dstu

Dude in front of me on the train was using Gemini to write GRAD reviews (Google's semi-annual performance review, successor to "perf")... for his reports.

Same prompt each time, just replacing FOO in "Help me write 's GRAD... blah blah blah, see the attached notes..." with various names and attaching a different notes doc each time.

I have never been so glad not to be working at Google anymore.

I grew up reading Vivian L. Thompson's retellings of Hawaiian stories and legends (Hawaiian Myths of Earth, Sea, and Sky; Hawaiian legends of Tricksters and Riddlers; Hawaiian Tales of Heroes and Champions), and I'm so chuffed that I have been able to introduce my kids to them recently. We already dipped our toes into the d'Aulaire myth books, but Hawaiian legends and folk stories are much more accessible.

Everyone is speculating about what targets Ukraine might be going for during the parade in Moscow, and I'm just imagining how fitting it would be if they managed to get in some massive rainbow glitter bombs.

When someone in CREATIVE_DISCIPLINE_A says they're using "AI" to emulate the output of a person in CREATIVE_DISCIPLINE_B.

Might be time to set your ringtone to "John Brown's Body."

Falling back to a 9-year-old smartphone, which is somehow less janky than the 2025 phone I fried last week, has thrown me back in time. There's no Discord, Mastodon, or Matrix chat. The top suggested link when I open a browser tab is r/coronavirus.

This is a lot more relaxing that I would have expected. I should continue this inadvertent experiment on the inevitable replacement phone (already in the mail... gotta be on the apps the school district uses to contact us).

RE: @pesasa@mastodon.social

Our 4-year-old was talking about sports yesterday and came up with "Americaball." And that just fits so well that I want it to stick. Fewer syllables, gets to the point, rolls off the tongue.

TFW you blocked out a few hours to read some papers suggested by reviewer number 3 to improve the analysis of your experimental results, and one of them is 85 pages long...

Do I even have that much toner left? If I want to keep up with the literature, an E-reader might actually pay for itself...

Another reason to hate Flatpak: it's polluting libraries that my desktop applications use.

I never ran an xdg-desktop-portal provider. I run a simple window manager in Xorg and like it that way.

But now libadwaita queries xdg-desktop-portal for default GUI settings, and programs that use it hang on startup. (dbus queries for nonexistent default settings time out.)

I expect filing a libadwaita bug to be futile. libadwaita is for GNOME apps. I'm not running in GNOME. Will this use case matter?

How do you mess up formatting for an unspecified field this badly? (If the string isn't long enough, use it as padding until it is???)

The tall ships visiting Boston are a treat.

I was not, however, impressed by the "Happy 250th Birthday, United States of America!" mini-golf course. I am pretty sure that the USS Constitution never flew the flag pictured here. Looks like generative "AI" was used to do the heavy lifting and zero human fucks were given. (Or, worse, that someone is dog-whistling with a secessionist flag that has 11 stripes.)

@ml@ecoevo.social @johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz is in a very different career stage than you but might have some insights from taking a position in Europe after seeing the direction things were going in...

Kids have started asking for Nu Pogodi (Ну погоди!) instead of more common fare when they get to watch some TV in the evening. It's kind of refreshing to hear.