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Robert Rackley

Orthodox Christian, aspiring minimalist, inteverate notetaker, budget audiophile and paper airplane mechanic.

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Damnable Things Afoot

Regular readers know that I attempt to hold together two theological commitments that sit in tension. First, a hopeful eschatology where God, in the end, is "all in all." Second, a fierce prophetic conviction that what we do here on earth matters and that God will judge the

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Making Lemons Into Lemonade

In the making lemons into lemonade department, I’ve got something to teach my son nearly every day about what happens when you elect immoral, incompetant people to run your government. My son is a sysadmin for a Minecraft server with an interest in technology. On Friday, I was able

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Mario Icons

A colleague recently named her AI Hackathon team “The Pipeline Plumbers,” due to their work with YAML-driven build pipelines. I told her it reminded me of Super Mario. Since she loves Mario, she decided to do a Mario-themed presentation (I wish I could embed it here). I came across another

Mario Icons
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A Custom Collection

A few years ago, my wife’s company had a get together at CAMRaleigh, the modern art museum. After some mingling, the boys and I camped out in the staff offices. The desk where I sat had numerous pictures of Karl Lagerfeld. I might have felt a little uncomfortable at

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Studio - West Coast

A much-hyped reissued album was ahead of its time while still feeling rooted in its own era.

Studio - West Coast
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Reject All Vibes

Reject all vibes. Whatever is supposedly emanating from TikTok according to six people you know from a group chat, you can let it waft by like a bad smell. Remember that these are synthetically produced moods created by online influencers and there is never any need for you to be

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Malicious Compliance

Jason Koebler writes for 404 Media about the rising popularity of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Koebler takes a cheekily sarcastic tone in his final paragraph. It is impossible to say why this book is currently going viral at this moment in time and why it may feel particularly relevant

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Deep In The Seek

I am still reeling from the announcement about DeepSeek and the economics it represents for AI. To think that Biden’s chip restrictions had the opposite of the intended effect of curtailing Chinese AI development and actually forced more efficiency into the process. Wall Street is now worried that may

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Headlights Pointed At The Dawn

For this Friday Night Video, we’re going back a way, to the mid-nineties. Smashing Pumpkins had released Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness a fittingly grandiose title for an ambitious and widely varied double-album. At the time, I heard the first single, the “rat in cage” song, and I

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Unpublishable.txt

Chris Butler writes about the words he chooses not to publish online and that end up in his unpublishable.txt file. The Unpublishable file is filled with half-formed critiques of the systems I work within, questions about the ethical implications of design decisions I’ve helped implement, and doubts about