Google AI mode query about "science fiction writer David D Levine's dogs" that says under a section labeled "Current and Former Pets" that "Sparky VanDevender: Levine recently shared that his dog, Sparky, passed away in late 2025."
Sparkman "Sparky" VanDevender was Ann Patchett's dog. https://www.annpatchett.com/sparky
As I left to walk to work, a Petaluma motorcycle police person was setting up to do stop sign enforcement at Mission & Mountain View. I watched two drivers roll through, as I was crossing Mountain View on to 5th I saw him pulling over a bicyclist.
Sigh.
Petaluma area folks: nerd gathering at Aqus on Feb 3, 5-7. I'll be the AI curmudgeon.
https://aqus.com/aquscafe/#!event/2026/2/3/alphabet-soup-ai-cahi-geo-seo-beyond-community-dinner
Somewhere I accumulated these big slices of walnut that are a bit too thick to treat as veneer with any equipment I have, and that warped tremendously in drying. For a project Charlene is doing (laying out dried flowers) I'm going to glue them all up, and sand them smooth, but let the warp be.
As Meta lays off thousands of VR workers, I guess the good thing about the AI boom is that with LLMs having replaced all of those workers there'll be no one left to fire...
https://futurism.com/future-society/meta-reality-vr-layoffs
Trying to read a description of what something does, realize that we've gotten so into Github farming that we obfuscate such the simplest things in the most bizarre language in order to get the whuffie of the green squares on the calendar.
If Google we're serious about making Gemini useful, they'd give it an "okay, after I spent a few hours dicking about with the CLI and giving up, here's the code that *actually* worked, use this to train the next version" option.
Do I know anyone who knows anyone who works in an administrative capacity for a shipping port? Trying to do some due diligence for someone, pretty sure I know the answer, but an exchange with someone actually in the business would be helpful.
I used to kinda be grateful advertisers for helping to support the podcasts I listen to. But now I hear ads for BetterHelp and Lifelock and seriously side-eye...
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Dan Lyke 23:49:35+0000 (2026-01-14)—
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Went into a Slack channel which is doing the "Start Free Trial" to view messages older than 90 days thing, and realized the Signal group that has replaced this Slack workspace has a message expiration time of 10 days...
With the realization that all software is great, then becomes crappy as the developers decide to screw with stuff that doesn't need changing...
AntennaPod just pissed me off. Looking for a replacement Android podcast player, hopefully that has folders. Bonus for open source.
Went to a tech meetup last night, had a lot of younger developers there. Was amazed by how many side projects were essentially the same inventory/POS projects people were doing in xBase back in the '80s.
Only this time the tooling is way less suited to task.
There are times, especially when dealing with health insurance companies, that I would like to discuss the decisions of UI professionals. With a 3 foot long weighted clue stick.
Must have been Christmas related. Facebook Marketplace and similar were full of free or super cheap monitors, so I promised one of mine to a friend figuring I'd just pick up another one.
Now they're all $75+ for ancient 1080p ones.
Tried to use Google to find an old page on my web site, using the 'site:' qualifier. It returned no hits.
Given the amount of search engine traffic I see in the logs, that isn't Google, maybe they've just given up trying to index the web?
Combining learning Rust and understanding LLMs, I prompted Gemini's CLI to create a little utility I want. This is my first attempt to do real work with it, and more than before I really understand the comparisons between LLM and cocaine that people are making.
And I'm not actually learning Rust...
Today I learned that Cocoa's -layoutSubtreeIfNeeded only does the work if the NSView is attached, which means that rather than calculating where to put the frame before adding the subview, you have to add the subview somewhere off-screen, layout, and then move it where you want it.
Holy crap. I milled a dowel out of purple heart for a friend doing some guitar stuff, and dropped it in the mail December 8.
It just arrived in Grass Valley yesterday.
So, yeah, the NWS used gen"AI" for a map and created a forecast with Idaho towns that don't exist: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/01/06/nws-ai-map-fake-names/
But, currently searching on that term in Startpage brings up stories this, searching on that term in Google brings up nothing.
I'm not saying the International Criminal Court has to immediately go after the US Executive Branch leadership, they could start with prosecutions of anyone who's contributed to the Enter vs Shift+Enter and "insert a newline" vs "submit this message" behavior confusion.
Just putting things in perspective. Looks like OnlyFans 2025 revenue was about $7.2B, OpenAI $13B.
Compare to 2022: $107B for Trip and Equipment Expenditures for Birding
https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2024-11/2022-birding-in-the-us-demographic-and-economic-analysis.pdf
Cutting the table rim round. Big breath, mark the jig for reassembly as close as I can to reconstitute it, but take it in to make sure the glass really fits, then do the recesses on the bottom
The hard part of this stage of table construction is fitting the glass, and anticipating the depth before I sand things, and how much the flatness of this is going to alter as I assemble it. Getting a bunch of tear out in the joints, have to work around that.
Thinking this morning about how many people my mom's "alternative" healthcare beliefs and advocacy have killed, how I'll always be trying to excise those roots from my own thinking, and what I owe her, and my sisters, in familial peace and continued interactions.
Had lunch today with a Trump and Musk supporter who is, on a steady diet of YouTube, remarkably uninformed. It's going to have to get bad enough to affect people like him (he'll be dead first) before it turns. We have a long way to go.
Found an old 250GB SSD to be a boot disk for this hand me down 96G dual Xeon machine. Realized that the last time I had a machine with this low a storage to RAM ratio it was a 143k floppy drive on a 64k Apple ][+.
Through my windshield with my phone in the mount, so bad quality, but the roundabout at Petaluma Blvd S and Crystal Ln/Caulfield is doing what it was designed to do, slowing down dangerous drivers and keeping them from injuring people.
Glue up of the rim for the dining room table with the train set into it. After this dries I route it into a circle, with an insert for the glass in the middle. Chuffed that the accumulated error over the 22.5 degree angles was about saw kerf at the center line.
For anyone keeping track at home, the dual 2.6GHz Zeon with 100G of RAM and the older NVidia graphics card (that needs the external power connector) draws 186 watts in BIOS, 130-160 in Linux.
My home server, an i7-6700 at 3.4GHz draws about 22 watts in Linux at idle.
Foiled in today's Timdle by phosphorous. Not to get too spoilery, but the long arc of how humanity has gone about learning about chemistry is fascinating.
Dealing with awesome customer service reps stuck in crappy systems with crappy call scripts without the tools to actually do customer service is making me want to just not fucking buy anything.
Today, this rant is brought to you by T-Mobile.
Lazyweb: Anyone got a tool that keeps metadata on files, and lets you browse and filter and see views based on that metadata? With a command-line?
Before I go and implement something, I wanna see what people are up to.
Friend dropped this 128G dual Xeon machine on me, if I could use it. Plugged it into an ammeter, turned it on, and presumably going into BIOS it's sucking 1.5 amps. Not sure I need a machine in my house that draws 180W at idle, unless it'll be substantially less when it boots into an OS (and I'd need to put a drive in it to test that).
We've talked about AI and social media in the context of Ameica's Funniest Home Videos and golf crotch shots, and... The Internet provides.
https://bsky.app/profile/jjvincent.bsky.social/post/3mayddynhas2l
Test layout of the train inset in the under construction dining room table. The outside of that ring will get veneer on the outside, there'll be glass on top, with a wood edge.
Ripping and accumulation of CDs, using the Mac 'cause it's there, and having fun with "how many of these CDs has iTunes not heard of".
Surprised by some of the ones it finds data on, where others...
`perl -le 'while (<>) { print $1 if m%public_html/(.*?\.php)%;} ' < ~/var/log/apache2/flutterby.com.log-error`
And you get a zip bomb, and you get a zip bomb, and...
Oh, great, something in LetsEncrypt has changed, the app is telling me the cert got renewed, Apache is pointing to the right files, and my browser is telling me the cert is expired.
The future sucks. I don't want to keep nannying things that should just work, and stay working.
Google AI mode query about "science fiction writer David D Levine's dogs" that says under a section labeled "Current and Former Pets" that "Sparky VanDevender: Levine recently shared that his dog, Sparky, passed away in late 2025."
Sparkman "Sparky" VanDevender was Ann Patchett's dog. https://www.annpatchett.com/sparky
It's a small thing in the overall scheme, but if you needed another reason to leave Facebook: "fewer"
Somewhere I accumulated these big slices of walnut that are a bit too thick to treat as veneer with any equipment I have, and that warped tremendously in drying. For a project Charlene is doing (laying out dried flowers) I'm going to glue them all up, and sand them smooth, but let the warp be.
I went to show Charlene the Google AI Overview for "how many g's in birthday" and... it gave me a different answer this time. Awww, G's.
Go go Google AI overview!
Just uploading a picture of my Dad's Graflex cmera
That is the most ominous sounding fortune cookie I've gotten in a long time!
Cutting the table rim round. Big breath, mark the jig for reassembly as close as I can to reconstitute it, but take it in to make sure the glass really fits, then do the recesses on the bottom
The hard part of this stage of table construction is fitting the glass, and anticipating the depth before I sand things, and how much the flatness of this is going to alter as I assemble it. Getting a bunch of tear out in the joints, have to work around that.
Still need to build the under layer and the pedestal, route the top round, and the inset for the glass. So, yeah, most of the table, but... Progress!
Through my windshield with my phone in the mount, so bad quality, but the roundabout at Petaluma Blvd S and Crystal Ln/Caulfield is doing what it was designed to do, slowing down dangerous drivers and keeping them from injuring people.
Glue up of the rim for the dining room table with the train set into it. After this dries I route it into a circle, with an insert for the glass in the middle. Chuffed that the accumulated error over the 22.5 degree angles was about saw kerf at the center line.
Are "Emerald Nuts" like blue balls?