Jeff Kaufman

Now that LLMs have made many kinds of coding a matter of saying what you're looking for, many more programs make sense. This weekend it was audio mixing software, customized for my use case (live sound for contra dancing) and hardware (a specific obsolete audio interface).

This Sunday I'll be leading the BIDA Open Band, with Jonah Sidman anchoring melody and Max Newman anchoring rhythm. Come play with us! 4:30-7:30pm at the Cambridge Masonic Hall. Come early (anytime after 3:30) to set get set for sound.

I'm looking for a word for when nothing humans do still feeds into whether anyone is fed, has shelter, gets medical care, or has any other basic need met, but where people still do things for each other, sometimes for pay, because of a preference that some work be done by a human. Suggestions?

Last weekend I organized a van down from Boston to NYC for EA Global. Very happy I did this, and would definitely do it again. Being able to talk with folks both ways was great, and it saved the group a decent amount of money (though how much depends on whether bus or train is the counterfactual).

Is the telephoto camera on the Pixel 11 Pro actually better than the one on the 10 Pro? I took a bunch of pictures and it looks like yes (though the impact of AI-based cleanups makes it a harder comparison than I expected).

The kids have been excited about Pig Latin lately. I noticed that there are a few words that are also English words, or homophones thereof. With some help from Claude, especially in figuring out which words would work well and in checking my work, here's a poem about a pie and a naughty plover.

I suspect this usage of the Rolls Royce logo is not licensed.

Several months ago I wrote a program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped. Now available as a free app on the Mac App Store: www.jefftk.com/p/clipboard-...

Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines: www.frogandtoad.ai

Summary of where we currently are with pathogen-agnostic early warning, what the benefit curve looks like, and what still needs doing.

I tried positively pressurizing a room with a HEPA air purifier. It maybe worked, but I'm not really set up to test it well yet.

[BOS] There's a new Dawn Dance in VT, the weekend of 9/26: 7pm Sat to 7am Sun. I'm playing the 1am-4am shift with Cecilia. Driving out on Saturday and back Sunday; anyone want a ride? Timing is flexible: I need to be there Sat by 5pm, and on Sun I need to take a nap before driving back.

I avoid Twitter (𝕏) for similar reasons to drugs: I think it would change me for the worse, and I would be unable to give it up.

When I look at why I expect the world to change a lot in the next few years, a big component is that I expect to see widespread "teleoperation": AI walking people through work where the motions are straightforward, timing is not critical, and people are paid a lot for their knowledge and judgement.

To increase resilience to disruptions that might bring down the power grid we should end net metering (including for existing installations) and compensate people with a one-time subsidy for battery purchase. www.jefftk.com/p/replace-ne...

The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven't banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. But their nonsense rule that babies can't be in carriers for takeoff and landing is one of my least favorite.

If you have solar and an electric car, what should happen during a power outage? Solar should be able to charge the car and power you house, drawing from the car battery as needed. My only option for doing this anytime soon seems to be a Cybertruck, so I'm just going to get a stand-alone battery.

I'm considering a solar battery backup for our house. Decided not to do this in 2024, but since then: * I've learned about utility incentives if we let them drain it remotely. * We can finance most at 0% for 7y. * I'm increasingly concerned about long-term disasters.

A few months ago Chris Bakerlee wrote up "10 big projects for reducing bio x-risk." Working on any of these professionally would be really valuable, but most have solid actions we can do at the individual level.

My program that lets you whistle to control a synthesizer is now available in the Mac App Store: www.jefftk.com/p/whistle-sy...

The standard recommendation on time out duration is one minute per year of age (up to 5min). In my experience this is much longer than needed; I typically do about a minute regardless of age. The important thing is that the punishment is predictable and immediate, not that it's strong.

I'm voting for Burhan Azeem for State Senate, and if you're in Somerville, Medford, or parts of Cambridge and Winchester I think he's the best candidate I've had the opportunity to vote for on housing, transit, and AI.

The OpenAI Foundation has granted SecureBio Detection $17.2M for pathogen-agnostic detection. I'm very excited about this, I think we can do a lot of good stuff with this funding, and also do want to make sure we're not providing cover for OpenAI (the for profit) to do less.

Walking through an example of how I used my 5yo's motivation to eat ice cream to get them to practice interacting with strangers.

In 2015 I made a little webapp to show predictions for the MBTA. A few years later they moved APIs and it stopped working. Back in those days programming required effort, and I let it die. But now that we have genies (for better or worse) I had Claude one-shot a fix.

Thinking about what worked well (and a little of what didn't) at the amusement park with the kids last week: www.jefftk.com/p/canobie-la...

Side tabs are the thing I missed most after switching to Chrome (originally for speed and stability, but now that those are table stakes, for security) and I was really sad when they removed the experimental vertical option ~15y ago. Excited to see that they've added it for real!

Really impressive foot drumming technique: youtu.be/u4RSlO9nS50?...

Air purifiers are great, but they make a noise. Which means in most cases where you'd use a white noise machine an air purifier is better.

Liner notes from the 1972 Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra album. www.jefftk.com/p/canterbury...

Someone submitted my musical multitasking post to Hacker News, where Rochus Keller saw it and left some fascinating comments. He's developed a method of foot drumming, using midi organ pedals: www.jefftk.com/p/organ-peda...

Notes on reading Dudley and Jacqueline Laufman's barn dance book. I'm especially interested in the presentation of the question of live vs recorded music for contra dancing (Dudley was a famous partisan of live), especially when combined with a selling a book of recorded music to dance to.

59min from getting on the red line shuttle bus at Kendall to get off at Davis. Not counting the wait for the shuttle. Definitely should have taken the green line today.

Amazon music's concept of "Artist" is terrible: of the nine bands I tested seven of them conflated multiple artists into a single ID. Their recommendation system is also terrible, and I wonder if this is part of why. (We've since unsubscribed, for unrelated reasons.)

The core of musical multitasking that you have much more physical ability than conscious attention to coordinate it with, so you need to get aspects of your playing out of your conscious mind. I practice by playing and reading a book: this forces my body to learn to draw minimally on my attention.

Looking through writing from 1985-1992 as a dance community grappled with the question of live vs recorded music, and noticing how the features the author disliked about the newly revived live music tradition on initial exposure were prerequisite for the later thriving tradition.

Kingfisher (Cecilia Vacanti and I) will be playing ArtBeat this Saturday in Davis Square, 3-4pm on the Elm Street stage. Harris Lapiroff will be calling dances for all!

I've been calling some parties and I've been happy with mostly longways whole-set dances. But if I build every dance out of the same small number of building blocks you run into "haven't we done this one before"? Asking around for ones with unique "hooks" turned up two I'm excited to start calling.