Chuck Grimmett

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  • I learned something new tonight: How to recharge the refrigerant in my car’s AC system. Easier than I expected.

  • Charlie is getting more adventurous and capable every day. I’m so proud of him.

  • Our purple peas are ready for harvest. We used some in our pasta tonight, along with fresh basil, chives, parsley, garlic, and lemon.

  • The farm I get our veggie share from set up an email group anyone could reply to for members instead of making it announcement-only. Rookie mistake. Now we have never-ending reply chains from boomers.

  • A-typical weather day. Four different thunderstorms throughout the day with periods of sunshine in between.

  • Newly rediscovered cocktail recipe from Trader Vic: Māori Punch https://cocktailwonk.com/2023/06/maori-punch-an-undiscovered-trader-vic-original.html

  • With any luck this Shortcut will post to my blog, Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky all at the same time.

  • Anyone figure out how to post to Bluesky via the Apple Shortcuts app yet? I suppose I’ll need to dig in to the AT protocol and use the Get Contents of URL action to POST.

  • Testing a Shortcut to post to my blog, Twitter, and Mastodon all at once. If it works, I’ll try adding Bluesky via curl next.

  • Last week I mentioned to Amanda that I hadn’t heard the coyote pack since last summer and wondered if they had moved on. Spoiler: They didn’t.

  • This week’s veggie share: head lettuce, parsley, basil, cucumbers, bok choi, arugula, radishes, and scallions. Here is how we plan to use them: https://cooklikechuck.com/2023/06/23/roxbury-farm-2023-csa-week-3/

  • Today I’ve been married for 10 years and have been blogging here for 15 years. Still very happy with both decisions. Cheers! 🍷

  • I think this Anti-Meta Fedi Pact is short sighted and not in the best interest of the users on those instances.

    Defederate the instances with rampant spam, bad actors, and poor moderation? Sure! Block users or whole instances that violate your server’s rules? Go for it! But preemptively blocking/defederating the whole service in advance? That ain’t it. It seems like the mods who signed are this week’s landed gentry.

  • I think beer makes my seasonal allergies worse.

  • TIL about ink traps

    An ink trap is a feature of certain typefaces designed for printing in small sizes. At an ink trap, the corners or details are removed from the letterforms. When the type is printed, ink naturally spreads into the removed area. Without ink traps, the excess ink would soak outwards and ruin the crisp edge.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_trap

  • Made a Lost Lake for the first time tonight. It is excellent and going in the regular rotation.

    Lost Lake Cocktail – Imbibe Magazine
    For the Lost Lake cocktail, Lost Lake’s Paul McGee combines aged rum, passion fruit syrup, lime juice, pineapple juice, maraschino liqueur and Campari.
    imbibemagazine.com

  • Looking forward to checking out this show at the Center for Machine Arts on Saturday. Very cool to see stuff like this happening locally in Peekskill.

  • I always have to look up how to find payments from Apple and Google Pay in the Stripe dashboard. The answer is here:

    To locate Apple Pay or Google Pay charges, you can export your payments from the Dashboard with the Card Tokenization Method column enabled. In the resulting export that column will contain apple_pay for Apple Pay payments and android_pay or google_pay for Google Pay payments.

    https://support.stripe.com/questions/filtering-for-apple-pay-or-google-pay-charges-using-the-stripe-dashboard

  • Hail storm!

  • Bookmarked Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang: ‘The machines we have now are not conscious’ by Madhumita Murgia.

    Non-paywalled link: https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2Fc1f6d948-3dde-405f-924c-09cc0dcf8c84

    “There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”

    So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.

    “It’s genuinely amazing that . . . these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.

    Chiang’s view is that large language models (or LLMs), the technology underlying chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, are useful mostly for producing filler text that no one necessarily wants to read or write, tasks that anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”. AI-generated text is not delightful, but it could perhaps be useful in those certain areas, he concedes.

    “But the fact that LLMs are able to do some of that — that’s not exactly a resounding endorsement of their abilities,” he says. “That’s more a statement about how much bullshit we are required to generate and deal with in our daily lives.”

    Chiang believes that language without the intention, emotion and purpose that humans bring to it becomes meaningless. “Language is a way of facilitating interactions with other beings. That is entirely different than the sort of next-token prediction, which is what we have [with AI tools] now.”