Joel Dueck

A Shepard tone of assaults,Of bearings-down,A game of cartoon chicken by sound effect,A light aircraft, loud as a station wagon,A whole graph of grackle birds,Each of a hundred mocking each of a hundred,And now the day’s single train having a moment,A gollyshucks dog and his Mid-Atlantic narrator teaching the great American pastime to an unseen audience,A parliament of pick-me trucks, late to somewhere and mad about it,Coming out by ones and twos as Gandalf instructed them,Soon by sevens and elevens,Quick, everyone, open your windows,Start putting away your clean dishes,It’s almost seven o’clock.

Some people are so upset about AI crawlers that they’re going to mute themselves in protest. I can sort of understand the impulse, but I don’t share it.

Yesterday, Rachel Kroll wrote:

In my travels of the “Fediverse”, I saw something a couple of weeks back which seemed to resonate with me. They had a problem with something, stumbled across one of those Stack Overflow sites, and found the answers lacking. They then did their own work, found “a much better answer”, and then didn’t post it.

They didn’t want to post to a Stack Overflow site because of “harvesters and scrapers digesting my answer and not giving me one cent or even credit”. Someone else replied with a similar take, and I realized that describes me and how I'm feeling these days.

I respect Rachel a lot, and am certainly not here to say she, or anyone, is “wrong” to feel this way. But if we’re talking about how we feel, I’m going to take up some space on my own blog to say I definitely don’t feel this way.

I always enjoyed making and publishing notes of my discoveries, on the mere chance that someone else in the Graph Mind would find them helpful or interesting. With rare exceptions, no one ever gave me “one cent or even credit” either. They didn’t before AI, and they don’t now. So what has changed for me? In almost thirty years of writing online — nothing, really.

Maybe it’s just that I never built a large audience. Maybe people who are better at this than I am (Rachel would certainly be one of those) have felt a huge drop-off in Signals of Interest from their writing; if that happened to me, I could certainly imagine resenting it. And of course, being in tech has always been wearisome in other ways which I do understand from experience. We were longing for the goose farm even before AI murdered Stack Overflow.

But from where I sit, it feels like there are still curious people online doing stuff and looking for human signal. It’s still possible to find them and make yourself known to them. It’s just that, in addition to that undiminished community, there are also, now, a lot of robots. If I close my eyes and think hard about how that makes me feel about wanting to write specifically: well, somehow I can’t detect that it makes any difference at all.

We stopped in Rogers for fast food on the way up to the cabin yesterday evening. I snapped this photo from the parking lot.

I posted it on BlueSky and Mastodon, and hence it is temporarily also visible on my Latest weather pixels page, but I wanted to capture the HDR version here.

Control never told anyone his name. It’s fiction, of course, but what a fun idea, to so compartmentalize your life that you run a whole spy organization and no one has even the least idea who you are apart from some handle you chose for yourself.

Predictably, he started with the last days of Control: “Your old boss, George, bless him, the only one who ever kept his name a secret. Not from you, of course, he never had any secrets from you, George, did he? Close as thieves, Smiley and Control were, so they say, right to the end.”

Think about how difficult this would be. You can’t very well withhold your name from your boss or your co-workers and just say “I’m Control”, especially not when you’re new at the job.

It would depend, in particular, on not having anyone to answer to, or on those people forgetting or otherwise not caring what his name was before they left.

I have two unlikely theories.

One: maybe started on a very low rung, possibly in a position without any need for collaboration, then worked his way into a position of indispensable but invisible importance. At some point, maybe he has no clear direct report and his place on the org chart is unclear, there’s a power vacuum. He’s built up a huge disparity between his leverage and his recognition, and he executes the trade.

Or, he came in as a sought-after hotshot, right at or near the top, already on the fifth floor from day one, and anonymity was (unofficially) part of his terms.

The latter seems much less likely. What spy agency is likely to hire someone at the top who won’t say who he is?

The former also seems unlikely. In TTSS we get a sample of the interviews that formed part of the hiring process (for Bill Hayden) and they were comprehensive, if a bit perfunctory. Transcripts were kept for later reference, which is more than can be said for any company I’ve worked at.

But Control joined long before Hayden, potentially long before the hiring process had been built out to that degree. Maybe he joined at a time when such a trick would still be possible.

I think often of this line from a Junip song:

where nothing is compromisednothing is lostwhen everything is realizednothing is crossed

Looking back: when I’ve been angry, like really mad, it’s been a reliable signal that everything is not realized, that I’m missing something. That I’m about to do something stupid.

So I have a process: I try to look at all the angles, and then decide what feelings are actually going to help me deal. And when I follow this process honestly, I find that anger, even righteous anger, is just never on the menu of productive options. It’s not something I get to feel and then feel good about afterwards.

I’m a tall, straight, pale male; of course I’m going to have fewer real reasons to get het up than my ego might invent for me. I walk over the earth as I please, and I owe people the care it takes not to step on or hurt them.

I like to hope that ultimately, everything probably resolves: “when everything is realized / nothing is crossed.” Not in the sense that everything turns out right, but in the sense that if you had all the information, you couldn’t have written it any differently. That for every harm one person can do to another, there’s a missing twin of understanding out there somewhere that would take the poison out of it, if not the pain.

Not many people use Martina Plantijn. I came across it — I don’t remember when or how, and it was on my mind for months before I finally licensed it in December 2024. I didn’t know of anyone else using it at the time, but it’s such a good body font that surely it was in use lots of places.

Then at some point in summer of 2025, Frank #@!&ing Chimero switched to the same font for body text on his site. Miniscule pride! My own impeccable taste — validated! Frank, we should be pals.

Alongside pride, I admit to momentary… tiny …resentment? Because having good taste, and putting it to use in the things you make, is not enough to attract Signals of Interest from people you admire. No one will ever know or care that I beat Frank to a good font.

Anyhow, Frank has since switched fonts again, this time to… uh, Courier. I don’t think I’m quite cool enough to pull that off.

Write your content here.

[edit: oops. I created this post while recording a new YouTube demo for Camp. I forgot to delete it, and when I made an unrelated change the next day I accidentally published it. Now it’s appeared in feed readers and I think I have no choice but to leave it up. —Joel, Sep 21 2020]

I was rewatching the show Miss Fischer the other day. In the first episode, the maid Dorothy is so scared of this new-fangled electricity that she is terrified to pick up the telephone.

Miss Fischer

But don’t they [vacuum cleaners, washing machines] save you labor?

Dorothy

Yes, but at what cost, miss? My priest says it’s unnatural putting electricity through wires. Sooner or later, it will come in contact with the molten center of the earth and will blow up the whole world.

Dorothy is right about one thing. Electricity is dangerous. But it’s not dangerous in that way. It’s dangerous in much more mundane ways, ways that can be mitigated with boring things like codes, inspections, and licensing bureaus.

I can imagine a tweet from 1890:

I resigned from Westinghouse Electric Company today. I spent the last three years researching alternating current at both Thomas-Houston and Westinghouse. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to high-voltage arc lighting and gambling with our lives.

And…yeah. High-voltage overhead AC lines did kill people in New York. We had to figure out how to make them not do that, with policy choices and oversight. (Hopefully we can still do that kind of thing.)

I accidentally started another listen-through of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, one of my favorite books. Once again I am confronted with the weaknesses I share with the titular characters:

“Oh!” said Strange. “I think that the quicker one gets these things out of one’s brain and off to the printers, the better. I dare say, sir,” and he smiled at Mr. Norrell in a friendly manner, “that you find the same.”

Mr. Norrell, who had never yet got any thing successfully out of his brain and off to the printers, whose every attempt was still at some stage or other of revision, said nothing.

I am reminded how much I would like to see myself doing writing, not just making tools for writing and designs for writing. My tools are in good shape; I should start using them more often.

It’s tricky, from a design point of view, that the things I think I want to publish are sometimes an essay with a title, and sometimes a paragraph of something maybe just barely worth saying. But not having room for those little paragraphs means I’m losing some good stuff, and I rarely have time to do the essay thing in a way that’s up to my Norrelite standards. So I took some time to crack the design piece and I’m pretty happy with it.

I used to hate the word “blog”. I also used to be a prescriptivist.