A weekly note

Oh right, it’s Sunday, the endest of the weekend.

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My favorite way of describing A talking recently is that he loves trying words on for size.

Literally any word, he’ll immediately repeat. “Impressive”, “amazing”… we even got him to try “nefarious” during our walk today.

He’s also getting really good at two word combos and even sometimes even three. (e.g. “Momma read froggy” to request a book)

It’s so great to watch him say something out of the blue you haven’t heard him say before and then patiently work with us while we try to figure it out. We’ll repeat the wrong word and he’ll say “no” while giving us the kindest stare to prompt for another guess.

Words. I love it.

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One of his tricks is making his shoulder blades disappear when I’m trying to pick him up for a diaper change. I called him Houdini last week and he proceeded to repeat “Houdini” through the entire change. Houdini, Houdini, Houdini.

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Other favorites: artichoke, avocado, banana.

And he actually eats (and loves) artichoke hearts, what even!

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I’ve thought a lot more about the impact ChatGPT and other LLMs could be having on the work we do and have started to modify my previous opinion, which could be nutshelled as: “Wow, I don’t trust the people (the money?) behind OpenAI at all and this should all just go away, please go away.”

But it’s here and it’s not going away and I won’t retire nearly soon enough to avoid it, so I’m starting to adapt.

My latest take in the Happy Prime slack:

My today’s guess at the actual “paradigm shift” with AI/LLM is that we’re only a year or two out from expecting LLM augmented interfaces everywhere

That was after I watched the crazy WordPress augmentation Joe shared. Thanks, Joe, now there’s no going back. 🙃

This is of course all a very recent opening of my mind to a different opinion, so I’ll be back to correct next week.

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I made brown soda bread today and we’re painfully waiting for it to cool. By the time I publish this note we may have tasted it. I’ll assume it was fantastic and hit the spot.

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It did.

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One of our backyard garden “ponds” was small enough to empty without a pump, so I did some bucket bailing on Saturday. We’re looking for it to be anything but a standing pool of water a toddler could accidentally run into so probably a place for a fire pit—fire is safer than water, right?

Once all the water was gone, I shoveled out a much larger than expected load of black walnut soup sludge and found the concrete bottom.

Because I now find myself drilling into concrete too much, I decided to drill a few holes in the base so that it would drain when we filled it with rocks.

Alas, I was still drilling into concrete at about 8 inches in, the length of my existing 1/2″ diameter drill bit. Okay then. We went to the hardware store and I bought yet another carbide tip bit, 1/2″ diameter and 12″ long.

Today I started drilling again and it still brought up concrete dust at 12 inches! So I have no idea. Hopefully it’s rock or something under the concrete and it will start draining on its own. I’ve added some water and am playing the waiting game.

I already have a self-imposed rule where I won’t try to drill more than 1/2″ in diameter anymore. I think a new rule is to stop at a foot deep if you have no idea what you’re doing.

I really don’t want to try to hammer through this, so the next step might be to just pack it full of sand and rock and let it get wet every once in a while.

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I asked ChatGPT for a recipe to use all of my black walnut sludge from the pond and it went for it.

Black walnut sludge can be a bit tricky to work with in recipes, as it can be quite strong and bitter. However, if used in the right way, it can add a unique flavor to dishes. Here’s one recipe you could try:

Black Walnut Pesto:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of black walnut sludge
• 2 cups fresh basil leaves
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• Salt and pepper to taste

See. It is out to get us.

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We got a new television, the first in 10 years. It’s the Hisense U8H, one of the highest (the highest?) rated mid-range 55″ TV out there.

We hooked it up, turned it on, and oh wow it was bad.

You’d think 10 years of technology would result in an objectively better experience, but this motion smoothing junk is absolutely horrendous. Every show or movie we tried looked like absolute shit. HD, 4K, Dolby Vision IQ WTF?

I won’t claim to know anything about TVs, but it shouldn’t look this bad when you turn it on.

Anyhow. Long story short. It’s near impossible to turn off all the junk when we used the Google TV interface that came with the TV. It’s like every app is able to communicate with the TV the settings it wants and overrides your customizations.

So I connected our old Google TV over HDMI, set the TV in Dolby Game mode and everything looks beautiful and works like a charm.

Is this what everyone does? Why on earth.

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Okay, hopefully that’s the last I’ll talk about the TV for 10 years.

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Happy Spring 🥃