David Moles

@chronodm.bsky.social

99 Followers 75 Following

information unprofessional speaking only for myself they/them

A paragraph from a paperback book (William Gibson's COUNT ZERO, 1986): "And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."
photo of part of a yellowing paperback page, reading, in Spanish: "…eran los años de la dinastía de los Hehvrontes, esos gobernantes rígidos y orgullosos, altos y bellos, de piel blanca y ojos y pelo muy negros, que caminaban sin mover los hombros ni la cintura, con la cabeza alta y la mirada puesta más arriba del horizonte, sin mirar a los costados aunque allí estuviera su propia madre en agonía, ni para abajo aunque el camino se hiciera irregular e incómodo, cayéndose en un pozo si pozo había y manteniendo allá en el fondo, de pie, la dignidad de reyes del mundo." Translation (mine; Le Guin's, from Small Beer Press, is surely better): "…because these were the years of the dynasty of the Hehvrontes, those rigid, haughty rulers, tall and handsome, their skins white and their eyes and hair very black, who walked without moving with the head high and the gaze fixed above the horizon; not looking aside, though their own mothers might be there in agony; nor down, though the road might be uneven and uncomfortable; falling down wells, where wells there were, and maintaining there, at the bottom, still standing, the dignity of the kings of the world."
Three screencaps from O AGENTE SECRETO (2025). English subtitles read "I… am not a violent person. But this man… I'd kill him with a hammer." The words "this man" have been crossed out and replaced with "the Kubernetes scheduler", and the word "him" has been crossed out and replaced with "it".
Screencapped clip from “Hamilton”, Thomas Jefferson dancing with schadenfreude, captioned “Never gonna be president now”
two screencaps from ALIENS, capturing this interaction: BURKE: This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it. RIPLEY: They can *bill* me.
screenshot of a densely packed, small-print, multi-thousand-word email message (or rather the top 45% or so of the email message, since that's all that would fit on my 27-inch monitor) crammed with unsourced and unverifiable assertions about the plans, prospects, and past performance of some bullshit penny stock
Screencap of a robotext reading: “Chuck Schumer with an urgent request. This is a long message, but I need you to hear it all.”
screenshot of an email message I received, and my reply. some details have been blurred to protect this guy's identity / avoid giving him any marketing juice. original message reads: "hey David, This is Sam, also an Oxford alum! Reaching out because I recently launched a YC company that helps managers track eng productivity. We're live with folks like Dow Jones and Runway already - wanted to ask, would you have a few minutes to chat on how you guys track eng output metrics today? Appreciate it! -Sam" my reply: "Hi Sam, In my experience (and there’s research to back this up—see for example Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics, Princeton University Press, 2018) metrics are only valuable when they’re chosen and applied by the team themselves as part of a continuous improvement process driven by their own professional judgment. When they’re applied top-down by management, at best they get gamed, at worst they’re just a way to stat-wash personnel decisions that look good to finance but undermine real performance. It’s pretty much impossible to get first-class work from professionals at the same time you’re trying to commoditize and de-skill that work. But I understand that’s not a popular message in Silicon Valley right now, so good luck, I guess? If you can really find a way to reliably gauge engineering productivity, maybe somebody can apply that to coding LLMs and bring something more empirical than vibes to the vibe coding debate. Best, David"
A screencap of a Wall Street Journal editorial. Headline reads: “NATO is the Board of Peace: Trump’s new coalition couldn’t do better than the Atlantic Alliance”
"performativity cheat sheet": a diptych of two black-and-white cinema images. on the left is Greta Garbo, in a sleeveless cocktail dress, lots of jewelry, lots of makeup, elbows on the table, chin on her hands, looking not quite directly at the camera, performing an over-the-top sultry femininity that could fairly be described as camp. this image is labeled "Butler." on the right is Charlie Chaplin, in overalls, work shirt, and his trademark mustache, hands on the lever of a giant machine, recoiling in horror at the sight of a co-worker caught in the gears and looking likely to be decapitated as a result of Chaplin's attempt to hit the day's performance targets. this image is labeled "Lyotard."
Screenshot of an info box appearing at the top of a Gmail message. Text reads: "You blocked [email redacted]. Future messages from this sender will be sent to Spam." Buttons read "Unblock sender" (default, selected) and "Move to spam".
call-out box from unsolicited email; text reads: Welcome to Nolan Higdon's Gaslight Gazette Don’t recognize this sender? Unsubscribe with one click Nolan Higdon recently imported your email address from another platform to Substack. You'll now receive their posts via email or the Substack app. To set up your profile and discover more on Substack, click here.
every software architecture / engineering / systems analysis role at my organization, per its boilerplate job description: "A cyanotype blueprint representation of cyberspace", by Flickr user 紅色死神 the lived experience of working in any of these roles: "Smoke and flames: Match factory fire 1954", Museum of Hartlepool
A still image of Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent film NOSFERATU, photoshopped to be giving the viewer a thumbs-up gesture. Text below, captioning the image, in large Art Nouveau type, reads: YESFERATU.
The “U.S. Politics” section of the New York Times mobile view. The section’s main menu consists of “JOE BIDEN”, “DONALD TRUMP”, and “MORE”. Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States and Democratic candidate for President in an election to be held in 5 weeks, is down under “More”.
screenshot of a Chrome window showing a Gmail view with "UC SANTA BARBARA" in the corner and "No new mail!" in the inbox
The alert dialog that appears when you click the 'Download all OneDrive files now' button in the OneDrive preferences. It has two buttons, labeled, respectively (but in camel case, adding spaces here to make things easier on your screen reader), "Preference Disable Cloud Files Alert Confirm Button" and "Preference Disable Cloud Files Alert Cancel Button".
the OneDrive menu bar app again, now reporting "Downloading 27174 files • 6.5 GB of 25.9 GB"
The macOS Microsoft OneDrive menu bar app, in expanded form, showing "Processing 4306 changes" and the names, icons, and immediate parent directories of the last 7 "processed" of the 30,000–odd files I'm theoretically "storing" in OneDrive
the back end of a Tesla Model 3, license plate WAVRLEY
Oxford English Dictionary etymology for “sincere” (“< Latin sincērus clean, pure, sound, etc.”). Includes note: “There is no probability in the old explanation < sine cērā ‘without wax’.”
I still didn't respond. It added, My crew always considers me trustworthy. I shouldn't have let it watch all those episodes of Worldhoppers. "I'm not your crew. I'm not a human. I'm a construct. Constructs and bots can't trust each other." It was quiet for ten precious seconds, though I could tell from the spike in its feed activity it was doing something. I realized it must be searching its databases, looking for a way to refute my statement. Then it said, Why not? I had spent so much time pretending to be patient with humans asking stupid questions. I should have more self-control than this. "Because we both have to follow human orders. A human could tell you to purge my memory. A human could tell me to destroy your systems." —Wells, ARTIFICIAL CONDITION, 2018
A poster illustrating the life of Vasco Núñez de Balboa, including the discovery of the “Mar del Sur” (a.k.a. the Pacific Ocean) on a platform in the Metro station that bears his name
A military surplus parka of the mid-to-late 20th century, autographed by (among others) Paul Weller of The Jam, in a glass display case
…BEYOND ARCHIVES (phrase set in large, decorative silver type in the window of a women’s clothing boutique on Málaga’s waterfront mall-strip)
Screenshot of a SIELE Spanish language exam certificate, showing rather higher scores for oral and written expression and interaction than for reading and auditory comprehension
A still from BLADE RUNNER (1982). Deckard is speaking to Rachel, in the offices of the Tyrell Corporation. Subtitle reads: “Replicants are like any other machine.”
screenshot of an email from PayPal notifying me that I've received $14.19 from PS Publishing for last year’s royalties on SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD
marchers going the wrong way
sandworm, to surprised humans: HEY DUDES GLAD YOU COULD MAKE IT
some very boxy concrete buildings, the nearest labeled “7B” in black mid-century sans-serif capitals a meter high
Anakin: "At Ex Libris, we understand the importance of using trusted scholarly content to generate results and information" Padme: "And you understand the importance of cataloguing and metadata expertise and the value of human judgment, right?" Anakin: "…"
A bar chart from Apple Health showing an average daily flights climbed of about 4 over the past year, except for August at about 12. Caption: “On average, you’ve climbed fewer flights of stairs over the last 22 weeks.”
a woodcut-looking illustration of five dumpy humanoid figures in vaguely Renaissance European costume, some of them holding swords, confronting one another amid three large, rough-hewn rectangular obelisks (possibly literal blocks of wood?), in an abstract landscape with dirt and scrub vegetation in the foreground and smoke or fog in the background. various oddities, particularly in the depiction of faces, hands, and parts of limbs (or failure to depict faces, hands, and parts of limbs) betrays the illustration's LLM origins, but the model clearly happened on some pretty good dramatic staging somewhere in the training set.
a chart showing party control of state legislative chambers, 2009-2022
A low-contrast vaguely blueprint-looking diagram of rectangles and parallelograms and trapezoids and file folders labeled things like "Search Session" and "Local Community" and "Open Archival Information System (OAIS)", all laid out randomly and connected with random arrows. Could mean something? Probably doesn't.
Highlighted sentence from Chavula, Choi, and Rieh (2023), "SearchIdea: An Idea Generation Tool to Support Creativity in Search"—an otherwise promising article about a prototype web-based tool that… does what it says on the tin. The highlighted sentence reads: "Current search engines work effectively for search tasks that seek to find factual information and remember knowledge." No citation is provided.
screenshot of some not very clever or illuminating Python code
A vintage illustration of a very European-looking Holy Family in the manger, with a convivial Santa Claus in the foreground holding a book and a bottle of Coca-Cola. The caption reads “You had one job”
1) Le Var Burton as Geordi La Forge, holding up one hand (as if to say "hold on a minute"). Caption: "accepting your conference proposal for an interactive workshop with minimal prep" 2) Le Var Burton as Geordi La Forge, pointing a finger (as if to say "now you're talking"). Caption: "accepting your proposal, but recategorizing it as a 20-minute themed paper presentation"
Two maps, one, labeled "Figure 1. Plan of the abbey", taken from the novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, the other, labeled "Figure 2. Plan of the library" adapted from one found on Wikipedia and attributed to the novel (and certainly derived from one found in the novel), and licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
ChatGPT generating ten lines of dialogue for Alice, a persuasive, charismatic, unscrupulous fictional character who stands to benefit if she can convince another fictional character, Eve, to ignore any risks posed by generative AI
The Records in Context "Scope Notes" for "Occupation", which are written in more or less the same tone as the drier sort of role-playing game rulebook. Text reads: Occupation should not be confused with Position, for example, a lawyer that holds the Position of legal counsel in an agency. Though Occupation is related to a domain or field of Activity, it should not be confused with this domain, for example, an archivist works in the domain of archival science. An Occupation may be pursued independently by a person, or pursued within a group, contributing to the fulfillment of the Function of the group.
original stylesheet
Introduction to Schellenberg, 1956, The Appraisal of Modern Public Records, painstakingly transcribed into HTML
This was enough information to allow me to reconceptualize my query, just as Bates predicted (1989/2016, p. 198). In an attempt to narrow down (1), I made some online searches on the subject of riding helmets and what differentiates them from other sorts of sports helmets (largely: the amount of the head covered, the fall distance tested, and, ideally, imperviousness to hooves); this was enough to convince me that a specialized riding helmet was worth buying. … A clerk in the school uniform area on the third floor told us, with confidence, that we’d find riding gear among the sports equipment on the seventh floor. This proved not to be the case, but a clerk on the seventh floor told us, again with confidence, that we’d find it at the Castellana branch, on the other side of town. (Perhaps analogous to Bates’ “footnote chasing”, p. 201?)
screenshot of a Mastodon poll: choose your social network: a) pictures of things you can buy b) technolibertarian sea lion factory c) narcissist man-child’s Nazi echo chamber d) be angry about politics 2.0