2026-02-01 Sun

• Friendship: A Selection from David Whyte’s Consolations (2020) — Likeville

  • is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses, as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. Quote from David Whyte, “Friendship,” Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (2020)
    

• Person/codekiln/GitHub/beans
  • Tried using bd/create-form three times. Each time it failed with Error: failed to flush: write unix @->/workspaces/beans/.beads/bd.sock: write: broken pipe and no task added. Eesh. I ended up using Codex/CLI to add it to beads rather than figure out what was wrong.
  • Still working on getting comfortable with tmux.
• Learned that Person/Adrianne Lenker is a part of Big Thief, which has a new album Double Infinity that just came out. Created person page Person/Adrianne Lenker.
• While brewing some coffee, I watched a bit of Nix/YouTube/24/09/Nix Explained from the Ground Up. I wanted to log it in my knowledge garden. This is something I want to do frequently, so I asked ChatGPT about how to get my youtube watch history from a CLI/Tool or an API.
  • ChatGPT/Conversation here
    • Google/Takeout
      • Learned/Unconfirmed AI/LLM/Information Source
        • no Google API exists which lets you access your YouTube watch history.
          • automation - Automate Google Takeout Download - Stack Overflow
          • automation - How to programmatically create/download Google Takeout archive? - Web Applications Stack Exchange
          • You have to use Google Take-out in the browser. The only way to automate it is to use Selenium / Puppeteer / browser automation tools.
          • I wonder what SOTA is in terms of being able to quickly create a script that automates something concrete for you with your authentication credentials?
        • The google take-out process does let you
          • select only youtube history
          • specify the history should be in json
          • deliver it to Google/Drive
          • pick between a single export and exporting every two months for one year (6 exports)
          • receive an email when it's done
        • for me
          • it completed in less than a minute when restricted to just channels and watch history in json format
          • the download was actually 56 KB zip archive (I could have picked tar.gz in the drop-down)
      • There are tools that help you in parsing the output data.
        • Python CLI/Tool
          • purarue/google_takeout_parser: A library/CLI tool to parse data out of your Google Takeout (History, Activity, Youtube, Locations, etc...)
    • I was a bit surprised that there wasn't some kind of MCP that Google itself used to help Gemini/Paid/AI/Pro and Gemini/Paid/AI/Plus do things, so I asked some follow-up questions, and it turns out that as of right now there is something called Google/Personal Intelligence available to those plans and it's in Beta.
      • I would be quite surprised if this "Personal Intelligence" was actually useful in a way that benefits users and gives them tools to deal with their data directly. I anticipate that it just contains a big, overly-permissive opt-in related to information disclosure which helps google give you "better" ads and up-sell possibilities, e.g. "would you like us buy movie tickets for the trailer you just watched on youtube?"