Popped out of bed to vote first thing. Biked to polling place and filled in the ballot with my helmet and high-viz vest on. Now time for a shower and breakfast before heading to campus.

Today’s adventures in helping kiddo with a science fair project include: 1) discovering I can still do long division and 2) complaining that the school worksheet organizes data into rows and columns differently than I would have.

Slow Horses Season 6 made a lot of strange adaptation choices, but I appreciate that they kept the “Poirot” bit and made it work for television despite being so heavily dependent on narration in the original.

Bad faith challenges of expertise are real problems with potentially disastrous consequences for society, but the lifting up of academic researchers as purely objective and authoritative because they can express their conclusions in numbers is not the solution.

Cette semaine, je vais faire livrer le nouveau tome Brume jusqu’aux USA pour moi et ma fille, mais ce n’est qu’en commandant un tas de choses de chez Fnac que les frais de port deviennent supportables. J’accepte donc tout conseil sur ce qu’il faut lire de francophone en ce moment !

I would appreciate the district’s assurance that “state tests cannot measure important aspects of a children’s learning” a lot more if the examples they listed weren’t also things they were trying to quantify in other ways.

Here’s a(n admittedly paraphrased and out-of-context) line from a conversation I once had that I think about often: “I’m not saying AI is going to be good for society as a whole, I’m saying it’s good for me for this task.”

Honest question: Do people who believe AI models can feel pain limit that to LLMs, or do they believe image- or video-generating models can, too?

It turns out I can get grumpier about my employer’s “relentless adoption” approach to AI, and that’s when they start calling it SI when the president might be listening.

I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of single-issue voting, but I’m so annoyed by our incumbent mayor’s “let’s think long and hard before rushing into getting rid of Flock” that I don’t know that any other issue is going to matter to me in a few weeks.

The opening scene of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (bypasses have got to be built, your house is a small price to pay, and we couldn’t be bothered to consult you) remains one of the best metaphors for generative AI I’ve ever encountered.

In Lexington, we have a local hemp store called The Botany Bay, and every time I see one of their advertisements, I just smile at what a great choice of name that is.

Super neat (not neat at all) that my Apple made it so my email client can’t connect to my work email the same week that I’m trying to migrate task managers. All of my systems in chaos.

…when did Garfield Without Garfield get mainstream enough that my kid can check out a book of it on Libby?

Still angry about Reddit and RSS: Praising RSS’s role in the “open web” in an announcement that they’re shutting it off isn’t saying the quiet part out loud, but it is pointing a giant neon sign at the quiet part.

I just had a brief moment where I felt some sympathy for Reddit: “Maybe I’m part of the problem for only consuming via RSS, which isn’t good for their bottom line.” Then I remembered that they don’t produce the content I’m interested in, they just profit off it, and now I’m even angrier.

Reddit ditching RSS b/c of massive web scraping tolerated because protecting IP is now a threat to business is threefold disrespect for Aaron Swartz, and everyone should be ashamed. (I don’t think IP is the issue w/AI, but it’s what let feds harass Swartz in a way that they never will AI).

An “employee benefits company” reimbursed me for medical expenses by putting the money into an account at the company instead of my bank. Now, my employer is no longer contracting with this company, so I have to hurry and find things to buy before it starts taking it back $5 at a time. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Quizzes have always struck me as less-than-ideal because they don’t capture the depth of student understanding. As I’ve gone back to them, though, I see how good they are at capturing whether students just bothered to pay attention, and maybe that was always the point.

Queen has always had a place in my musical heart, but my exposure was mostly limited to the one CD I bought in high school. Turns out that I’ve been missing out on bangers like Under Pressure and Radio Ga Ga.

Needing to bulk download some PDFs for a lit review is making me think of Aaron Swartz which is making me furious at AI companies.

We have spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars at our local indie bookstore, justifying each cent as helping it stay independent. Seeing it get acquired by B&N is devastating, no matter how much independence they claim they will let it keep.

me: “hey, kiddo, can you plug your headphones into your Switch?”

kiddo: “ugh, fine, I guess SOME people don’t want to hear the melodious sound of going through portals”

me: “…”

kiddo: begins humming Portal theme song louder than the sound effects were coming through her Switch

Look, I’m biased, but it feels like a self-own for a “school picture day” flyer to use an AI-generated approximation of a school picture instead of an actual photograph?

Some English words see a g-to-w difference when compared to French (e.g., gaufre ↔️ waffle, Galles ↔️ Wales) BUT in some cases, English has both the different AND original versions, so we have near synonyms like warranty/guarantee and warden/guardian.