After Iceland, we traveled to Oslo, Norway. Summers can be hot in Atlanta, so we wanted to visit another country with cooler temps. Norway is amazing! So much natural beauty and quiet.

We took a tour of the islands in Oslofjord (and learned it’s not technically a fjord because it was created via tectonic plate separation rather than glaciers). Here we learned about cabin culture in Norway: I think it’s around 80% of people either own or have access to a cabin. July is the main month for folks to retreat to their cabins where they enjoy nature and the nice weather.

One thing I found cool is that Olso’s public transportation (including the island hopping ferry boats) has been completely converted over to battery electric. Our guide told us that Oslo wants to be the quietest city in Europe. I think their work has paid off, Oslo was very quiet!

From Oslo, we headed to Bergen on the west coast via the scenic Bergensbana train.

The train route is famous for crossing the Hardangervidda mountain plateau where the landscape changes over to a more barren, mountain top plain (even though the elevation at around 1,500 meters is not extremely high).

In Bergen, our main event was a cruise through the fjords to the small town of Flam.

Flam is one of the more popular small fjord towns and is visited by cruise ships almost every day. The ships dwarf the town in both size and population.

From Flam, we took the train back to Bergen, traveling on the scenic Flam Line.

From Bergen, we headed north along the coast to the small island of Lilløy where we stayed in a converted boathouse.

Lilløy was my favorite part of the trip: we got to experience a bit of Norwegian cabin life, where we shared breakfast in the main house and cooked other meals in our small cabin.

This part of Norway is famous for rain, and it did rain almost every day while we were here. But the sauna kept us warm.

We had an amazing time in Norway! It was especially hard to leave behind the nature and cooler weather. We can’t wait to return someday.

Currently reading: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow 📚

The lunar landscape of Iceland

We traveled to Iceland for my sister-in-law’s wedding, congrats Ginny & McKenzie! I wanted to share a few photos from our time on the island.

Our rental car was a Chinese EV, a Hongqi compact suv. First time driving a Chinese built car!

The landscapes around our hotel were amazing:

We rode in buggies out to a glacier:

A nearby waterfall:

We spent our last night in Reykjavik, there was an interesting boat in the harbor. I looked it up and it’s powered entirely by renewable energy, turning seawater into hydrogen and using solar panels to charge its batteries:

Spur of the moment, we decided to take a whale-watching cruise at 9pm (it stays light until after midnight) and it was amazing!

We saw puffins:

And humpback whales “bubble feeding”:

We felt incredibly lucky that we were able to see this!

Iceland is an amazing place and we had a great time.

From here, we traveled to Norway to visit Oslo and Bergen, where I’m currently posting from somewhere on the coast just north of Bergen. In my next post, I’ll have some photos from our time in Norway.

Just turned on cross posting to Grain.social for images posted here!

Currently reading: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton 📚

Re-reading Jurassic Park, last time I read it was maybe 20 years ago. Realizing now how much of a metaphor for the AI age it is.

Life finds a way.

Finished reading: Palaver by Bryan Washington 📚

Ghost Pipe flower (not a fungus!) spotted while hiking near Asheville, NC. Thanks Beth and Jonathan for teaching me about this plant!

How to Hate AI • Steve Simkins

I read a blog post recently saying that it was ok to hate AI. While I agree to some extent, I think it was missing some key points about how to hate AI. It’s easy to just hate something you don’t like. We as humans have a natural propensity to hate or dislike things we are not familiar with. The problem is that this approach is akin to putting your head in the sand or screaming at the clouds; it doesn’t actually help anyone.

Nobody Pushed Back: Why Engineers Stay Silent Until It’s Too Late | How to Center a Div

Someone walks through an architectural decision and nobody in that room actually agrees — they just act like they do, because saying what you really think is socially expensive. Meeting ends, decision gets made. Six months later production blows up and everyone says “we knew this would happen.”

I wonder how AI is going to change this situation? Will it become harder to push back against something AI has built even if it’s bad? How long until engineers don’t even know what the AI is producing and the automated decisions being made are not even reviewed?

Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott

For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win.

That contract is now broken.

Free stuff unintentional (?) still life.

Some photos taken outside Taos, NM from last year that I don’t think ever made it to the blog.

If you like classic Macs and home automation, you’ve got to check out the Cydintosh project:

https://github.com/likeablob/cydintosh

I assembled mine and it’s working great!

It’s amazing to me that this little board is emulating a Mac while listening to events for weather data. What a clever project!

If this appeals to you and you don’t have access to a 3d printer for the enclosure, reach out. I have plenty of PLA in this color to go around. :-)

BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN | The Verge

I’ve reviewed a lot of tech products over the past decade and a half, and all I can tell you is that it is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea.

Great essay by Nilay.

It feels to me like the whole industry has forgotten about the “personal” in personal computer. I’m someone who loves computers, or at least I used to. But I think it sounds awful to have to remold my entire life to suit the computer.

The irony here is that LLMs are the first technology that really could make the PC personal. But instead we are on a path to remake our lives to suit the LLM, not to mention our land, water, and electricity.

I hope as a society we can course correct. I hope, if LLMs have to be a permanent part of the computing landscape, small, efficient models that run on the hardware we already have take over. Then we might have some hope of making computers personal again.

A few friends convinced me that I should give film photography a try so I took the plunge!

The camera I chose is the Pentax K1000 which came with a 50mm f/2 lens. I wanted to find something that was completely manual/analog but still had a functional exposure meter and that’s exactly what the K1000 provides. With the exception of the meter, the camera is completely functional without a battery.

It’s been an adjustment to photograph with full manual controls, including manual focus which I almost never need when shooting digital.

My first roll* was Kodacolor 200 and I had a few photos that I was really happy with which I’ll share here.

*: My actual first roll was a b&w Kodak Tri-X and, sadly, the lab mistakenly destroyed it when they processed it as color. It’s a sad outcome, but I suppose all a part of the overall experience with film! Honestly, I was a little relieved that it was the lab’s mistake and not my own.

This barred owl lives in this magnolia tree right near our home!

Trump’s latest salvo to upend offshore wind: Pay firms… | Canary Media

In its efforts to block U.S. offshore wind development, the Trump administration has halted project construction, rolled back tax credits, and spread misinformation. Now, in the latest maneuver, the administration is paying a global energy giant nearly $1 billion to walk away from its plans to install turbines off the east coast. On Monday, the Interior Department said it had struck a deal with France’s TotalEnergies, which agreed to forfeit its leases for offshore wind areas near North Carolina and New York. In exchange, the Trump administration will ​“reimburse” the company dollar for dollar for the lease fees — and that money will be plowed into new fossil fuel projects.

Insane. Let me make sure I’m following this logic:

1. Hype up fossil fuels while shitting on renewables
2. Start war, spiking the price of oil
3. Pay a foreign oil company to not finish projects that’d bring more clean energy into the US grid
4. Also pay the same foreign oil company to build natural gas export infrastructure that locals oppose and also doesn’t contribute to add energy into the US grid
5. Laugh all the way to the bank while oil companies (and Trump) get richer and the environment, US energy grid, and US citizens suffer the costs?