Jim Willis

Author: sjwillis

  • Crazy Fingers

    I’ve been ruminating over how the chord changes to Crazy Fingers ever came about. The changes don’t feel like something you’d come at organically outside of some melody. Last night my son turned me on to Distorto from the ‘75 studio rehearsals and I now think that Jerry had this really interesting melody in mind…

  • dowpy – WordPress Posts to Day One

    Dowpy grabs the ATOM feed of my website and pulls in new entries into a Day One Journal called, surprise, “Wordpress Entries.”

  • Why Federate?

    Over at Dave Winer’s Scripting News, Dave makes the case that federation and interop of social media is maybe the wrong move. I think in some cases it may be. Thinking a lot about why and what I write here, it’s rarely because I want to engage in conversation but because I want to share…

  • Read: A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft

    I’m becoming more and more convinced that the people who are most well-positioned to leverage GenAI in its current form are those who are skilled at precise language. When you think about programming languages like Perl, Python or PHP, they’re really just language that is trying to communicate something without ambiguity to a computer. Prompting…

  • Re-listening

    The shift to hosting a personal Navidrome server has shifted my listening habits, fostering more repeated listening contrasted with Apple Music’s constant novelty aspect.

  • ChatGPT and “Humanities Types”

    In his latest issue of galaxy brain, Charlie Warzel dismisses the value of ChatGPT in part because he’s unable to see the value or potential. of ChatGPT, because the ability to control or drive value from the tool is outside the grasp of most humanities types. A good ChatGPT whisperer understands how to sequence commands…

  • Read: “We Are All Socialists in Our Private Lives”

    > If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes. *Source: Nathalie Robin Justice Gravel on X* We evolved *because*…

  • Read: Overconsumption Is Killing the Planet. What Can We Do?

    During the 1960s, for example, the average American person bought fewer than 25 garments every year. Fast forward 60 years, they’re purchasing nearly 70 pieces of clothing annually, or more than one new item per week. Source: Overconsumption Is Killing the Planet. What Can We Do? – Richa Syal

  • Read: Being a Humanist Technologist

    A *humanist technologist*, then, is someone who uses multidisciplinary skills to help organizations use or understand technology in order to improve personal and social conditions. Don’t get me wrong: I can code productively, and have built entire companies by doing so. But I’m not motivated by the code or the fundamental problems themselves. My motivation…

  • Read: What’s This for You Feed? Is It Algorithmic?

    When you subscribe to a Smart List, all the posts from the accounts on that list will show up at the top of your screen, as a feed. That’s the “firehose”, nothing removed. By default, Smart Lists you subscribe to also show up in your For You feed. In For You, we only show the…