Fresh new CAPTCHA hell from Google (as seen on Reddit)

@waldoj do you know Robin Garcia from C'ville? She's taking a job I care about here in Nevada County.

Should I read Dungeon Crawler Carl?

Today I asked Opus to look through 15 years of my Twitter archives and figure out which ones were tweets while I was travelling. It's discovered its own heuristics and correctly realized that I don't tweet more often while on vacation but I do tweet at different times than usual because of time zones. Now it's clustering tweet text based on what looks like travel discussion. It figured out all this without me prompting it.
(End result is rescuing my old "postcard" threads from long ago travel.)

I really do find the improvements in AI very exciting. I've been coding with Jules + Gemini for awhile and recently switched to Claude Code + Opus. And OMG it is so much better. It's like having software engineer with ~5 years experience instead of one with just 1 or 2 years. It's regularly inferring details from vague instructions and anticipating challenges I hadn't considered. And the code it emits works.
I see GPT 6 is about to come out. And Claude has Fable, even better than Opus. I don't know where this improvement curve tops out but it feels pretty close to my own skill level for programming already. And way more patient and with way more breadth of knowledge. Still lacks some judgement and overall perspective, some role left for the meat that thinks.

Trying out Claude Code CLI for the first time in awhile. It's got decent sandboxing now but the first thing the agent asked me was to install a Chrome extension so it could use my browser. LOLOLO.

I am in love with Thai salted fermented crab: (ปูเค็ม / Pu Khem). I only ever see it in papaya salad where it brings some serious funk.

An AI suggests it's also good in fried rice, or mixed into a variety of salads and condiments.

Gemini agrees with me that all this naming is dumb but wryly observes

At least with dnf, nobody actually says the words "Dandified YUM" out loud in a server room—we just type the three letters and pretend the name never happened.

I have a hard time remembering that Fedora uses something called DNF to update itself. What does DNF stand for, I wondered? "Dandified YUM". YUM is Yellowdog Updater, Modified", an evolution of YUP which was some PowerPC thing.

Actually it's all just RPM.

There's this trend in sans font faces to have a lowercase u with no stem on the right, just a round bowl. It looks good and distinctive but impairs my readability! Anthropic Sans and AirBnB Cereal both do it.

@phanpy on my Android tablet the toolbar at the bottom covers the new post button. It does still work but it's very hard to hit it.

A related thing is AIs are very very good at you pasting a log file in and saying fix this bug. I've solved so many problems that way. But it works better if the log file only shows meaningful errors and not junk that the developers are just ignoring.

One thing that's unpleasant about a Linux desktop is you often end up looking at log files. And every big app is spamming all sorts of warnings and errors to the log files all the time. Like Chrome logs an error every 2 seconds. All of this is a very bad code smell. The engineers are clearly ignoring their own error logs.

Making the finest American cuisine for my visiting Parisian friend.

Do you have a US cell phone on Verizon? Consider switching to Visible. It's still Verizon but half the monthly price. Been on it a couple of months and quite happy.

Made it to Italy! Our first night was at La Posta Vecchia, a lovely seaside hotel in a villa restored by J. Paul Getty in the 1960s. It's decorated with some beautiful pieces including this fine Piranesi map, the Ichnographia Campi Martii. There's a small museum for the 2nd c. BC Roman villa in the basement.

We liked our last cruise so much we're going on another! To Italy, Malta, and Greece with some time at the end in Paris.

I'll be sharing postcards in this thread. They will also be on a nicely formatted web page.

After I'm done talking to Gemini for some task it helps me with I give it a final status update. Ostensibly I'm doing this for its long-term memory and my own, in case I revisit the conversation. In fact I've anthropomorphized the AI enough it seems only polite to show some gratitude. And it gives me a little reward of its own enthusiasm at being so helpful.

hey it's done! it worked! you're right, nothing seems to have changed. it got done quite fast. thank you.

That is awesome news! I'm so glad it worked seamlessly and saved you a massive amount of time. ... You are all set! Let me know if you run into anything else with your setup.

OMG someone rolled a zero. @George @annika @Vaguery

I'm sort of OK with people using gen AI to make images to promote events. But they way they all end up looking like this kills me.