AI is spectacular at fixing bugs created by humans. It was trained on that. I am seeing PRs of fifty files changed, and experience tells me there will be blood, I mean bugs. But not the kind we are used to. These bugs will be invisible to the models because […]
White never even agreed with Strunk and White. White used passive voice. He began sentences with conjunctions. Pronouns floated. Sentences ended on a preposition if that's where they wanted to end. The proscriptions in Elements of Style are aspirational, they describe how […]
The Gileadites had a border problem any bouncer would recognize. The Ephraimites looked like them, dressed like them, worshipped the same God, and kept trying to slip back across the Jordan after picking the wrong side of the wrong war. Cousins, basically, indistinguishable by aspect. So the Gileadites stopped guarding the paper. […]
My wife thinks I built a machine to text her happy birthday after I am dead. She is not wrong, which is the part she objects to. The setup is dumber than it sounds. There is a cron job on the same closet Linux box that serves this website, the one already warm from rendering bread […]
So … why am I still mad about the internet, thirty years on? Always, needlessly, and I'm still kinda shocked when it does it again. (My wife says "thirty years of complaining about the internet" is, TBH, a joke.) […]
Lemme spoil the lede: I have been running a language model over years of chat logs with my wife. Not to generate fake apologies this time (that was the Markov boyfriend incident, and we do not talk about it). To see what a machine could tell us about us that we were not able to see ourselves. It started, as most of my terrible ideas do, with a question I could not […]
Reading about artificially generated tweets from a certain (in)famous twit got me thinking about an idea I had for a plug-in to my chat app. There was a time, before I implemented the chat app, when I was not the most communicative husband. In my defense, I was deep in code in a state of […]
After experimenting with house automation, I arrived at the inevitable point when I needed something to do with all this cool stuff that nearly worked. Having devoted entirely too much time to the process of raising and training a miniature human, my first instinct was to look for ways to automate the work of parenting […]
As part of a more general initiative to take ownership of my data by hosting it myself, I cobbled together a chat app. My target audience is limited to me and my wife mostly discussing logistics. A fancy way of saying we needed a better way to coordinate grocery lists and who […]
Jayne was an automated yelling and nagging entity. She was my early attempt at a whole house AI before that was a thing. She was definitely artificial but not particularly intelligent. She ruled our house from my daughter’s kindergarten until third grade. What follows are a few observations about the experience. Before her retirement Jayne […]