Gillespie’s humility stood in stark contrast to my “Look at me, everyone! I have things to say! Someone please call me a witty wordsmith!” attitude.

For those who don’t know, don’t remember, or just never cared, I used to have a blog by the same name as this one. On it I wrote about many things, but the most common topic was theology. Besides having been convinced that I ought not be writing as one having authority, that blog ended because I saw the vast ocean of Christian writings that all pretty much say the same 12 or so things (7 of which are probably heretical). It was an ocean that made it impossible to find the buried treasure, the exceptionally good books hidden on islands—but not by pirates. That would break my metaphor.

It is for this reason that I’ve buried that old blog. I don’t want to be a part of the pesky, distracting ocean that keeps people from even hearing about books by Thomas Watson and Wilhelmus à Brakel. Hold on a minute, “buried that old blog?” That’s confusing because of the previous ocean metaphor. I burned it. Burned it with fire. Man, my writing has gotten rusty.

So many believers think that they are well read on matters of theology because of the contemporary paperbacks and blogs they read. My experience has taught me quite the opposite. I found eating the candy of lesser writers was not only failing to help me grow spiritually. It was actively stunting my growth, making me think I was getting real nutrition and satisfying my biological hunger response, so that I had no desire for dinner.

This blog is still a worse thing to read than Thomas Watson, but its main new feature is that it doesn’t pretend to compete with him. Watson never wrote about note-taking systems, photographic composition, headless CMS’s, German note-taking systems, or the rest of it. If you want good theology, please go read his Body of Divinity. If you want fun thoughts on everything else, you’ve come to a place that will attempt to fulfill that desire.