how do i like someone in a normal way

AI Literacy is having its day in the sun. A quick google search will reveal at least 679 different frameworks from pretty much every organization, every state department of education and ed-tech company with a PDF budget. They may come with a list of competencies, a handful of principles, but they most definitely will have […] Source

I participated in an only workshop at the weekend and the organisers kindly provided the recording as an unlisted YouTube video. As I wanted to watch the video again at a later time I used my MeTube installation to download the YouTube video. Or rather: Tried to. As the download would fail. MeTube would say no available formats could be found. The video however played nicely on YouTube!? The setup I use a self-hosted web frontend for yt-dlp in Docker called MeTube, configured through the…

Regular readers will know I’ve had a long fascination for the Yamaha DX7–after all, besides getting a Reface DX quite some time ago, I also built a MiniDexed box and accumulated more software instruments than I have time to use, as well as an embarrassing amount of other physical gear that brands me as a victim of Gear Acquisition Syndrome. The FM-1 in DX7 livery, running Sloop firmware. I can only manage to dabble in music occasionally, but I’ve been interested in FM synthesis since the heady…

Since starting this blog, I have found it hard to sit down and write. Bear Blog is a place primarily focused on writing, and I have wanted to live up to it. However, at the end of the day, I want to build. At the same time, while browsing the many other amazing personal sites on Bear Blog (along with NeoCities, through peoples blog rolls, bubbles.town, etc), I have discovered the personal web 1. I find it so fascinating that people are building their own spaces, tools, and communities in ways…

Many students now study with AI chat apps such as Claude or ChatGPT. A common approach works like this: you open the app, upload your study guide, and ask the AI to write practice questions from it. The AI reads the guide and quizzes you on your own material. For a single study session, this works well. The approach feels good in the short term- but it fails to support you in the long term. Three weeks after the midterm, the final arrives. Your earlier conversations are buried in the app’s…

Ten minutes now saves you a weekend in April Picture next April. You sit down to do your taxes, and the form asks what you spent last year on electricity, trash, water, and gas. Four companies sent you roughly twelve bills each, and all 48 sit scattered through a year of email. Digging them out by hand costs an afternoon, and a missed bill puts a wrong number on your return. Today your bills land in your inbox with everything else. After the work below, each bill files itself into a single tax…

There is something extremely funny about watching people use AI to rebuild the software they are tired of renting. The promise was that these models would make other people’s expensive expertise available on demand. Writing, illustration, programming: describe what you want and the machine will produce something resembling it. Now people are asking for the applications too. Photoshop. Illustrator. Word. Excel. On my own computer, with the source code, please. Brandon Thomas’s Crafting Apps,…

Pete Millspaugh has a lovely article over on WIRED that peers into the world of domains. (If you’re as interested in the esoteric details of domains as I am, follow Pete’s writing at Dot Com Press.) You should just read the article, but here are a few things that stood out to me. The .com Registry Did you know who the registry for .com is? I didn’t. The registry that owns .com, Verisign, makes a billion and a half dollars every year just by keeping the lights on. To Verisign’s credit, the…

Its true. In a manner of speaking. If LLMs had not reached Fable / Mythos tier of marketed intelligence, I'd probably still have a job with the place I used to be at. For a short while.It wasn't that Fable was better at my job. As the last engineer, Fable was cheaper than my compensation. Evidently, it gave enough confidence to the last vestiges of leadership that they could coast until M&A.I've been through layoffs driven by budget cuts. I had to mechanically justify "I need this person…

👤 Personal {#newsletter}1️⃣ First things first, the hero image of this edition is the default wallpaper of the upcoming iPhone Duo. It's one of the best iPhone wallpapers ever selected by Apple. 2️⃣ It's still hard to keep up with this newsletter, but I still like to put them together. I think I finally found the right structure and visual style.🗺️ Discoveries {#discoverability, #digitalcreation}1️⃣ This is my little dot. Pixel Area is a novel discoverability tool. You can filter by topics. →…

“AI code review tools” pulls around 720 searches a month, mostly from engineering leaders trying to figure out whether these tools are worth adopting or just another subscription that sits unused. As a Principal Engineer who runs most of my work through agentic AI workflows daily, here’s an honest answer: it depends entirely on what you’re asking it to catch. What AI Code Review Is Actually Good At The strongest use case, by far, is the boring stuff a human reviewer’s attention tends to skip…

One good trick when trying to look for ways to optimize software is to stay away from areas that are very likely already quite well optimized, and instead focus on areas that might have been overlooked, either because they are too obscure or don’t show up during regular profiling sessions. This tactic worked well in the past, as shown with my optimization of tooltip creation, or the loading of editor localization files. This was also the reason why I mostly skip over any functions that contain…

All these screenshots are a couple of weeks old – I took them while my personal laptop was still holding out on 15.8, when reproducing something I had encountered on my work machine which had already been forced into macOS 26’ ugliness. The header photo above is a bonus bug which I only encountered while trying to reproduce the actual problem I wanted to highlight here. I can’t say that I encountered this again since, but what a bizarre stroke of “luck” that exactly when I specifically needed…

When you run yt-dlp -F on a YouTube video you will see lots of entries ending in mp4_dash, webm_dash or m4a_dash. I thought at first that this is a new format, so I started searching. As my current filter would complain: "No video formats found!" The short version DASH stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, also known as MPEG-DASH. It is an international standard (first described in ISO/IEC 23009-1) for streaming video and audio over plain HTTP. The same protocol your browser uses to…

I know we’re famously bad at predicting things, including recessions. So let’s treat these predictions for AI in 2030 as ideas I’ve pieced together from private conversations about where AI is going over the next 3–5 years. 1. AI models will become commodities We still argue about which lab is ahead: OpenAI versus Anthropic, Opus versus whatever just came out. Then we spend another week arguing about the benchmark. I expect most of that to disappear from the customer’s view. For ordinary work,…

The software field is in a knot-twist about AI; but the people who are doing some of the best thinking about the impacts of AI are mathematicians. (Note: I’m going to use AI here because it’s the parlance of the times. I continue to be very frustrated by the terminology flattening caused by continuous use of the term AI -- the difference between LLM, agent systems, generative video and image systems, audio processing, transcription, virtual manipulation and ink detection, and more is enormous,…

There is a special kind of embarrassment in being the person who explains Ansible to other people during the week and then spends Sunday evening typing freebsd-update fetch install into a dozen SSH sessions. My RHEL machines were fine. They have been patched from Satellite through Ansible for a long time. Everything else was not: FreeBSD routers, jail hosts with Bastille and with classic jail.conf jails, a mail server, a Proxmox cluster, a Proxmox Backup Server. Each one had its own little…

I recovered another program I wrote in 1995: ELPDS, or Enhanced Logical & Physical Drive Status. Run ELPDS C: and it reports physical disk geometry, partition entries, FAT boot-sector details, and free space. It doesn’t change anything on the disk. My help says it was for checking whether a partition existed and was formatted. I think I was just trying to learn about the underlying partition mechanics. I didn’t write all of it. The help credits “Mr. Schaeffer” for a “huge part of FIPS code.”…

I saw Ned Batchelder's post about a zsh function to show git hooks in the current repository, which was in turn inspired by a post by Frank Wiles, detailing a hack that nearly got him, reliant on sketchy git hooks in a shared folder. I use fish shell, though, not zsh, so here's my version of the same script. I put this in ~/.config/fish/functions/_show_git_hooks.fish: function _show_git_hooks --on-variable PWD set -l git_dir (git rev-parse --git-dir 2>/dev/null) if ! test -d "$git_dir/hooks" #…

A weekly recap of the articles and posts I’ve read that I think are worth your time. GitHub – Myraas/BetterGreenButton: A tiny macOS menu-bar utility that makes the green window button maximize instead of fullscreen · GitHub — A tiny macOS menu-bar utility that makes the green window button maximize instead of fullscreen. YES! We are going to kill “unalive” – Anil Dash — “One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is…

Training a @bot to manage an updated version of ThocStock for me.I’m not sure about the necessity of a personal assistant, but a semi-personal business associate makes a lot of sense to me.

Lance blogged on the OpenAI solutions to many problems here and also created a website of the TCS-related problems OpenAI claims to have solved here.Scott blogged about it here. Terry Tao seems to have had an infinite number of guest bloggers talking about AI and Math even before the OpenAI .... WE NEED A WORD FOR IT.Now it's my turn. For now I will just discuss some of the results without getting into what it means for the future of mathematics, the future of academia, and the future of…

Email isn't personal anymore. Inboxes are flooded with automated mail, and real messages from real people are hard to find. We need a government-level verified email standard.

In our value statements, we usually say we value diversity, but our strategies and plans don’t quite live up that. Academics are themselves diverse. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all job description. The 40-40-20 model itself doesn’t fit everyone, and doesn’t fit every stage of the career. It is natural to focus more on different roles at different times, depending on opportunities and energy. Some of us are just not meant to be president, and not everyone has to lead large EU projects to…

This week brings some resources on neurodiversity and cognitive accessibility, explains why design struggles to justify its value to business, and how AI exposes design’s craft crisis. Also don't miss some nice accessible color combinations and funny wildlife photos.

Four sincere attempts at OKRs, four failures, and every time: "you didn't do it right." Maybe the framework doesn't fit you -- so how do you find one that does?

For much of my life, I've thought that I wanted to be someone else. Or at least be a person like someone else. Sometimes I'd even try to be that person. "That person" has usually been whomever I happened to be reading or watching something about. It's never worked. Instead, maybe I shouldn't work so hard at being whatever kind of person I find interesting this week. Maybe I should be the kind of person I already am. Except, what kind even is that? Fair question! The short answer is that I like…

A shortcut to send to Kindle from GoodLinks The result on a Kindle GoodLinks is a macOS/iOS read-it-later app. I do read directly in the app, but I also tag longer items that I want to read on my big Kindle.To get the tagged entries onto the Kindle I have a shortcut I can run from my phone.This shortcut sends HTML, but the Amazon send-to-Kindle service doesn’t fetch images for you. They appear as the “broken image” icon.I “solve that” by cutting all the image tags out of the HTML before…

First, a demo! Overview: How does this work? The entry point (load-st.fn) Some Smalltalk bindings The Grammar (smalltalk.g) What does this parse to in practice? The Smalltalk base library (st.st) One of the example programs in the FN programming language is a tiny Smalltalk implementation, in about 400 lines of code. I wrote FN and this example over a decade ago, but it wasn’t open source until 2020, so I failed to write it all up so far. But as it came up in a discussion over beers on the side…