Brad Barrish

The almost-total “blood moon” as seen from Los Angeles, CA

I’m back on Twitter, y’all.

I’ve always loved this photo of Dolly by Andy Warhol. It’s difficult to imagine a world without Dolly setting the impossibly high bar for what kindness looks like, especially in these trying times. She is undeniable. May she rest in peace.

I saw the incredible Jeff Parker and the the IVtet (thank you, Greg!), which included drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson. It was the first of three nights at the Lodge Room in the Highland Park neighborhood in LA. It was one of those rare shows where you hear all of these sounds and you have absolutely no idea where it’s all coming from. Jeff and Josh both use pedals a lot, but I focus so much on Jay, who is certainly one of the greatest living drummers.

Phoebe Bridgers in the BBC Live Lounge covering Lithium by Nirvana. Absolutely stunning. Wow.

Transcript

I don’t believe for a minute that Amazon is the only company that has been buying rare books to scan them and, in the process, destroy them. They’re just the latest to get caught.

I was sorry to read about the sudden passing of Stephen Wolfram’s wife, Elise Cawley. He wrote a beautiful post about her that was really touching. May she live on through all those who loved her and were loved by her.

Welp, after running the script for a while, I hit a limit. Apparently Gmail has a limit on the number of filters you can create. Every time I applied my Unimportant label to a new sender, the script would notice that sender and create a Gmail filter for it. One sender, one filter. It worked well, but once I hit the 1000 filter limit, it stopped being able to create new ones.

I worked with ChatGPT on a fix. I’ve been using it more for coding work lately. We ended up making the filters more dense without changing the overall behavior. Instead of creating one Gmail filter per sender, the script now groups multiple senders into a single Gmail query filter, which is something I used to do manually. Here’s what that looks like:

{from:a@example.com from:b@example.com from:c@example.com}

It still matches exact senders, but it uses a single filter instead of three. Consolidating filters reduced the total count dramatically while keeping the same basic workflow and ChatGPT handled the consolidation over the course of a few hours.

I also tightened up the operational side. The script now understands grouped from: query filters when it checks whether a sender is already covered, so rerunning it should not create duplicate coverage. I had some dupes that were left over from the manual work I was doing before I worked on the script. I also documented the setup a bit more thoroughly so it covers how to run it on a schedule, how to verify it, what files should never be committed, and details rollbacks.

Software still needs to be maintained. Go figure. Small automations are still systems.

This week I had a lot more time in the car to listen to podcasts. I’ve been following a lot of the discussion and reporting about data centers. Jasmine Sun is doing some of the best reporting on the topic you will find. I haven’t come across anyone else doing the depth of investigative reporting that she is doing. By all means read the article, but her conversation with Ezra Klein was great, but I particularly enjoyed her conversation with PJ Vogt.

I continue to use AI in my work and personal life and still find it exciting and ever more useful as time goes on. I use it mostly to build things for myself. That said, I really don’t like that AI companies have vacuumed up so much creative work for training without compensating creators. I also hate all the slop that makes up such a massive amount of content and traffic on the web. Every day I think about deleting my blog and just retreating to a dark forest.

I’ve really been enjoying the work that the DFOS team is doing. I created a space called Ohey Computer. If you want to check it out, this invite code is good for the first 10 people who use it.