John Holland's Blog
I went down a programming rabbit hole yesterday, kind of obsessively working on something. Kind of like how Steven Levy described "hackers" long ago. Not in any sense of illegal or immoral, just obsessive. Maybe something will come of it that I will publish, but for now you'll have to just wonder what that could be!
croydon.html Some info about and pdf's of writings and drawings by Stan Croydon, father of my friend Elizabeth.
Cannonball.pdf This is a transcription I did in high school that was pretty difficult for me, I think I worked on it off and on for about two years! It was the cause of the demise of the Wollensak reel-to-reel I'd had for years from Dad. It's the alto sax solo from this recording: StraightNoChaser.mp3 . I set out to transcribe at least the non-piano solos of this, but the Coltrane one was just too…
MyFunnyValentineHancock64Changes.pdf It occurred to me to do this - I scanned in this transcription and added the standard chord changes in red, for comparison. This is an object of personal significance to me, I obtained Xeroxes of same transcriptions by Bill Dobbins of Eastman in 1976, that were faded and which I penciled in; I became obsessed with this recording of the 1964 concert by the Miles…
Even if it's fake, think about this video AIvid.mp4 and this cartoon (I stole the image and made it, I can't find the original):
Swapped in the FreeBSD SSD and got back to the problem of updating it to the new release. There are some tricks to doing that and I hadn't gotten it to work. With some "googling" (actually kagi-ing) I eventually got it right. I used to be such a FreeBSD fanboy; my recent experimentation with it was encouraging until I couldn't update it. I think they're a little light on documentation, perhaps.…
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!
CharlieSub.mp4 The Clash "Charlie Don't Surf" with subtitles.
I'm like militantly against Generative AI; I mean it's like an article of faith. But I had to get this in HD, it's funny: LittleMarco.mp4
The Rosenberg Fund for Children was established in 1990 to support the children of people in trouble for their activism. I found out about it in an article in the Atlantic by someone who interviewed their (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's) children (who are now grandparents). I also found out, which I hadn't known, that Abel and Anne Meeropol took them in when that became possible, allowing them to…
https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/ I improved my xscreensaver situation today. Got the Linux desktop to keep it on, rather than blanking the screen, then on the MacBook and Mac Mini, the Random Screensaver was not working, it's somewhat better. I downloaded the source, and trying to build the whole project with Xcode was failing, but I was able to build the Random one and after installing it,…
created this page adri.html about our wonderful friend, Adri Galler Lastra.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!
Found my way to the history of my viewing that Youtube maintains. OMG! 1. That's scary. 2. I've been on about the same crap for over a decade! I like this: Unix.mp4 I want this file manager. And I think that's a three-button mouse with no wheel. I love computers in movies!
EleanorRigby.mp4
DeadMen.mp4
You've found it - something worthwhile. You're maybe in a hurry or impatient. And it says: "To continue, please create an account or log in with Google or Apple." . So you say, "sure" and click. Then you have to enter your Google/Apple password, maybe even email. Guess what? You just gave access to your main email to some scammers. And with that, they can wreak huge havoc on your life. I just read…
DataCenters.pdf Something I wrote. What I wanted to read to the County Council, but it would have taken more than 3 minutes.
Me at the County Council today trying to make the case that generative AI is a bad thing for society....
Think maybe deleting and recreating the port forwarding rules in the Fios router that send web traffic to a Linux server internally resolved the problem. So it may not have been Windows' fault. Things working now. Also, somewhat concerned about the Arch Linux AUR supply-chain attack. I've been worrying about supply chain stuff for a while, and this is as close as I've come to being compromised by…
Windows is vexing me, it's not forwarding traffic again. Booting that box back into Arch!
The recording: StellaByStarlight1964.mp3
OK jazz folks - I have a transcription (I've had for almost 50 years!) of Herbie's solo on Stella by Starlight on the My Funny Valentine album. I don't think I ever really digested it before. I've been playing along with that tune a little, aided by finding these changes that are somewhat like what they're doing. The chord substitutions/reharmonizations they do are incredible! The bass notes Ron…
Gave Claude (free version) online AI the same prompt deepseek locally didn't do well with. (the long one, with "you're confused. throw away all your previous reasoning." skipped.) It nailed it immediately, including unit tests. Kind of scary.
OK, looked at the code it generated - it's fundamentally wrong! It gets a number of spaces to go between each word but then doesn't use it, just putting one space between each word, plus one if the gap number is < the remainder (see the prompt below). So it'll never be right. It compounds it by putting padding (spaces) at the end of the line, which is completely the opposite of the assignment!
More about deepseek and justifiying text; Prompt that it spun around on for a long time: generate a Rust program with Cargo.toml file to justify an ASCII text file. take as input the file name and the desired line width. justify each line by inserting additional spaces between words, distributing the spaces evenly. A prompt it's churning on now, seeming to be putting out code: you’re confused.…
Fired up "deepseek-r1:14b" again on my Linux desktop and watching it try and write a Rust program to justify text. see justify.html . A problem I worked on long ago. (It's not very hard. ) The 'openweb-ui' docker image puts a web front end on it. It's painful to watch the words trickle out as it "reason"s . It's sort of hard not to look at, like a video of a car crash or something. Installing and…
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!