My unsubstantiated working theory is that LLMs are too verbose because they weighted SEO’d content too much in the training data, probably because that is what was easily crawled and obtained.

So what is the deal with Jeep Wranglers and rubber ducks? Every Wrangler I see has them on the dash and I don’t get it.

It finally feels like autumn. Cool weather, walks in the woods, potato leek soup for dinner, and a glass of calvados with a good book before bed.

I was bummed when the veggie share/CSA we’d been with for the past four years ended, but the new one we switched to this year has exceeded our expectations. The fruit has been a delightful bonus. Multiple varieties of plums, peaches, pears, and apples, all juicy and flavorful. All from a farm just across the Hudson!

The mud kitchen we built for Charlie didn’t hold his interest much last summer, but has been a big hit this summer.

So has anyone witnessed trout eating the spotted lanternflies yet?

An integral part of getting a CSA (veggie share) is freezing/preserving what you won’t use that week. We’ve been getting lots of celery and carrots, so I chopped them up and froze packs for soup this winter.

Taking shelter from the rain

We need the SEO Rapper to come out of retirement and make a Vibe Coding video to the tune of Design Coding.

Here’s that blast from the past for your Friday nostalgia.

These cool nights have been so nice. 55F this morning.

Chatting with GPT-5 is, in fact, like talking with a PhD—it recites lots of quotes and states complete fabrications with utter confidence!

I got a new space gray MacBook M4 Pro for work with 48GB of RAM.

I’m not running any local LLMs yet, so the main place I’ve noticed the RAM making a difference is in Numbers.app. On my previous machine with 16GB of RAM, applying filters to large sheets was noticeably slow. Now it is snappy. I still prefer Google Sheets, though.

This space gray machine gets hot noticeably faster in the sun than my previous silver one did.

Charlie (4yo) and I saw a Cybertruck on the way back from pickup today.

Charlie: “I HATE those!”

Me: “Why?”

Charlie: “Because they look like rocks ALL THE TIME!”

My reading has somehow swung back from physical books to ebooks again this month. I guess it is because I wanted to read something I didn’t have a physical copy of and I didn’t want to wait for it, then I started reading other things I already had on my Kindle.

Campfire rudbeckia

Sometimes I wonder in the spring whether or not to go through the effort of putting in a garden that year, but later that year I’m always glad I did. Going out to pick tomatoes for our salads each night is so nourishing.

Pour one out for Ozzy. Black Sabbath was formative for my musical interests and probably started my anti-authoritarian and anti-war inclination, both of which persist today.