the curvature of the Earth is overwhelmed by local noise
So the writing proceeds apace (if that’s what that means). I’m at nearly 14,000 words, which is quite a few words; something like sixty pages, I think. (Depending on the size of the page, chortle.) There have been interesting ups and downs. On Friday night I was feeling grumpy about the whole thing, because there […]
The title was going to be Readin an Writin' , but somehow that didn t look right. Reading So I ve read some very good books lately! And I have some thoughts on them. I give credit for having found a number of very good books lately to having read and listened to various people talking about books [ ]
So people used to make (and apparently still make, although to a much lesser extent than at its peak) charcoal, for various high-temperature activities like glassmaking and metalworking, by heating wood to high temperatures without much air. This was (is) a relatively skilled profession (need to avoid both the process shutting down, and the whole [ ]
So the other day I posted something of a rant, and (as I hinted at the end of the rant) on more sober reflection I need to tease apart a number of thoughts that led me to say, or appear to be saying, things that I don t think I actually believe. On the other hand, [ ]
(I do have some more nuanced ideas about my gut-level rant from last time, but I m going to let them percolate for a while longer (possibly forever, although I hope not).) This passage, from Renee Gladman s My Lesbian Novel , resonates with me more in terms of the activity of writing than anything I can recall [ ]
(Note: I am employed by Google, which is arguably a competitor of Anthropic. Probably also a supplier, customer, and partner, it wouldn t surprise me at all. My statements here are purely personal opinion, and do not reflect the opinions of, and are not statements by, Google, or any other corporate entity. Just me!) I am [ ]
I know I tend to start by saying that it s been a long time, but wow it s been a long time. I think we re just going to do bullet points here to record stuff. A particular unifying subject or coherent narrative seems unlikely. And I m sure I will forget important stuff anyway.
I feel so accomplished today! I picked up some prescriptions from the prescriptionary, got a haircut (my hair is so short now! but it s warm so that is good), went for a Healthy Walk outside, and bought ingredients for and then cooked this salmon dish that I will give a recipe for soon now. (I [ ]
It was suddenly all over my phone, so I told Jack but he said I d probably been hacked or something, but then he looked at his phone and it was all over his phone too, in the headlines. Heh, Jack said, The Crown Jewels are missing. The like English ones? I asked him, because I [ ]
Various things have been occurring! And I have been doing various of them! (If the initial nerdiness here looks boring, just scroll down to the Chili Recipe!) I have been writing Python code to talk to AIs, or rather I have been asking AIs to write Python code to talk to AIs and then debugging [ ]
So today is one of those I must have switched universes again days, like when I suddenly discovered that someone named L. Ron Hubbard was an extremely well-known Science Fiction author, and had been for years. Despite being an avid SF reader, I d never heard of him, so presumably I d grown up in a universe [ ]
Boy, is it cold! And the power structures of the world are still awful! But I did some stuff! On Thursday I stayed late at work and then went to Dizzy s down at Jazz at Lincoln Center (presumably somewhere near Lincoln Center, but also right off Columbus Circle), and listened to an hour and some [ ]
Many years ago (I m pretty sure) I wrote a little essay in the old weblog, describing what interactions with an artificially intelligent assistant might be like. I think it was somewhat prescient, getting the general tone right, but without realizing that (a) it might work through very large language models, or (b) that it might [ ]
Much has been happening! And there is some of it that I haven t written down! (So did it really happen at all?) For instance we had a kitchen renovation; where renovation means destroying the existing one and the small room next to it, and building a whole new kitchen where they used to be . The [ ]
I have now spent entirely too much time :) talking to a couple of AIs to make a pretty HTML version of Keelley, my November deci-novel (apologies for any Dire Warnings about that page being insecure; be sure not to enter your personal information into any of the non-existent input fields!). I m pretty pleased with [ ]
So I did finish my five-thousand-word Decinovel for November! Apparently my brain (muse?) didn t want to make that as easy as it sounds, so the entire thing is written in a sort of quasi-archaic synthetic patois (eine serta-elde syntete laungin), which while perhaps not ten times as hard to write in as normal prose, was [ ]
So far I ve decided I m not doing NaNoWriMo this year, there s just too much going on. But I m thinking about doing, say, a DeciNoWriMo (a word not found anywhere by a Google search!), and writing a 5,000 word short story just to keep up my association with words despite work, kitchen renovation (yow!) and so [ ]
(Sung to the tune of Sam Altman s Abundant Intelligence .) Growth in the use of snake oils has been astonishing; we expect it to be even more astonishing going forward. As snake oils gets smarter, access to snake oils will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human [ ]
Did I mention that I installed ollama , which is a thing that lets you install various Large Language Models on your local whatever sort of computer, and actually run them there? Which seems crazy, like this here random Windows laptop can all by itself create more or less lucid English text in a finite amount [ ]
Returning to our occasional topic of the Family Tree: my father s mother s maiden name was Helen Paxton Cassatt, and (especially given that Mom was very into Impressionism and France and also French Impressionists) there was a vague story or feeling or something that we had some sort of connection (family, or named-after, say) with Mary [ ]
Way back in the day, I used to title all my weblog entries that way, with just the date and no hint at a unifying theme. I ve done that once or twice in this new ( new ) one, and more often I ve thought that I should do it more often. So, having no unifying theme in [ ]