David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #30 (August 2025)

Posted 2025-08-05 under #dispatch

Nice to have a quieter month. We went down to Lake Norman for the Fourth, but otherwise stuck around town. Mom and Dad came down to celebrate Mom’s birthday, hit up Marbles (which Nev loved so much she snuck away and we had to organize a search party) and a Durham Bulls game.

Down at the lake, I started writing some music to capture the weekend as a sort of sonic journal. I finished it up at home in Ableton and called it “Lake Affect” (thanks ChatGPT for the title + cover art):

I pulled a bunch of samples¹ off the web – fireworks, ospreys, ambient lake sounds – to make it specific to the time and place. For the next one, I’ll try my hand at making my own field recordings.

A Lego store opened up at our local mall, and we got Nev her first set. Legos featured prominently in my childhood and it’s a real prime fatherhood feeling to be able to pass that down. Let’s hope my folks kept all my old stuff.

I asked ChatGPT to write a program to automate an annoying multi-step process (removing Docker volumes, specifically). I use the program it created, dvrm, several times a week. I went ahead and open-sourced it, but I feel strange putting my name on code I had really no hand in writing. I came up with the idea, and I tested that it works, but it feels roughly equivalent to signing my name to an AI-generated image. Anyhow, there it is if you delete Docker volumes with any frequency.

I registered for the Bull City Race Fest half-marathon for what’ll be the fourth year in a row. I am not in running shape, between a lingering foot issue and general exhaustion, but I’m intending to be ready. The weather’s been blessedly cool the last few days (low 80s) – let’s hope that keeps up. I’d like to be able to do a few 6-8 mile runs when we go up to Rehoboth Beach in a few weeks, but I’m not there yet.

This Month

• Adventure: Rehoboth Beach with my family; Brooklyn for an old friend’s wedding
• Project: make a beach-based track
• Skill: field recording

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
• Non-fiction: The Book, Alan Watts (a guy I follow mentioned this author, then I saw this on our bookshelf – maybe Claire picked it up? seemed like a sign + it’s pretty short)
• Music: The Exciting Sounds of Menahan Street Band, Menahan Street Band

Links

• Son Heung-min is Tottenham. Tottenham is Son Heung-min.

  Because he embodied the joy of football played well, the shared thrill as he burst past a defender, the graceful way he found the corner of the net. But also because he embodied the joy of people. He never hid his emotions on the pitch, or his love for his team-mates or colleagues or the fans who supported him.

• Flounder Mode - Colossus

  I asked Kelly about the tradeoffs of focusing on a single thing if you want to be great (which is what I had been getting at before). “Greatness is overrated,” he said, and I perked up. “It’s a form of extremism, and it comes with extreme vices that I have no interest in. Steve Jobs was a jerk. Bob Dylan is a jerk.”

• DIYR

  Celebrates the spirit of independence, creativity, and resourcefulness. The acronym DIYR stands for ‘Do It Yourself Revolution’, promoting reflection and new forms of production, combining simplicity and longevity, ethics and aesthetics.

• Naz Hamid • Just One Good Thing

  In the last year, a mindset shift and approach appeared as a very simple idea: just do one thing, that I want to do today.

• Contra Ptacek’s Terrible Article On AI — Ludicity

  Let me be extremely clear — I think this essay sucks and it’s wild to me that it achieved any level of popularity, and anyone that thinks that it does not predominantly consist of shoddy thinking and trash-tier ethics has been bamboozled by the false air of mature even-handedness, or by the fact that Ptacek is a good writer.

• The AI-Native Software Engineer

  A practical playbook for integrating AI into your daily engineering workflow

• Full-breadth Developers | justin․searls․co

  The software industry is at an inflection point unlike anything in its brief history. Generative AI is all anyone can talk about. It has rendered entire product categories obsolete and upended the job market. With any economic change of this magnitude, there are bound to be winners and losers. So far, it sure looks like full-breadth developers—people with both technical and product capabilities—stand to gain as clear winners.