@chris.ashworth.io - Chris Ashworth

03 Sep 2026 11:50 +0000

pro: after 9 years of having to drive my kid to school every single day because Baltimore City had no bus service, my 9th grader can finally take a city bus to school con: the city bus runs consistently 10-15 minutes late and she can't get to school on time {don't-know-what-i-was-expecting.gif}

02 Sep 2026 21:52 +0000

listen. it's VERY simple. A goes to B, B goes to G, D goes to 2, C goes to 1, and E goes to 3. in short, E, C, D, A, B is now 3, 1, 2, B, G and please don't keep asking

02 Sep 2026 01:48 +0000

i've spent 30 years of my life learning to organize electrons into useful arrangements, and sometimes i wonder ... sigh. I just wonder about that sometimes.

01 Sep 2026 22:52 +0000

there's an awful lot of grief in the air, friends

01 Sep 2026 22:48 +0000

For the past...10 years? 15 years? More? My personal home page has been exactly one Wendell Berry quote, which I found in the appendix of a book. chrisashworth.org

01 Sep 2026 15:37 +0000

Rest in peace fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry. He wrote one of my favorite poems.

01 Sep 2026 13:41 +0000

thank you PNC for whatever you did here; i'm sure we must have wanted it

01 Sep 2026 01:44 +0000

apparently my daughter's best friend described me to their peer group today as "the gayest straight man you'll ever meet" (the friend is queer; gonna read this as a compliment)

30 Aug 2026 15:17 +0000

Given that AI is automation, & automation tends to be owned by capital, it's understandably viewed with suspicion & hostility in a society where we experience powerlessness and harm from capital. But capital doesn't *just* do harm, and I find it hard to unwind that thread in this conversation. 1/7

29 Aug 2026 19:39 +0000

As I read this 2025 working paper (on Expertise as a predictive model for how employment is affected by automation - www.nber.org/papers/w33941), I'm struck by several typos and copy-edit slips which AI could quickly flag for clean-up. I wonder if these human errors now qualify as comforting? 😅

29 Aug 2026 15:27 +0000

my spouse attempted to add our daughter's "circus camp" to our shared calendar. due to a wild bug in the calendar app, it has not just added the event, but it has added an additional copy of the event...on every day to the end of time. by next summer our daughter has hundreds of "circus camps" a day

29 Aug 2026 11:46 +0000

i'm (obviously!) not an expert in economics but right now it feels a little like in 2020 when a bunch of us became HIGHLY MOTIVATED to learn at least the basics of pandemic science on that note here's an interesting paper about the value of labor when tasks are automated www.nber.org/papers/w33941

29 Aug 2026 01:46 +0000

the world's a mess, but we're making art anyway (i'd strongly encourage you to check out all three of these shows) (i'm co-directing the last one) [contains quote post or other embedded content]

27 Aug 2026 01:11 +0000

meeting with a tax specialist about a specific kind of filing and i'm completely mystified by what they think our job categories might be

26 Aug 2026 21:28 +0000

Desperately Trying to Amortize Violence into Boring, Non-Violent Chunks: One Species' Attempts to Reduce Toil & Suffering (or: "Healthy Human Governance, Can We Do It???")

26 Aug 2026 21:19 +0000

Just ordered this book from 2017. If the latter half of my career involves further instability due to ongoing fallout from a pandemic, political collapse, and hyper wealth inequality, I guess I want to… know more about what to expect? 😬 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691271844?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

25 Aug 2026 01:22 +0000

I keep hearing (and in early experiments, directly understanding) how the constraint on models is about the training data. Speaking in draft: what if communities organized around their data? Formed collectives to create new data they control and own? This is a half-baked idea but we need "what ifs" [contains quote post or other embedded content]

25 Aug 2026 01:15 +0000

I'd LOVE to see conversations about a future that acknowledges the utility of AI without the concentrated power and wealth of ultra capitalism in control of the whole thing. I'm hungry for something to work towards! I want an uncomplicated delight in technology inside a human-valuing social system! [contains quote post or other embedded content]

24 Aug 2026 23:58 +0000

this is a succinct explanation of why "AI is a toy" doesn't hold up. if programmers are being more obnoxious about this topic than the average joe, it's because we're (either optimistically, or pessimistically, or both) racing our little boats toward shore with news of a big wave [contains quote post or other embedded content]

24 Aug 2026 23:25 +0000

fascinating exchange here about the contrast between automation that increases productivity vs that which deskills labor, and some thought experiments on whether deskilling labor can ever lead to net desirable outcomes. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

24 Aug 2026 12:00 +0000

If AI was like Bitcoin or NFTs (useless and stupid and wasteful), I would still be scorning it. When exposed to the early public-facing versions of AI, I wrinkled a skeptical eyebrow and went on about my days. But to my great consternation, it got impressive and powerful. Now we gotta deal with it!

23 Aug 2026 15:35 +0000

If agents can absorb a meaningful fraction of the adversarial bureaucracy used by health insurance companies or governments to prevent people from receiving benefits, that seems like a positive thing to me. The system is stacked against us; using the tool against that system seems good. [contains quote post or other embedded content]

22 Aug 2026 19:57 +0000

overheard at the grocery store: (guy on phone): "do we have an *abundance* of white vinegar? because I'm going to do quuuuuuite a bit of pickling here, Casey"

22 Aug 2026 13:14 +0000

my in-laws have a container of generic cleaning supplies labeled "ersatz" [contains quote post or other embedded content]

21 Aug 2026 17:40 +0000

startup idea: dropbox, but not obnoxious

16 Aug 2026 02:40 +0000

increasingly, my mental model of AI is that it is a new layer on top of the classical computing model, and will have perhaps as many consequences. whether it seems good or bad depends on which bit you're looking at, and you can't see all the bits at once.

11 Aug 2026 15:06 +0000

cute mushroom couples (and a mushroom family) from our morning walk

11 Aug 2026 00:01 +0000

My wife pointed out at dinner that our generation is the last one that has experienced life when communication was not mediated by computers and we both find this pretty scary.

10 Aug 2026 14:53 +0000

There's a QLab-copy out there for a specialized piece of hardware, and it uses QLab design language to make people feel safe and good, but it doesn't use consistent spacing or even line up the UI elements. Like, I'm mostly mad because you did a *bad job* ripping me off. Rip me off correctly!

10 Aug 2026 14:35 +0000

The main feeling I get when I run across (yet another) project that copies QLab poorly is...disappointment. It's like someone turning in an assignment who is only worried about the grade, not about learning the subject. Develop understanding! Be influenced! Make your work something better than mine! [contains quote post or other embedded content]