Gemini* and Gopher

• Science

  • From Consumer to Producer: What Changes When a Practitioner Starts Making Knowledge

    There is a moment in a long project when you stop being someone who reads the literature and become someone the literature includes. It is quieter than it sounds, and most people miss it while proofreading. I will argue that the crossing from consumer to producer of knowledge is the real deliverable of practice-based research, by showing what synthesis demands, what a symposium is for, and what finishing one project tells you about the next.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Twenty-Five Minutes Against the Whole Dissertation: The Pomodoro Method for Scholars

    I want to make a pragmatic argument, not an inspiring one. If you are trying to build a scholarly writing practice that survives past February, the Pomodoro method is worth a try. I will argue that it works because it corrects a category error in how we describe writing. I will show what the method actually does (lowers the threshold, protects attention, produces evidence) and how to adapt it so it fits a human being rather than a machine.

    The category error first. Journal article writing turns excruciating partly because we name the whole project as the task. I need to write my dissertation. I need to write my article. But writing is not one action. Writing is a sequence of smaller actions: opening the document, sketching an outline, rereading yesterday's last paragraph, stating a claim, chasing a footnote, revising one sentence, identifying a source. Name the sequence as a single mountain and you will stare at the mountain. The Pomodoro method asks you to pick one action out of the sequence and give it a bounded amount of attention, which is a much smaller promise and a much easier one to keep.

    The classic version is blunt, which is a virtue. Choose a concrete, small task, and make a list of several of them (the small hit of finishing five or six items is real, and you should let yourself have it). Set a timer for twenty-five minutes and work only on that task. When it rings, stop and take five minutes. After four rounds, take fifteen. That is the whole system. I use tomato-timer.com because it lives in a browser and requires no setup ritual, and setup rituals are where writing sessions go to die.

  • Babel With Better Hardware: Christian Theologies of Technology and Artificial Intelligence

    Machines now do things we once filed under distinctively human: reasoning, conversation, creativity, the appearance of empathy. Technology, as George Grant argued decades ago, is a way of being in the world rather than a neutral tool. I argue that the Christian traditions share three convictions about technology (the uniqueness of the person made in the image of God, the goodness of created matter, and the priority of love over efficiency) while bringing distinct resources to bear, and I show this by following the argument from Genesis through Ellul and Guardini to the fight over transhumanism.

  • Should you accept contributions generated by LLMs in your Open Source project?

    Let’s put aside for a moment all the ethical/ecological/societal considerations about the use of generated code (also known as "slop" if you don’t like it and "vibecode" if you do) in open source projects and consider it from a simple, practical, pragmatic point of view.

    There are basically three potential positions:

    1. Mostly accepting LLMs as neutral tools that contributors could use (with safeguards or not, with policy of human reviewing or not).

    2. Finding a compromise or choosing not to do anything, issuing some "not yes, not no" guidelines. This is now known as the "Debian AI policy".

    3. Strongly rejecting LLMs (with potential exceptions that have major safeguards).

    The middle ground (position 2) may seem like the most rational position to take. It is also the default. Let’s wait and not decide too quickly!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Notes from DWeb Cascadia 2026

      Why did I attend this? When I signed up, I knew it was not entirely what anyone who knows me would call "my thing". For starters, it involved camping ... or well, sleeping in a tent. (With catered meals, hot showers, and the town of Ganges 5 minutes away, it could be described as "backyard camping for adults." But still). And even more daunting, it would involve talking with strangers, attempting to involve myself in a community about which I knew only that we shared some concerns about various mis-uses of contemporary tech. Previous conference experience has shown me how well I tend to do in such circumstances, which is not very well at all.

      But perhaps it would be good to stretch myself, to venture outside my comfort zone. Try something new.