a writer's notebook
I last charged this when I got it on Monday afternoon. God knows what other people were trying to do with theirs, but this is after two days of sporadic use. Sporadic use being the only way I’m going to use a knowledge assistant device.
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Technically the Gilbert Schema, apparently, but it gave me the lead I needed. It was the word “schema” I didn’t have. I’ll call that useful and time saving.
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Once again, a status post for the whole week. Two more weeks of a hard push to come. Was slowed down this past week by a nasty little cold my partner brought home from her travels. Heading into the hottest week of the year so far. Frankly. ten days ago I was still wearing a hooded coat and gloves if I wanted to go outside, so I’ll take it: there was a brief period IN THE MIDDLE OF BLOODY JUNE where my hands wouldn’t work well enough to type properly on the phone.
I was hoping to sleep in this morning, but apparently my body didn’t get the message.
I have, however, been having fun doing a quick Morning Computer first thing in the day to warm up, and I feel like I’ve almost got that format where I want it.
I brought my old Pixel Chromebook back to life only to find that it can no longer update Chrome, and it turns out I need an updated Chrome to access the WordPress New Posts window. It can still access GDrive, just about, for the moment, so I can probably still use it as a writing device – it has a great keyboard — but that’s about it. Poor old Pixel. Such a beautiful machine.
In other machine updates: I bought us a Tribit Stormbox Micro 2 outdoor bluetooth speaker (UK) (US+) for the patio table, which paired instantly with my phone and has a big round sound. And it seems like my Rabbit R1 may be arriving today. I’ve seen all the reviews, I am prepared for it to be useless, but I still have a feeling that my specific use cases may actually fit the device better than someone who wants an easier way to call an Uber or use whatever a fucking Doordash is. I look forward to discovering how stupidly optimistic I am.
And while I was typing that up, it arrived.
The promise here, for me, is a little box of knowledge. One day a version of it might even be a Box.
OPERATIONS: I stopped counting pages – probably around eighty last week? Not sustainable, but it’s nice to know I can still swing the hammer when I have to. Even when I can’t breathe, see or type properly. I need to get at least that many done by July 4, but I am slowing down now. INBOX: 111 ! I am across email this week, but I probably won’t be lightning in response time.
READING: QUANTUM: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar
LAST WATCHED: MALPERTUIS
LISTENING:
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Forthcoming 2024: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM.
Comments closedI’m one of those people who ordered the Rabbit R1. It hasn’t arrived yet. The reviews of the first batch are out and are uniformly terrible. I’m not too worried. For one thing, by the time my device arrived, the OTA updates will have fixed a bunch of things that reviewers complained about. For another, many of the things the reviewers complained about don’t affect my use case for the Rabbit R1. The Rabbit can’t use Doordash or Uber properly? Well, Doordash and Uber don’t even operate in my location, so that was never an issue for me. Can’t play your Spotify playlists? I don’t use Spotify and seriously, what kind of sound experience do you expect off a plastic puck? Can’t save your bullshit Midjourney pictures? Tough shit. Go and look at art made by people or learn how to draw. The AI hallucinates? All AI hallucinates. I’ve been messing around with Perplexity AI, the system Rabbit uses, and I’ve only caught it hallucinating once.
I want to try a separate AI knowledge device. I have an iPhone. Siri is not very good. I can’t summon Perplexity from the lock screen. Siri may well get a big AI-related update, but I am betting 1) you’ll have to buy a new iPhone to get the full effect 2) it otherwise won’t be as frictionless as pressing a button and speaking to get the knowledge I want. At night I sit downstairs with a notebook on a lapboard, writing and researching, and a little puck on the board next to the notebook that I can thumb and talk into to get the information I may need does seem a hell of a lot easier than having to pick up the phone, clear the notification scroll, swipe and tap and tap and tap to get to the same point. The Rabbit R1 seems to me like a calm little box full of libraries, rather than a slab of screaming glass, and that’s what I paid for. Maybe next month I’ll see how wrong I was.
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