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• Post #4292020

  Dude in front of me on the train was using Gemini to write GRAD reviews (Google's semi-annual performance review, successor to "perf")... for his reports. Same prompt each time, just replacing FOO in "Help me write <FOO>'s GRAD... blah blah blah, see the attached notes..." with various names and attaching a different notes doc each time. I have never been so glad not to be working at Google anymore.

• Post #4292019

  Falling back to a 9-year-old smartphone, which is somehow less janky than the 2025 phone I fried last week, has thrown me back in time. There's no Discord, Mastodon, or Matrix chat. The top suggested link when I open a browser tab is r/coronavirus. This is a lot more relaxing that I would have expected. I should continue this inadvertent experiment on the inevitable replacement phone (already in the mail... gotta be on the apps the school district uses to contact us).

• Post #4292018

  Might be time to set your ringtone to "John Brown's Body."

• Post #4292017

  Kids have started asking for Nu Pogodi (Ну погоди!) instead of more common fare when they get to watch some TV in the evening. It's kind of refreshing to hear.

• Post #4292016

  Another reason to hate Flatpak: it's polluting libraries that my desktop applications use. I never ran an xdg-desktop-portal provider. I run a simple window manager in Xorg and like it that way. But now libadwaita queries xdg-desktop-portal for default GUI settings, and programs that use it hang on startup. (dbus queries for nonexistent default settings time out.) I expect filing a libadwaita bug to be futile. libadwaita is for GNOME apps. I'm not running in GNOME. Will this u...

• Post #4292015

  The tall ships visiting Boston are a treat. I was not, however, impressed by the "Happy 250th Birthday, United States of America!" mini-golf course. I am pretty sure that the USS Constitution never flew the flag pictured here. Looks like generative "AI" was used to do the heavy lifting and zero human fucks were given. (Or, worse, that someone is dog-whistling with a secessionist flag that has 11 stripes.)

• Post #4292014

  TFW you blocked out a few hours to read some papers suggested by reviewer number 3 to improve the analysis of your experimental results, and one of them is 85 pages long... Do I even have that much toner left? If I want to keep up with the literature, an E-reader might actually pay for itself...

• Post #4292013

  I grew up reading Vivian L. Thompson's retellings of Hawaiian stories and legends (Hawaiian Myths of Earth, Sea, and Sky; Hawaiian legends of Tricksters and Riddlers; Hawaiian Tales of Heroes and Champions), and I'm so chuffed that I have been able to introduce my kids to them recently. We already dipped our toes into the d'Aulaire myth books, but Hawaiian legends and folk stories are much more accessible.

• Post #2268230

  Everyone is speculating about what targets Ukraine might be going for during the parade in Moscow, and I'm just imagining how fitting it would be if they managed to get in some massive rainbow glitter bombs.

• Post #2185721

  Setting gradeschool-aged kids up with a "family computer" (desktop). No Internet for now, but Broderbund games and similar should be fine. Maybe even the latest version of Encarta, that sort of thing, if the hardware can handle it. I have some childhood computers squirreled away, original MS-DOS and Windows installation media, and more. What's the best choice?

• Post #1127980

  @ml @johncarlosbaez is in a very different career stage than you but might have some insights from taking a position in Europe after seeing the direction things were going in...

• Post #1127978

  How do you mess up formatting for an unspecified field this badly? (If the string isn't long enough, use it as padding until it is???)

• Post #865965

  When someone in CREATIVE_DISCIPLINE_A says they're using "AI" to emulate the output of a person in CREATIVE_DISCIPLINE_B.

• Post #865964

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@pesasa/116312743250016167 Our 4-year-old was talking about sports yesterday and came up with "Americaball." And that just fits so well that I want it to stick. Fewer syllables, gets to the point, rolls off the tongue.

• Post #865963

  Always nice when a "bug" that you couldn't quite put your finger on turns out to be an elementary mistake in your model of how things worked. (Of course you're going to get a double-free if you explicitly delete all of a widget's resources by reaching through a shared pointer with a refcount greater than 1. The old C code didn't care if there were dangling pointers, but Rust will run the Drop impl a second time after the last Rc is destroyed...)