- BidWix’s a fast, fair way to agree on a price ✶
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Chloe just opened a small bakery and needs a logo. Ben is a freelance designer whose work she loves. But how much should a logo cost? Neither wants to go first.
Ben’s absolute minimum for the work is $100. Chloe could stretch to $900 if she absolutely had to. That’s her honest maximum.
They use BidWix to each submit their true limit price in secret.
Result: $300.
Ben earns three times his minimum. Chloe pays a third of what she feared. Both gained by the same factor, so both feel equally happy about the deal they made.
That’s the geometric mean at work. No awkward back-and-forth — just a fair price, found in one step.
Made by MyNoise.net’s Stéphane Pigeon, who’s also written some interesting thought experiments about the concept.
I haven’t used it, yet, but if you want to hire me, we can try it together and see.
Tuesday, 25 August 2026
- The Truman Show ✶
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It’s a visually stunning, spiritually powerful conclusion. It is the point of The Truman Show that we don’t know what world he is stepping into, and can’t follow him to see what happens next. This is about more than just turning off the TV, or setting down a smartphone; it’s about someone making the difficult choice to be himself outside the context of what others see and expect of him.
What a strange time we live in. Keep bringing more graphite, paint, and paper, musical instruments, and non-phone cameras to life.
Via Jank.cool
Saturday, 22 August 2026
- ♫ Just in Time ✶
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Nina Simone live at Casino Kursaal, 16th June 1968. Remembered this one while thinking about the Before trilogy of films.
Friday, 21 August 2026
- Self-playing games ✶
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Games that play themselves are like using AI for writing, drawing, and thinking, or, at the risk of making many people angry, watching others playing with balls on TV instead of playing yourself and rediscovering the pleasure of physical movement.
Wednesday, 19 August 2026
- AI hysteria’s effect on global decision making ✶
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Hoping it ends soon 🤦
Tuesday, 18 August 2026
- Writing using large language models, artificial intelligence (AI) ✶
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If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?
This can be navigated, of course, but it is truly perilous: our writing is an important vessel for building trust — and that trust can be quickly eroded if we are not speaking with our own voice.
Saturday, 25 July 2026
- You matter more than you think ✶
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This text by Karen O’Brien with beautiful pencil and watercolor drawings by Tone Bjordam will almost certainly be added to my list of best books once I finish reading it.
Our beliefs about the nature of reality influence our relationships, including our relationship to nature. For many of us, our relationships to concepts and ideas such as self, other, and nature have been influenced by a classical, mechanistic view of the world. Relationships within a quantum system are characterized by entanglement, uncertainty, indeterminism, and potentiality. In quantum systems, there is nothing that is “apart” or fully separate, and if we consider the universe to be one large quantum system, this includes humans and non-humans alike. When we consider Karen Barad’s concept of intra-actions, together with Alexander Wendt’s perspective on language and linguistics as quantum social phenomena, it becomes clear that who we are, what we do, and how we relate and communicate matters. In short, [I/we] matter and the words and metaphors we choose and use have the power to transform both our relationships and our shared reality.
There’s also a free audio book version.
Wednesday, 22 July 2026
- Ten steps towards happiness ✶
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By Peter Hintjens. See also, The Cretan Method, which talks about many things, including learn-play-work-teach vs the unfortunately more common play-learn-work-die.
Sunday, 19 July 2026
- Placid Lassie Douglas C-47 N74589 ✶
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Just saw this plane fly by, probably headed to Oshkosh.
Friday, 17 July 2026
- Noita 65, Reanimal, & Vein demos ✶
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The smoke is clearing and I’m slowly getting back to the games. Played a bit of Noita and the Reanimal and Vein demos with my friend Artwo.
Vein seems like a 3D Project Zomboid.
Reanimal brought to mind Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and Munch’s The Scream, which may be a “sign of the times.”
I may return to it, if I muster enough courage to play it alone, but I think it’ll be another game. (You won, Kojima. But I have something up my sleeve for the music.)
- Do it yourself (DIY) air cleaners ✶
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Looks like the current administration here has not completely destroyed the Environmental Protection Agency yet.
Might want to get some weatherstripping insulation tape for the fan edges, too, and get going with that solar installation you’ve been putting off.
Tuesday, 14 July 2026
- Nature, society, economy ✶
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If the economy collapses, society and nature might still survive.
If society falls, it takes the economy with it yet nature can still survive.
But if nature: the ecosystems of the planet, the biodiversity, and the climate as we know it today collapses, then everything falls apart.
The social and economic systems we have built cannot exist independently from the environment. Therefore, in a conflict between these three systems, nature must always come first.
- Earthset ✶
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Photograph by Christina Koch, taken aboard the Integrity capsule of Artemis II in 2026, 58 years after Earthrise.
Sunday, 12 July 2026
- Streetwork ✶
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The explosion of the school into the urban environment is the primary concern of this book. It views the town as the educational resource in a new approach to environmental education, and shows how this ‘streetwork’ can be put into practice by means of fresh educational techniques: perception studies, town trails, environmental games and simulations, and streetwork centres. This valuable study includes much practical classroom advice, and will be of interest to those who are concerned about the pupil’s involvement, particularly the non-academic secondary-school pupil, with the world outside the school. Streetwork has a message, too, for everyone who wonders how public participation in environmental decision-making is ever to become a reality.
Added a book by Colin Ward to the to-read list.
Friday, 10 July 2026
- The end of reading ✶
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But what if you consistently replace one kind of action (reading a word) with another (watching an Instagram Reel)? One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is that people’s brains master what they practice. If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair.
I love reading and writing on paper, and do read and write quite a bit on computer screens. Phone screens are too small and uncomfortable.
But there hasn’t been a TV at home for two decades, and even videogames, which I love, have been less interesting lately unless they have good cooperative modes, unusual gameplay mechanics, or excellent sound and story.
Nowadays I lean towards learning to play a new instrument, which has felt like a present from the gods, and having read McLuhan and Lanier, and the above article, I do worry about the future, but am hopeful young people will indeed rebel.
Monday, 6 July 2026
- Exanima episode 10 ✶
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Sound buzzing issues from the prior episode of my Exanima series are now fixed. They were caused by a forgotten compressor filter that had been turned on in the audio routing setup, and probably some electromagnetic line noise that is hopefully fixed. Still testing, but last night’s stream sounded alright.
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