Nathan Arthur

I’m so proud! In math class, the teacher told the kids they could have notes for the exam on one side of a single piece of paper. My 16yo twisted and taped his paper into a Möbius strip!

Apparently the teacher was dumbfounded… and then allowed it!

(I mean, how could he not? It was *math* class!)

My 16yo made (and invented!) this! #origami

I had one of my favorite things happen today.

I turned down a hiring candidate. (Not the favorite thing!)

They wrote back asking for feedback. (A second-favorite thing!)

I sent them honest feedback. (Hard to do.)

They replied saying it really was good feedback and they really gained new insights from it, and thanked me. (The favorite thing!)

I share it here because it’s nice to share good things. I hope it makes you feel good to know that a good thing happened today :)

The last ~30 hours have been quite good: I made cookies and they turned out great, I rode my motorcycle to and from work on a beautiful day, I spent the work day brainstorming and learning with my team, and I hung out with good friends and had good food and played cards.

Good job, #NASA. It’s damn impressive work.

Huh. I just got a business spam that actually caught my attention and made me think about replying. (A first!) It was legibly written by an intelligent person who had specific market knowledge, good understanding of our business, and novel ideas for how they could help us.

But it included "references" for some of their "facts" that weren't links - they were just things like "IDC, Nov 2025". And that got me thinking - I don't think any of those "facts" were real. They just sounded good. They were just AI slop.

There are some other clues like comments about "technical roadmap" that have nothing to do with what they're purportedly selling - but probably came from an AI "tailoring" the email to my title.

So... shit. Another notch in the spam ratchet, I guess. Nobody could afford a real human to do all that work, but now it's cheap to have a computer do it!

All in the name of selling something that must only be tangentially related to what they said they were selling. This is probably just a way to get a human on the hook to listen to their pitch for "quality spam services".

Grumble, grumble.

Update on my "never do business with Merrill Lynch" saga: apparently Merrill Lynch is actually Bank of America, or vice versa? So now I'm getting random emails from BofA, *at a different email address* - one that they should never have had - telling me that e.g. they're changing my contract terms... for an account I don't have! And that I can't unsubscribe, because "I have an existing relationship with them".

So when I try to go to the website, or contact their customer support, all avenues absolutely refuse to let me get to a human unless I have an account number to enter, but of course I don't, because I don't have any Bank of America account. It's amazing that they literally refuse to let you talk to a human, no matter what.

So I guess the "never do business" rule has been extended to BofA, too.

This is the OEM-recommended way to fix a loose grounding strap when the bolt that holds it down has sheared off, right?

I love the cost of old cars. But I hate all the yaks.

Sleepy cat

A little truth leaked through, there at the end!

My process for listening to background music when I'm working from home:

1. Realize that I'm free of meetings and have time to concentrate so background music would be nice
2. Turn on the speaker
3. Get distracted by some notification
4. Respond to it
5. Work, maybe for hours
6. Realize I never started my music
7. Start my music

(Or sometimes step 7 is pre-empted by another notification!)

RE: @misconceptions@a2mi.social

#TIL! Also here’s the source article, which was quite interesting: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5512720/