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A common problem I encounter with computers is the everyday minor friction in workflow: the repetitive but only occasional task, or the tedious multi-step process.

Perfect example: the other day I wanted to batch resize and compress a bunch of images. It’s something I’ve had to do before, but not an everyday problem.

When you have a problem software can solve, it has to be painful enough to warrant the effort and overhead required to build something. Given my level of knowledge, I could thrash my way through writing a shell script to do this resizing operation (probably). But it’d take me a couple hours of Googling and trying and retrying to eventually get something that works — all for an operation that might take 7 minutes to just do manually. So rather than automate, I just deal with it.

This means dozens of daily nags go on nagging —they don’t nag enough to warrant the cost of solving. And they aren’t painful enough to search for and buy software to fix. So I go on muddling through with hacks, workarounds, and unanswered wishes.

But yesterday with a few prompts Cursor, in 15 minutes I made (or the AI made) a shell script to handle images that I can reuse next time. I didn’t even look at the code it wrote. Just typed 3 bullets of a description of what I wanted in a readme file, and out comes the code. An annoying process goes away, never having to search around for existing tools. Even if a solution did exist, it’d probably be part of a bundle of other features I don’t need; I’d pay for the Cadillac when I only need a taxi.

We’re moving into a new phase where personal software like this might often be the simplest path to a solution. In a world where we’re used to going to Google or GitHub, it’s now even faster to make your own. It’s cracked open new possibilities for people formerly incapable of creating their own tools.

Software used to be costly enough that those “hey this might be cool” ideas were quickly set aside when the cost/benefit wasn’t there. There’s potential for this new paradigm of digital goods production to radically alter the landscape of what gets built.

I found and watched this this morning. Phenomenal documentary on the life and ideas of Rene Girard.

A lot of direct interviews with Girard himself, as well as many of his colleagues, collaborators, and those influenced by his ideas.

“Truth is beauty, and beauty, truth” —John Keats

I’ve been on a kick lately trying to understand what informs the concept of “taste.” When we say someone “has good taste,” what do we mean?

I’ll have more to say on taste later. But this thread of curiosity led me to reading on aesthetics and what constitutes beauty. Sir Roger Scruton’s Beauty is a great introduction to the subject, one I just finished earler this week.

In this short lecture, poet laureate Dana Gioia investigates the subject.

Is “beauty” a physical characteristic? Does it just mean something that “looks nice”? Something deeper is going on here that’s worth exploring.

Experiencing beauty happens in 4 stages:

• The arresting of attention
• The thrill of pleasure
• A heightened perception of the shape or meaning of things
• The moment vanishes

Initially we’re attracted to an unstateable something about the beautiful. The work of art, the pleasant mountain valley, the few lines from CS Lewis that get stuck in our brains. Then comes the pleasurable sensation; we want to stay in that place and absorb it. We notice something about the beautiful thing that seems to connect to a richer underlying reality — as when a mathematical fractal resembles the braided river or the veins in our bodies. Then before we can capture it the moment disappears, leaving us wanting to find it once again.

He also discusses the tension between beauty and practicality, suggesting that beauty has the power to transform and inspire, fulfilling a deep human longing.

I’ve been looking for a way to use outdoor time as a spur for creativity. Many of us do our best thinking when our brains and bodies are otherwise occupied — we even call them “shower thoughts” for a reason. Running and walking for me are incredibly productive for the generative part of my brain. I’ve come up with and connected more dots while running than ever when sitting at the keyboard.

Sometimes I’ll walk with phone in hand, usually reading in the Kindle app, but also burning time on social feeds. Depending on what I’m reading I’ll even bring a physical book on walks, as long as I can read one-handed. But then I started going with nothing, just a walk with my eyes, ears, and mind to keep me company. And, as is always the case when the mind has nothing to distract it, the brain is racing with thoughts and ideas and things I need to do and stuff I want to look up when I get back home. But there’s no way to write anything down — fleeting thoughts fleet right out of my head.

So a couple months back I bought a dictaphone. It seemed silly at the time, but I thought “what the hell, I’ll try it”.

Instead of the temptations of my iPhone and the internet in my pocket, I can “take notes”, but they have to be free-form, spoken word. There are voice recorders out there with wifi, AI, transcription. But all of this is irritating ornamentation to me. I wanted the lowest-tech, least-friction method I could find. Hit record, get mp3 file.

And yes, this means I have an audio file with messy, disorganized thoughts. But so what? I can easily speech-to-text it into the computer (more on that in a minute), and regardless, a driving factor here is to get out of my brain’s way. Half the benefit is the “unlocking” effect I get of the no-frills, no-barriers talking out loud. Who cares if I say something that makes no sense? Part of the objective here is to kickstart the mental pistons, get through the messy disorganized thoughts, and find the good stuff.

For me, thinking is modal. Sometimes I need a kick to switch my brain from “consuming” to “producing” mode.

Speaking your thoughts out loud doesn’t come naturally to me. Probably not to many people who aren’t daily podcasters or radio hosts. Having only done this for a little while, it takes practice to speak coherently off-the-cuff into a microphone.

But the improvisational aspect of dictating is one of the most interesting to me. I find myself 20 minutes into a spontaneous stream-of-consciousness, and along the way encountering 5 tangents of other ideas I didn’t even start out riffing on. It’s a fruitful method for getting these latent ideas in my head to crystallize into something tangible. I’ll fork off on some tangent, then the act of thinking, processing, and trying to articulate out lout helps organize the mess into cohesive thoughts.

These audio files aren’t publishable, but maybe one day they might be with practice.

All I’ve been doing after recording is copying the file off the device to my computer, and running a simple command line tool to convert to text locally.

I found this open source tool called hear, which acts as sort of the inverse of the native macOS command say. It uses the OS’s built-in speech recognition APIs to convert mp3 to a simple text file:

hear -d -i voice-note.mp3 > text-note.txt

It’s not as fancy as the online tools like Rev or Otter, but I like it this way. The bulk of the text is a mess of jumbled thoughts with fragments of useful interestingness I can clip out.

Offline, audible thinking is a helpful tool so far. I’ll keep going with it and see how it evolves.