Weeknotes: 2025-W23

Published: 9 June, 2025, updated: 9 June, 2025

Summary

Made a mobile base for my newly-purchased bench-top jointer (so I’m not blocked by the maker space’s one awaiting parts for repair), assembling and testing it and a bench-top planer as well. Generally getting better clarity on the garage workshop layout.

After quite a long break, successfully found a “proper” game to play for a few days!

Photos

(Based more on time of processing than time of taking…)

Enjoying

• Reading:
  • The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (Dungeon Crawler Carl #3) by Matt Dinniman (★★★★★)
  • The Gate of the Feral Gods (Dungeon Crawler Carl #4) by Matt Dinniman
• Watching (📺🏃🐌📅🎥📽️🏠🔄):
  • 📺📅 Murderbot season 1
  • 📺🐌 This Old House season 45
  • 📺🐌 You season 3
  • 📺🏃🔄 Continuum seasons 2 to 4
• Playing:
  • Revenge of the Savage Planet
    • Quite fun, but not sure it’s going to survive the mid-game…

Highlights

AI and the Rise of Judgement Over Technical Skill - Alexander Kohlhofer on Not So Common Thoughts

The technical barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals are rapidly dissolving. Anyone with access to AI tools can now produce work that, at least superficially, resembles professional output.

…

… the key differentiator is no longer technical skill but judgement. When everyone can generate content, code, or designs, the real value lies in:

1. Knowing what to create: Understanding what’s worth making in the first place
2. Making meaningful choices: Selecting the right approach from countless possibilities
3. Evaluating quality: Distinguishing between good and great outputs
4. Understanding context: Applying the right solution to the right problem

This idea of the value of judgement is one that I’ve been using internally (ie, in my own head) to describe the value I think I bring to situations (although I’ve been using the word “taste”).

There’s a lot of context needed to make good decisions about what “good” is, and it starts with understanding the set of opportunities and challenges that exist, ways to approach them, what resources you have, who your “customers” are and what they need, who your competition is, and so forth.

Whether it’s “AI” or less context-aware humans, if you ask them to solve a problem that isn’t the right problem to work on, the opportunity cost is wrong. If it’s the right problem, but a poor understanding of it, that’ll affect the output. If it’s the right problem, but a poor understanding of the environment, you may have a great solution that won’t work for you.

Recommended

The Problem Solving of Filmmaking Part 2 - ponysmasher

David F. Sandberg continues to share stories of real problems he had to deal with as a director and how he approached working through them.

The Ultimate Modular Workbench: 2 Fast 2 Modular - Ben Tardif

This arrived just as I was starting to work on mobile bases for my tools, and watching this changed those plans entirely - most importantly since it’s easy to calculate and adjust the dimensions. I’ve made a few already, and they’re solid and have exactly the right dimensions for my use cases (especially height, for infeed/outfeed.)

The easy way to clean your lead screws - 3D Revolution

This was also surprisingly well-timed, since I needed to clean the lead screws on my 3D printer. Glad I didn’t have to figure it out from scratch…