2025
I'm writing this for several reasons. First for Steve, my neo-luddite friend with an enviable life in beautiful PA who always tells me that zmjones.com is his favorite site. That domain now redirects to Vietnamese soccer-betting? Shout-out to Steve.
Second because I'm self-hosting this on an Unraid sever that I built, and I didn't die of frustration or morph into a SysAdmin because of Claude: destroyer of tedious work, and third because I possess some apparently inescapable urge to word-vomit into the void occasionally.
Things I learned or did this past year that I can fathom someone else might want to know.
- San Diego sucks for cycling: it is a highway by the beach. The weather and the velodrome are really the only good parts of cycling in the metro area. I've been hit twice. I don't recommend it unless you are the type of cyclist who doesn't mind driving. The fact that there is cycling infrastructure makes it barely tolerable but it all feels like it is trying to kill you.
- I decided to build the Unraid server for serving media to our TV, backups of our various computers, self-hosting this. It has been pretty stable, and with Claude's help anyway hasn't been very difficult to configure. I built in a mini-itx case using a new but very low power intel cpu, a modest amount of ram, no discrete gpu (the intel transcoder is quite good), an nvme drive for cache, and then some larger hdd. I recommend. The *arr apps are pretty cool. I can download SNL automatically to watch with the wife which she thought was mildly cool and so a huge win.
- I read some interesting "conspiracy" books about Allan Dulles (The Devil's Chessboard), the Manson killings investigation (Chaos), the Contra's drug running (Dark Alliance), and the general lawlessness of SFOD-D or whatever they are called now (Fort Bragg Cartel). Idk how much of this it is reasonable to believe but it generally jives with the tone set by unarguably sober books like Kill Anything That Moves or Legacy of Ashes which have mountains of documentary evidence. Also on this topic I ofc read Seymor Hersh's articles on the Nord Steam Pipeline that the US clearly blew up and I talked to a French coworker about this and he was like "oh yea duh everybody knows that" and that reminded me how local notions of what is plausible and what is not can be: makes you think about his article about the killing of OBL (recommended).
- Radio War Nerd did a series on Barbarossa which has been really fantastic.
- Now that we've kidnapped Maduro and seem poised to try to repeat that elsewhere and it seems like Trump is playing 3-D chess against China/Russia we should remind ourselves that Venezuela/Iran are only selling them cheap oil because of our sanctions, obviously they don't want to sell oil to anyone cheaply. Sanctions are like strategic bombing, just an epic flop of a political/military strategy that causes wanton pain which we morally excuse because it isn't "kinetic." Also it seems eminently reasonable to nationalize your country's natural resources.
- The rising tide of AI content is flooding books and nobody has a plan about what to do about it. Even if publishers had a policy against it, which most don't, it is, I would argue, an intractable thing to reliably identify on an ongoing basis, especially if you take blocking decisions based on that. All of the existing techniques are very fragile from what I can see. IMO we have to rely more on recommenders, and it is making search more difficult. This really is applicable to any type of content.