I collect notes from things I read and hear. There are currently {{ site.categories['notes'].size }} notes collected here. The best way to browse them is through [the index](/tags). Or you can start by browsing [my favorites](/search?q=...| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
Recovering from yesterday’s deadlifts.| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
I think *Se7en* has better "what's in the box?!" energy than this film, but this was fun. I did not expect "come to daddy" to be the most-repeated line in this movie, and that felt out of place! Maybe people said that a lot in the '80s and I just never knew? I think the best parts of this film are the practical effects. The sequence of him raising from Hell was well worth the price of admission. Afterward, we pulled up the trailer for the 2022 remake of Hellraiser and boy did that look differ...| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
The old capitalist Left identifies and states the truth of the problems we face but lies about the results of their actions (because the actions for a solution require dismantling capital). The modern capitalist Right lies about the issues (or denies them altogether) but is ironically honest about the results of their actions.| Josh Beckman
Neoliberalism has sought to become the most efficient system that would fight the Stalinist approach to the appearance of work. Fisher uses the example of Stalin’s White Sea Canal. In the 1930s, this canal was one of the most impressive feats in engineering, but only on the surface. The canal was too shallow to use for most 20th-century cargo. Thus, it was a symbol of production and, more importantly, anti-production at that. Stalin’s USSR would turn this canal into PR. People would photo...| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
I threw this party with Mike Wang, who’s my collaborator at Long Journey. Everyone that came to this dinner party had to try on a pair of spectacles, and the spectacles had a role that they had to play written on the side. Jackson: Cool. C...| Josh Beckman
I’ve been listening to Mustard Service’s Variety Pack album since I saw them last year. This newest album from them has an even greater range - from the driving Going Nowhere to the dreamy and lilting 2 AM - and has been my go-to for relaxing in the hot summer breeze. The tunes are just so catchy and fit well with a cool drink in your hand.| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
I didn't actually like much of the first two acts, but the final act is *just* so perfect. And I gave another star just for M. Emmet Walsh's performance. You can see so much of what a Cohen style would become: mirrored cinematic transitions, sweaty realism, stupidly and misunderstanding as fatal flaw, patient conversations, heavy diegetic sound. This first attempt just isn't as refined as they would become.| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
Politics legendarily creates strange bedfellows. Crypto companies are now asking the CFPB to revive a regulation protecting a business the first Trump administration kneecapped, after which the second Trump administration hollowed out that same agency, despite campaigning against kneecapping tech and crypto—leaving the CFPB, long a sworn enemy of big banks, in Chase’s corner dismantling the crypto industry and suppressing competing payment methods, because the administration apparently th...| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
A double header of losses| Josh Beckman
This review may contain spoilers. A mobius strip of dreams that I enjoyed more while watching it than I did while turning it over in my mind the rest of the night. Like a dream, I guess.| Josh Beckman
A double header| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
This isn’t full of bangers but it’s full of bops that are fantastic to listen to while working in the morning. Just lots of little loops that wiggle their way into my body and then I find my shoulders shimmying to the beat.| Josh Beckman
This has a really good overview of my own thinking around why/when a fetus or a baby has rights and “is alive/conscious” and why an embryo or computer is not.| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
I wanted to get notified when my friend Kevin posts new photos to his Flickr profile. Flickr’s documentation says it supports many feed formats (including RSS/XML) but in order to actually get those feed URLs, you have to go spelunking into the source code of the page and then decode the HTML entities the developers mistakenly left behind:| Josh Beckman
| Josh Beckman
This is like the author-attribution complement to everything must have a URL. And I do agree! Everything was authored at sometime by someone; make it clear to encourage collaboration. You’ll learn more if people can find you through your work.| Josh Beckman
Really not fun today. Not hard, just a bad mood. Unknown location (probably inside)| Josh Beckman
Sore and tight hamstrings but music makes running easier 1725 North Sheffield Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60614, United States| Josh Beckman
Choose the least capable feature/tool/pattern/etc. suitable for a given purpose. This optimizes for the capability/tractability tradeoff: the more things you can do with something, the harder it is to reason about. Using a less capable thing...| Josh Beckman
I hadn’t seen BMSR before but everyone else had and so I didn’t know the treat I was in for. They draped a big net in front of the stage so they could have two projectors in tandem - one on the screen behind them and on on the netting in fron...| Josh Beckman
(Politically speaking, this idea overlaps appealingly and naturally with the widespread low-information voter belief that a single sufficiently driven and common-sensical guy could “fix” the government–see, e.g., the movies Swing Voter, Dave, Ma...| Josh Beckman
Hello, friends. I'm [Josh](/about/). I'm a software engineer building gardens, systems, and tools. ## What I Believe ### On Making - **Make things. Not too much. Mostly for others** — Our job is to help others. Be of service. - **Bui...| Josh Beckman
Lessons learned and observations from working in the software engineering industry. {% assign postsByMonth = site.categories['practicing'] | group_by_exp:"post", "post.date | date: '%Y'" %} {% for day in pos...| Josh Beckman
First we built a user interface (UI) when the application was just going to be operated by humans. There’s a whole branch of study around good and bad patterns in that design practice, focusing on how we make things easily operable by humans. T...| Josh Beckman
