Coleman McCormick

Personal Software

January 17, 2025 • #

A common problem I encounter with computers is the everyday minor friction in workflow: the repetitive but only occasional task, or the tedious multi-step process.

Perfect example: the other day I wanted to batch resize and compress a bunch of images. It’s something I’ve had to do before, but not an everyday problem.

When you have a problem software can solve, it has to be painful enough to warrant the effort and overhead required to build something. Given my level of knowledge, I could thrash my way through writing a shell script to do this resizing operation (probably). But it’d take me a couple hours of Googling and trying and retrying to eventually get something that works — all for an operation that might take 7 minutes to just do manually. So rather than automate, I just deal with it.

Personal software

This means dozens of daily nags go on nagging —they don’t nag enough to warrant the cost of solving. And they aren’t painful enough to search for and buy software to fix. So I go on muddling through with hacks, workarounds, and unanswered wishes.

But yesterday with a few prompts Cursor, in 15 minutes I made (or the AI made) a shell script to handle images that I can reuse next time. I didn’t even look at the code it wrote. Just typed 3 bullets of a description of what I wanted in a readme file, and out comes the code. An annoying process goes away, never having to search around for existing tools. Even if a solution did exist, it’d probably be part of a bundle of other features I don’t need; I’d pay for the Cadillac when I only need a taxi.

We’re moving into a new phase where personal software like this might often be the simplest path to a solution. In a world where we’re used to going to Google or GitHub, it’s now even faster to make your own. It’s cracked open new possibilities for people formerly incapable of creating their own tools.

Software used to be costly enough that those “hey this might be cool” ideas were quickly set aside when the cost/benefit wasn’t there. There’s potential for this new paradigm of digital goods production to radically alter the landscape of what gets built.

Things Hidden

December 31, 2024 • #

I found and watched this this morning. Phenomenal documentary on the life and ideas of Rene Girard.

A lot of direct interviews with Girard himself, as well as many of his colleagues, collaborators, and those influenced by his ideas.

Dana Gioia on Beauty

November 21, 2024 • #

“Truth is beauty, and beauty, truth” —John Keats

I’ve been on a kick lately trying to understand what informs the concept of “taste.” When we say someone “has good taste,” what do we mean?

I’ll have more to say on taste later. But this thread of curiosity led me to reading on aesthetics and what constitutes beauty. Sir Roger Scruton’s Beauty is a great introduction to the subject, one I just finished earler this week.

In this short lecture, poet laureate Dana Gioia investigates the subject.

Is “beauty” a physical characteristic? Does it just mean something that “looks nice”? Something deeper is going on here that’s worth exploring.

Experiencing beauty happens in 4 stages:

  • The arresting of attention
  • The thrill of pleasure
  • A heightened perception of the shape or meaning of things
  • The moment vanishes

Initially we’re attracted to an unstateable something about the beautiful. The work of art, the pleasant mountain valley, the few lines from CS Lewis that get stuck in our brains. Then comes the pleasurable sensation; we want to stay in that place and absorb it. We notice something about the beautiful thing that seems to connect to a richer underlying reality — as when a mathematical fractal resembles the braided river or the veins in our bodies. Then before we can capture it the moment disappears, leaving us wanting to find it once again.

He also discusses the tension between beauty and practicality, suggesting that beauty has the power to transform and inspire, fulfilling a deep human longing.

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