https://silasjelley.com/feeds/references/ /icon/48.ico Silas Jelley reply@silasjelley.com 2026-02-27T18:06:30Z tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:58eb7299-1e3a-4730-9937-cb4fa2e485c7 2026-02-27T18:53:30Z 2026-02-27T18:53:30Z <p>Worrying is funny, because inevitably […] your mind begins to forget it all.</p> <p>Everything you were anxious about is compressed and edited into a few images. The bike boxes on the sidewalk at 3:30AM, the customs guy cutting open your 10 layers of tape on the bike box, doing squats in Dallas during a layover while being watched by a lady eating a huge tub of yoghurt.</p> <p>Everything else slips away. Inconsequential. And surely soon even these images will be compressed.</p>6:53pm on February 27, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Kyle Siemens, India, The Bike Trip, The Book?!, Making It Meaningful, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:72cb745a-fb63-4c58-a521-0378a0160c12 2026-02-27T14:46:34Z 2026-02-27T14:46:34Z <p>recently it dawned on us that clothes are, in a certain way, open-source. We can go to a thrift store, buy a shirt, rip out the seams, study it, lay all of the pieces down over new fabric, trace the patterns, cut them out, and sew it all back together to produce a copy of that same shirt. We’ve been wanting to learn how to make our own clothes but didn’t know where to begin, until this month. Our first project was to reproduce our hats, after the store we bought them at stopped stocking them. We bought black cotton canvas at a local fabric store, took our old hats apart and re-built them.</p>2:46pm on February 27, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Rek & Devine, January 2026, Hundred Rabbits, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:ebeab6f5-f853-43ab-adc8-642c65d13249 2026-02-22T17:52:59Z 2026-02-22T17:52:59Z <p>It’s a fine line between standing behind a principle and hiding behind one.</p>5:52pm on February 22, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“President Thomas J. Whitmore in Roland Emmerich's, Independence Day, 1996”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:bb70b67e-e25c-432c-8bf8-ab63789590df 2026-02-15T01:25:41Z 2026-02-15T01:25:41Z <p>Human must adopt shape of machine or machine will smoosh human into shape of machine.</p>1:25am on February 15, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Garbi, Google might think your Website is down, Lobsters, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:35b5e4d3-6166-4954-8ae2-09365eb2c96c 2026-02-14T10:44:58Z 2026-02-14T10:44:58Z <p>So many of our foundational institutions – hiring, journalism, law, public discourse – are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable. That the internet, which we all rely on to communicate and learn about the world and about each other, can be relied on as a source of collective social truth.</p> <p>The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system.</p>10:44am on February 14, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Scott Shambaugh, An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened, The Shamblog, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:88cf8aed-9795-46ff-95ad-49dee3861abb 2026-02-14T00:30:42Z 2026-02-14T00:30:42Z <p>What you cannot do, let others do for you.</p>12:30am on February 14, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Mysaria in Ti Mikkel, season 2, episode 5, 2024”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:d2317ff3-653d-4f12-8482-f6f30fe58145 2026-02-13T19:10:00Z 2026-02-13T19:10:00Z <p>Multitasking is a lie. It is just rapid-fire distraction.</p>7:10pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Calin, Single Tab Week, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:03603dbb-ea90-474b-b421-504f059d5490 2026-02-13T15:20:04Z 2026-02-13T15:20:04Z <p>With domestic robots, what will the new continuous repetitive micro task be? Will I have to empty its lint trap? Will I have to polish its eyes every night? Will I have to go shopping for it, day after day, or just endlessly answer the door to Amazon deliveries of floor polish and laundry tabs? Maybe the future is me carrying my robot up the stairs and down the stairs and up the stairs and down the stairs, forever.</p>3:20pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Matt Webb, 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry, Interconnected, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:717276e5-9752-49be-a97e-2db7e54077cd 2026-02-13T14:38:58Z 2026-02-13T14:38:58Z <p>The very features of the sport that the ‘C’ swimmer finds unpleasant, the top level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring-swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say-they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. […] It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.</p>2:38pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Daniel F. Chambliss, The Mundanity of Excellence, Sociological Theory, American Sociological Association, Vol. 7, 1989”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:ae299648-eb86-4063-a954-71e7f5153ef1 2026-02-13T14:37:06Z 2026-02-13T14:37:06Z <p>Can a writer appoint themselves artist-in-residence of a place or subject or idea and make some kind of literary project about it? How would that work, exactly?</p>2:37pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Amy Stewart, The Self-Appointed Writing Residency, It's Good to Be Here, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:9d595722-60bd-4d30-87be-d19546079d24 2026-02-13T14:32:10Z 2026-02-13T14:32:10Z <p>I imagine robots will be priced like a car and not like a dishwasher? It’ll be worth it, assuming reliability. RELATED: I was thinking about what my price cap would be for Claude Code. I pay $100/mo for Claude right now and I would pay $1,500/mo personally for the same functionality. Beyond that I’d complain and have to find new ways to earn, but I’m elastic till that point.</p> <p>Because I don’t doubt that domestic robots will be reliable. <a href="https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response">Waymo has remote operators that drop in for ambiguous situations</a> so that’s the reliability solve.</p> <p>But in a home setting? The open mic, open camera, and a robot arms on wheels - required for tele-operators - gives me pause.</p> <p>(Remember that smart home hack where you could stand outside and yell through the letterbox, <em>hey Alexa unlock the front door?</em> Pranks aplenty if your voice-operated assistant can also dismantle the kitchen table.)</p>2:32pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Matt Webb, 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry, Interconnected, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:17b8abf1-5ad3-4df4-b3f2-633a2d23603a 2026-02-13T14:30:22Z 2026-02-13T14:30:22Z <p>What mundane pleasures will I be robbed of by domestic robots?</p> <p>Sometimes I feel like my job at home is putting things into machines and taking things out of machines.</p> <p>I don’t mean to sound unappreciative about “modern conveniences” (modern being the 1950s) because I take care of laundry and emptying the dishwasher, and I love both. We have a two drawer dishwasher so that is a conveyer belt. And I particularly love laundry. We generate a lot of laundry it seems.</p> <p><a href="https://x.com/Duderichy/status/1935313693866180976">There was a tweet in 2025</a>: woodworking sounds really cool until you find out it’s 90% sanding</p> <p>And it became an idiom because 90% of everything is sanding. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhotography/comments/1lj3pal/what_is_our_90_sanding/">See this reddit thread</a>… 90% of photography is file management; 90% of baking is measuring; etc.</p> <p>So when I say that I love laundry I don’t mean that I love clean clothes (everyone loves clean clothes) but I love the sanding. I love the sorting into piles for different washes, I love reading the little labels, especially finding the hidden ones; I love the sequencing so we don’t run out of room on the racks, I love folding, I love the rare peak moments when everything comes together and there are no dirty clothes anywhere in the house nor clean clothes waiting to be returned. (I hate ironing. But fortunately I love my dry cleaner and I feel all neighbourhood-y when I visit and we talk about the cricket.)</p>2:30pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Matt Webb, 90% of everything is sanding e.g. laundry, Interconnected, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:49f2ec78-7653-4907-91a5-32cf49c1f525 2026-02-13T14:26:15Z 2026-02-13T14:26:15Z <p>woodworking sounds really cool until you find out it’s 90% sanding</p>2:26pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Duderichy, Twitter, 2025”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:51d40ad8-d3b0-4d5b-a03f-c627e5995bac 2026-02-13T14:16:48Z 2026-02-13T14:16:48Z <p>What happened was, a faucet started dripping. And then I managed to route around the malignant machineries of late-stage capitalism. These days, that’s almost always a story worth telling.</p>2:16pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Tim Bray, Humanist Plumbing, ongoing, 2025”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:eb867c73-bc29-420b-93a6-a91381e80615 2026-02-13T12:21:12Z 2026-02-13T12:21:12Z <p>I don’t understand anything about flavour, that’s the problem. My taste buds are like a child’s. I’m perfectly happy with convenience store bento boxes and curry from cheap restaurants.</p>12:21pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 9, 2023”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:d543d3c6-93c0-45af-9b87-a29317726d8b 2026-02-13T12:20:19Z 2026-02-13T12:20:19Z <p>Every night, those women would clean out the toxins that had built up in their partners’ bodies and souls over the course of the day – toxins that, if left untouched for too long, would eat a person away. The elder male colleague of hers who had died unexpectedly at home last month had been single and lived alone. An image rose up in Rika’s mind of her own cold apartment which she hadn’t cleaned in some time – his had probably looked a lot like that. The apartment also closely resembled the one her father had inhabited by himself after his divorce.</p>12:20pm on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 8, 2023”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:bcaa705f-7c7b-4d53-91c2-2595a0e4b69a 2026-02-13T11:50:26Z 2026-02-13T11:50:26Z <p>Impressive, you have reached the end of the page: Thank you for your interest!</p>11:50am on February 13, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Adrien Barbaresi, Trafilatura, GitHub, 2024”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:20196c22-9e8e-463a-b985-d87ead962ed7 2026-02-12T23:40:39Z 2026-02-12T23:40:39Z <p>your notes to be useful to yourself later[.] They have to be useful to someone else, too. Future you <em>is</em> someone else: you won’t remember everything.</p>11:40pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya, Using an engineering notebook, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:2fda940b-3cc4-4553-892e-51fb8b49a866 2026-02-12T23:30:01Z 2026-02-12T23:30:01Z <p>There was a pre-LLM version of this called “battledecks” or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPoint_karaoke">“PowerPoint Karaoke”</a> where a presenter is given a deck of slides they’ve never seen and have to present on it. With a group of good public speakers it can be loads of fun (and really impressive the degree that some people can pull it off!)</p>11:30pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“crystal_revenge, Hacker News, 2026”">Reply via email</a></p> tag:silasjelley.com,2020-08-20:192aa0a1-2e5c-456a-a0d1-3cc810a00e3b 2026-02-12T21:01:18Z 2026-02-12T21:01:18Z <p>The way that Reiko spoke made it seem as if her baby already existed in the world, Rika thought – as if they were all just waiting for it to appear in the room. It was the previous summer that the obstetrician had told Reiko it was likely that stress was to blame for the fact that two years into her marriage she still hadn’t conceived, and Reiko had promptly quit her job in the PR department of a major film production company […]</p> <p>When Reiko had resolved to give up the job that she was so good at, Rika had thought it a waste. Not just that – her friend’s decision had produced in her a sense of loneliness and resentment that had left her sleepless. They had argued about it several times over the phone.</p>9:01pm on February 12, 2026 from Appledore, South West England, United Kingdom<p><a href="mailto:reply@silasjelley.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Rika in Asako Yuzuki's, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 5, 2023”">Reply via email</a></p>