Quick bits:

• I quite forgot that I intended to organize a birthday picnic. My birthday is almost three months ago now.

• My Fitbit is still lost. It has to be somewhere in my apartment — but where could it possibly be?!

• The wound on my arm, which I got in the first accident described in Week­notes 2024 W28: Triple accident, is still healing. It’s been more than a month. At this point, I am expecting it to turn into a long scar along the length of my lower arm.

• My web site finally supports alt text for images on my week­notes. That took some hacking, because Bear does not natively support adding alt text to images. I have not (yet) gone back through old images to add the alt text, but I might do so gradually.

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It seems that with the start of my new job, gremlins are coming back:

• My external display, the Dell U3423WE, has occasionally started flickering. Powering it off and on again did not fix the issue, and it went away on its own.

• My personal laptop (the M2 MacBook Air) has been experiencing kernel panics lately. The message is always “No device added after powering on the rails.”

• Screen sharing my personal laptop onto my new work laptop (a M3 MacBook Pro) works, but comes with horrible sound artifacts — a cursed persistent buzz.

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Years ago, I had a dream in which I asked a certain celebrity about their work ethic, and they responded that they start each day by eating bananas for three hours straight.

That made me wake up in the middle of the night, say “what the fuck,” and promptly fall asleep again.

The next morning, I looked up, out of sheer curiosity, what would happen if you ate bananas in such massive quantities.¹¹¹ Provided that you managed to do so in the first place, that is. I imagine you’d get physically nauseous fairly quickly.  There is a chance of mild hyperkalemia, which is mostly harmless — or at least, not something that can cause problems from eating bananas alone. Good to know.

I had entirely forgotten about this, until I checked out the Time Insights section of my new work calendar:

13.8 hours of “default” time. Okay. And… 9 hours of “banana” time?!

Is my employer forcing me me to eat bananas for 9 hours per week?!

Not to worry! As it turns out, “banana” is the name of the yellow-ish color I assigned to certain meetings, which happen to sum up to 9 hours per week.

Whew.

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I continue to be surprised by how some people fundamentally misunderstand and grossly overestimate what “AI” is capable of.²²² I wrote about my objections to “AI” previously in Week­notes 2024 W15: String of bad luck. And yes, I will keep putting “AI” in quotes for as long as it keeps lacking any form of intelligence whatsoever. See also: my Generative AI note. 

I had a discussion the other day with someone who believed that LLMs understand human emotion. (They absolutely do not.) This person suggested that screenwriting — or any form of fiction writing, for that matter — will become an obsolete profession, because “AI” will perform that task better than any human can.

I have witnessed the following scenario play out, over and over again:

1. A person will make a ludicrous claim about how good “AI” is at a particular task (for example, screenwriting). This person will claim that, therefore, this task will be done pretty much exclusively by “AI” in the future.

2. I will ask this person how much experience they have in doing this particular task (for example, screenwriting).

3. This person will respond, without fail, that they have absolutely zero experience with such tasks.

You see the problem, right?

It is telling that these people, who so strongly praise “AI,” have barely created anything noteworthy with it in general — if anything at all.

If you were to argue with these people and state that “AI” is incapable of doing these tasks properly, they will, without fail, argue that it’s still the early days,³³³ When cryptocurrencies were all the rage, a common counter-argument from the crypto-bros was that it’s still the early days. History repeats itself, this time with “AI.”  and that even though humans are still needed right now, they will become obsolete in the future as everything will then be done much better with “AI.”

These people tend to usurp random conversations and pivot the topic to “AI.” There are, in my opinion, few things as frustrating as having a joyous conversation about art and creativity be interrupted by an AI-loving tech bro preaching their “AI” bullshit.

This is religious dogma. Not just blind belief, but reverence.

“AI” is a fucking cult.

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I did some more behind-the-scenes tweaking of my web site, and removed Sass entirely. I’m now using plain old CSS.

I’ve had this on my to-do list for a long time. Modern CSS is quite powerful, and the only Sass feature I still used was concatenating multiple stylesheets into one (with @import).

With Sass gone, I can now use CSS cascade layers, which will make the CSS of my web site even cleaner. Cascade layers is a feature widely available in all modern browsers, so there is nothing holding me back anymore.

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Some progress on writing, but with plenty of setbacks.

None of my active writing projects are working out. I am quite stuck with the stories I am working on at the moment. Is this writer’s block?

For now, I’m going with a new approach, which involves pumping out story ideas, filtering out the good ones, and refining the ones that remain. Very few remain, and even in the refining process I realize that many of them aren’t very good.

But I’m rather liking the idea of starting with a story premise, then designing potential characters around this premise, and finally letting the characters run with the premise so that I can see where they end up. We’ll see how that goes.

Also: this isn’t news, but my Alphabet Superset superset project is quite abandoned. I’m also aware that I haven’t published any new (short) stories in quite a while, but I hope that’ll change soon.

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Entertainment:

• I read Pines.⁴⁴⁴ Blake Crouch, Pines (London: Pan Books, 2023).  I like how easy it is to read, how it moves along swiftly. I am a sucker for mystery books, and this one scratches that itch. Nonetheless, I find the story a little simplistic and perhaps over-the-top. The characters and their relationships are rather one-dimensional.

• I purchased Dreams in The Witch House,⁵⁵⁵ Dreams in the Witch House (Atom Brain Games, 2023), published by Bonus Stage Publishing.  a game based on the similarly-named short story by H. P. Lovecraft,⁶⁶⁶ H. P. Lovecraft, The Dreams in the Witch House, The Complete Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (2019).  but I’m unfortunately not enjoying it very much. I switched to reading the short story instead, but liked that distinctly less. I think it is time for me to admit to myself that I am not a fan of H. P. Lovecraft’s work.

• Oh no — I am back to playing Factorio.⁷⁷⁷ Factorio (Wube Software, 2020), published by Wube Software.  I say “oh no” because man, does it make time flow fast.

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Tweets and toots:

• “Cats seem to interpret holding your hands cupped and behind your head in the manner they interpret cat ears” (@0utside0utsider): Now I need to find cats to experiment play with!

Links:

• Adam Savage’s Problem with Internet Photos (Adam Savage): Painting a helmet is relevant here!

• Search for the mythological Klein-ing Frame (Matt Parker/Stand-up Maths)

• JummBox: An easy tool to make chiptune melodies. So much fun!

• Welcome to Videogame Town (Alasdair Becket-King): Aaaahhh!

• Movie Prop Frying Pan (Scott Prop and Roll): Donk!

• HACKENBUSH: a window to a new world of math (Owen Maitzen): Whoa!

• How Near-Death Experiences Change Your Perspective (Philosophy Tube ft. Caitlin Doughty)

Tech links:

• Nature of Code (Daniel Shiffman): I have only checked this out briefly, but it looks fantastic. The author describes it as a resource “exploring the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software.” Yum! This brand new version is built around the excellent p5.js, which makes it a lot more accessible.

• Book Building (Sarah Reichelt/TrozWare): I am a sucker for seeing how other people build their books.

• Game UI Database: Ooh! This is exactly what I’ve been needing for so long. I have heaps of game screenshots lying around for inspiration, but the Game UI Database makes all of that obsolete.

• Zotero 7: I’ve been using Zotero for a while, as I think it’s one of the best tools like it out there, but its ugly UI has always bothered me. I am glad to see Zotero 7 making a giant step in the right direction.