Office Gorn

The desktop app that I use for listening to Japanese has updated itself and in the process lost all of my subscribed podcasts. What's worse is that it has decided to be all regional and also defaulted to the US. Open the app and the first thing I see is Joe fucking Rogan. 面倒くさい。

MotoGP qualifying. 1.5 second gap between P1 & P2. That's like an entire grid worth. Biggest gap in 7 years. Same rider as last time...

Replied, but still somewhat open mouthed at the misunderstanding. Chris H will be taking testosterone or equivalents to look like this. When preparing for Thor he was reportedly eating over 4000 kcals a day to gain 10kg of weight ASAP. He's unlikely to have needed much of a bulk/cut cycle either.

Looking at season ticket prices for a thing. Option 1: return ticket every day with 16-25 railcard, £257 per month. Option 2: monthly season ticket, railcard not valid for some reason, £313 per month. May write to Andy Burnham, seeing as he's sorting out irritating things at the moment.

It's surprisingly large house spider season again. Not as big as last year's monster, but there's still time.

Alcohol consumption peaked mid 2000s, it's dropped back now to roughly where it was in the early 90s. Did people socialise less in the 90s? If they did is the current panic over people being unsocial justified? If they didn't, alcohol consumption merely correlates with the last 20 years.

Amazing what 3 prompts and 22 minutes of LLM churning can do. In this case, custom 5.1 → 2 channel digital only down mixer (because the TV output is 'industry standard' for a crappy soundbar.) with web interface.

Project I have been putting off for years - years - because it's such a pain in the arse just written for me by Claude Code 5.5 in 9m 13s. I'm a professional, and it would have taken me the whole weekend, reading specs, getting test files, etc. Maybe a couple of hours on the actual code.

"There are peas in the freezer in the garage, don't add them to the shopping list" The frozen peas in the garage:

Watching an LLM trying to write performance code is a real insight into how they write code. We have IRunnable objects, and a thread pool meant to run them. It has built a thread pool that takes function objects, and wrapped the IRunnables in functions that call them to pass them to the pool.

Well, at least the person with mental health issues on the train was being tracked, I guess. Unless this is some weird scam. It looks like some weird scam.

Not convinced the Elizabeth line is completely integrated into Reading station. Arrive, platform 14, walk to exit near platform 1 to tap out, scan QR code for rail ticket to get back in, walk to platform 13 for onward journey.

Fuck. Just realized that the project I've been putting off for years because it's such a pain in the arse (digital only 5.1 → 2 down mixer) is now completely possible due to LLMs. I don't have to trawl through tedious Dolby documentation or read the digital input spec or even write the code...

I do like how somebody has decided to improve this by adding 4 lines and killing the little humour it had in the first place. Americans, gotta love em.

I'm cold, but according to my temperature probe everything in this room is 20°C or warmer. Has this summer broken something?

Hey wait I got a new complaint You know that time between when they announce your stop on the train and when you're standing in front of the barriers? You can use that time to find your ticket app, payment card, or god forbid your actual paper ticket rather than scrabbling for it at the barrier.

My feeling about this is basically Vyvyan from the Oil episode: it's ok it was bound to happen eventually.

I'm revising my "need to be more attractive to slim people on the train" effort. I also need to be more attractive to people who don't smell like sewage.

Absolutely nailed my life. "Concentrated knife maintenance investment" has me in tears.

Watching a Rick Beato interview with Josh Homme. I guess I should not be surprised that Homme sounds like a drug addled Californian, I should have expected it, but I really am surprised at how drug addled a Californian he sounds. Anyway, Rick Beato's YouTube channel continuing to deliver.

TV and film were fine but my grandparents had a painting done by a my aunt who'd taken sunday school to heart. A scene from hell, fiery mountains and a vally with burning people and demons running through it. Hung in the spare room lit up by passing headlights coming through a gap in the curtains.

FFS. Son has a deadline of 5pm today for two enormously important financial transactions. He's had 2 months to sort both out, and in 10 mins I'm going to have to stand over him and watch him click the bloody buttons to make sure he does both. Kids! Gah!

Putting something Japanese on in the background while I work, in this case some random anime. This is the warning that comes up at the start. FX trading anime? What? Why? I guess I might learn some technical language... Alt text for ease of reading.

Our worst fruit tree, that hasn't grown an inch in the 5 years since it was planted, has produced a single apple. Can't wait to share the crop with the family.

This is a photo of our home planet taken only a few hours ago! So what? We have photos of Earth taken from space every day. Ah, but *this* photo was taken by a spacecraft ON ITS WAY TO JUPITER.

Yesterday: Doing a YouTube search for Japanese bands, clicked on what looked like a promising metal/punk band, turned out to be Japanese Burlesque. (It's like normal burlesque, but with a low quality j-pop idol theme afaics). Today: my YouTube recommendations 😢

Going through my old posts I realise they're mostly moaning about stuff, primarily technology. Anyway, I don't see any reason to change, so... Discovered today that NowTV deliberately doesn't work on Linux, so I've cancelled the service and torrented the thing I wanted to watch instead.

LLM: the error case is only reachable via a hand edit - so it's low priority. You know we're building a thing to allow people to safely hand edit right? LLM: You're right - and that changes the risk analysis. These things are super intelligent and a major risk to our existence, don't you know.

Claude Opus 5 that been giving me time estimates for bits of work like: "it's a rewrite of the tree pane, maybe a days work" "We could add a first matching it's a few hours work but would add a useful feature" Which is quite jarring. Ok, I can see the dev training leaking into your output...

Picked up the bass again a few months ago after 20 years of not playing and this weekend I thought I'd try and learn slap bass ftft. Delighted to say that after only four or five hours practice I can now play a god-awful rendition of Give It Away. Family are being as supportive as you'd expect.

Just dropped #1 child at university. It was like stepping back in time 35 years; think this may be the first time I've felt the full force of nostalgia. If anyone needs me I'll be in the shed, pining for my youth.

My daughter has decided she wants some TV dinner like ready meals so she doesn't have to cook for herself all the time. (If she ate at normal times...) Anyway, buying "roast Sunday dinner" and similar in microwave form and I feel like a divorcee who can't cook.

Just been incredibly stupid & clumsy and gotten away with only minor injuries. In fact I'm barely in any pain at all and I don't think the damage is permanent. Yay.

The argument: Should we, a) cut carbon emissions to net zero b) discount future generations at rate great enough that the death of most complex life on earth due to ocean hypoxity doesn't matter c) some magical thinking that will never work

Have watched for the third time today Opus 5 get confused by timestamps changing in generated output. Begging Anthropic to produce a genuinely intelligent AI, or at least one that can remember things from one hour to the next.