Bunch of scraps I needed to get out of the way, and wanted to fine tune some methods of work for various cuts, so I'm making 4 music stands. And learning things about geometry and what's practical as my design evolves.
Itis really quite the thing to see all of the shock and dismay over the Supreme Court when Big Tony Scalia explicitly fucking told us what was up. Great to be outraged, but if you're only noticing now, it's worth doing some introspection.
And find better pundits.
”The idea, he said, is to do to San Francisco what Musk did to Twitter." Wait, I thought London Breed was trying to do this already.
_The Tech Baron Seeking to “Ethnically Cleanse” San Francisco_ (https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat)
Software development is just an unending series of discussions in which you attempt to get people to describe what they're seeing or what they want more precisely, continually iterating on what "that", "it", "home", "away", and similar terms mean....
...and then you die.
As campus administrators across the country are solidly positioning themselves on the wrong side of history, I'm reminded of my Dad, who had a stint in the army that he actually really enjoyed (he was in Germany along the Iron Curtain and didn't re-up because Vietnam was finally catching up with him), observing that when his peers were protesting, he was enlisting, and that he should have been protesting.
Seriously, if anyone has recommendations for USB-C power cables that last any amount of time, please mention them. I'm, down to one 3' long one that I bought because it was $20 vs the $15 for the other ones, the original Apple one died, the magsafe connector on this M2 MBP seems to have died, and I'm sick of shoveling money down the USB-C hole.
Oh that's A powerful observation: "It’s the first time the police have been invited onto Columbia’s campus since 1968. Like 1968, 2024 may go down as an inauspicious year for university administrations trying to defend the indefensible."
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/april/at-columbia
Email from Chevrolet informs me that "Dan, there’s a world of tech in Blazer EV", and... no, I work with this stuff, let's limit that tech as much as possible...
Oh, look, the cryptodweebs are reporting me for offering up cited debunking of their bullshit. Apologies to the my awesome instance admin for wading through their crap. A good reminder to block and move on, rather than engaging the idiots.
Oh, good, I'm glad that after the recent Firefox upgrade I had to restart a couple of times for various things to start working. I thought I was going to have to finally switch away.
In other news, Mozilla has a helpful guide to getting started with LLMs https://ai-guide.future.mozilla.org/
Reading "If You Don't Go, Don't Hinder Me", and struck by the pondering of the distinctions between possession, ownership, and status of cultural artifacts (like songs), and how our analytical structures reflect biases on these issues.
Interesting. a bug of mine suggests that OpenAI's "small" embeddings are locations on a sphere? I haven't chased it down, it's ancillary to what I'm trying to accomplish, but that's a dramatically smaller semantic space than I'd intuitively have thought.
So Oakland airport is renaming themselves to include "San Francisco" in the name, and... if you can figure out how to get people from one airport to the other in less than 30 minutes or so, I bet you can print money.
Those travelers showing up at the wrong airport who *need* to get across the bay...
If I loathe LLMs for no other reason, the fact that so much energy needs to go into getting people to understand that they're experiencing confirmation bias, and it's just making up stuff, we can't base core features on that, is enough.
But mad props to Perplexity(dot)AI for returning different info from their API than from their front page, and giving me both dramatically wrong summarization and lots of bogus URLs, to help me make that case just a leetle bit faster.
Trying to walk some people through the realization that, no, LLMs are not actually useful for what they think they might be useful for is bringing me to some great 404 pages, but for some reason I'm liking the German Wikipedia's "this article does not exist" text....
Dieser Artikel existiert nicht.
Möglichst ganze Wörter eingeben, die im Artikeltext, insbesondere aber im Lemma vorkommen sollen.
Waiting at the dealer for warranty service on the Bolt, and... I wonder how many of the inefficiencies here vs the shoi take my truck to are intentional. I think an interaction at North Bay Automotive takes me less than 5 minutes, we're headed for half hour for the drop off at Victory Chevrolet.
Someone recommended listening to Erich Jarvis on the Huberman podcast, and... The discussions of how he thinks language works are not resonating with me, and I'm totally experiencing this as "Really? That's how normies think and process language?"
Bizarre.
This a good time to mention that Firefox on mobile keeps going non-responsive, viewing, and even downloading, PDFs on MacOS is giving me zalgo, or worse, documents which look legit but are wrong (hi insurance cards!), and they fucking moved the place I was downloading APKs to use Firefox on my Kindle Fire tablet?
https://mozilla.social/@mozilla/112253468123323423
Dan Lyke 01:56:16+0000 (2024-04-12)—
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Thinking today about how different history would have been if Mark Furhman and his fellow thugs hadn't tried to frame OJ, and had just done a straight up above-board investigation.
Ugh. Okay, I have some further technical issues to resolve before the next hybrid Know Before You Grow. I need a second monitor, and should probably not even be on site, which sucks, but....
I had to verify the "eyes hurt" Google trends theme for myself, and, sure, the graph is eye-rollingly worth a giggle, but the map... Sigh. I weep for humanity.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=eyes%20hurt&date=now%201-d&geo=US&hl=en
As a Modern Western Square Dance caller, I approve: All music must be 4/4, 126BPM.
Limited exceptions may be made for cued round dances on a case-by-case basis.
_Chechnya bans all music deemed too fast or too slow_ (https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/08/europe/chechnya-music-ban-scli-intl/index.html)
Oh dear, I've done a little more screwing around with You(dot)com, and, functionally, it appears to be a GPT layer over Reddit. This... uh.... does not improve the quality of the information presented vs straight up Google search results.
Hey, if you are a user of Steve Bogart's awesome _Sankeymatic_ (https://sankeymatic.com/) Javascript library (and if you need to generate Sankey diagrams on the web, it's definitely worth looking at), he's got a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sankeymatic
I'm reading Jensen Huang talking about a marketplace for NIMs, and I honestly can't tell if there's useful application for LLMs somewhere in here, or if I'm being told with great enthusiasm that I can use multiple slurp juices on a single ape.
Hearing people asking for things that terminal users have had in their toolbox for decades kinda wants to make me say "how about using tools that respect your intelligence, rather than buying crap from vendors who prioritize the shiny over use".
Unrelated, Microsoft is making it harder to use non-Edge browsers...
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/new-windows-driver-blocks-software-from-changing-default-web-browser/
Dear FireFox: all I want is a stable url from which I can download an APK for my Kindle Fire.
Okay, that and better PDF handling on Mac and a few other browser parity issues, but that's the big one this morning.
Today in "not really a productive use of my time", but they're decent condiment dispensers, just gotten a little grody over the years. It's fascinating to see what color lies under there. The ones on the right have been sanded down and given a couple of coats of walnut oil.
Thinking this morning about software bloat, how we just keep adding features and let hardware take care of the interim stuff, what I actually end up using on my computers, and what libxz is actually used for.
There doesn't seem to be an energy or efficiency argument for cleaning up our software and systemic technical debt.
Just a reminder to those expecting to whip up general categorization systems that are broadly applicable in an afternoon: The Dewey Decimal System is a 2 semester course.
I like much of the Strong Towns message, and that they've been successful. I've enjoyed talking to Chuck Marohn the couple times I've met him. But there's often something just... off... in the messaging, some "gold standard" stuff in the original book stood out.
The latest email from them links to Bari Weiss talking with Jonathan Haidt, and I'm happy that several times when people have discussed stronger ties between organizations I've said "uhh, take a step back".
"No, you can't be trusted to have a .quote(...) method, just use parameterized queries where you pass in the SQL as text in an object and the actual value in an array, and we'll opaquely drop your update with a {..."status":"UPDATE 0"} response" <-- statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
The future is just going to be reading documentation to figure out how this particular environment that someone else has set up wants to deal with its database accesses because someone had a good idea and someone else fell for it, forever, right?
This rant brought to you by accessing Postgres from Typescript. Fuck I just want $dbh->quote(), is that so hard?
(And, yes, I'm muddling through this on MacOS, so apparently that involves compiling Perl from scratch.)
Oh look, someone else has reinvented suburban sprawl and is selling it as "agrihoods". Most telling: the renderings have no sidewalks.
Yay for selling to rich white people who want to cosplay peasants, I guess...
So if my view is over the NSScrollView stack, it gets its -mouseMoved: events just fine, if an instance of that view is over a WKWebView (with innocuous static content), it gets weird hiccups, where the events drop out for a second or two occasionally.
(Trying to recreate in a stand-alone app the thing where the scroll view drag is getting interrupted by other views.)
Bunch of scraps I needed to get out of the way, and wanted to fine tune some methods of work for various cuts, so I'm making 4 music stands. And learning things about geometry and what's practical as my design evolves.
Not sure if "8 Cheese Pizza" means like 7 bladed razor, or "we had leftovers and a grater" or ... But that many seems excessive for a blend.
At the Oaktown 8s Tea Dance
I had to verify the "eyes hurt" Google trends theme for myself, and, sure, the graph is eye-rollingly worth a giggle, but the map... Sigh. I weep for humanity.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=eyes%20hurt&date=now%201-d&geo=US&hl=en
Got a Facebook ad for "You(dot)com", decided to check it out. "AI" is going just great.
Today in "not really a productive use of my time", but they're decent condiment dispensers, just gotten a little grody over the years. It's fascinating to see what color lies under there. The ones on the right have been sanded down and given a couple of coats of walnut oil.