Once colleges start teaching Prompt Engineering (are they already?), will they finally merge Humanities studies with engineering? | Continue reading
Overheard: A group of older ladies at brunch, discussing how ChatGPT is this magical thing which can take any prompt and write it like any poet or author they know. Some were amazed and some unmoved at the pace of technology. Loved listening to how generative AI is a different th … | Continue reading
My blog was down for the better part of the evening due to excessive MySQL logs and expired cached media filling up the entire 50 GB hard disk with noise. Now freed up 55% and all my sites are back online. What a way to spend a Friday evening. | Continue reading
I’ve been addicted to Apollo for most of this year. The way people doomscroll Instagram and Twitter, I do Apollo. Mind you, it’s not Reddit, but Apollo, that I use. Reddit just happens to be the backend for this app in addicted to. Therefore, now that Reddit has gone and killed o … | Continue reading
I think I’ve figured out what type of non-fiction I enjoy. It’s called a biography memoir. The idea is that it has to be a collection of memoirs of multiple people, and it shouldn’t be an autobiography. I can’t deal with that. It has to be written by someone else. Not just that, … | Continue reading
Fewer words are fine. Social-length posts are fine. Link blogs are fine. You get to keep your own output, where you want it, and the form it takes is entirely up to you. You only need to give yourself permission. Write Less, by Matt Gemmell This makes so much sense to me! This is … | Continue reading
Well, this one isn’t about coffee. To be precise, it’s not about a specific coffee (pod), but all coffee. Well, most coffee. I know some of you don’t put milk in your coffee. Some don’t even put sugar! Heck, some don’t even put water. But I do. I put milk. Specifically, cool milk … | Continue reading
I love reading RSS feeds. But sometimes words get tiring. Today is one of those days. Luckily, I have a folder with a few very nice photo blogs that I fall into when I’m in such a phase. I’ve got the following blogs on there – @muan’s photos – This has got to be one […] | Continue reading
Ah, now this was real coffee! One shot of this in the afternoon and I was awake much later than I wanted to! After the previous Coffee Notes post, I got some really nice responses, mainly from the micro.blog community. There are a lot of discerning coffee drinkers out there and … | Continue reading
It almost feels wrong to begin Coffee Notes with Nespresso pods. After all, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of amazing coffee vendors all over the internet vying for our attention. They arguably even have better, cheaper product. But I won’t belie Nespresso the quality of t … | Continue reading
In the tradition of every techie ever, I drink coffee daily. My average is about three cups a day. It used to be two cups, but then I went ahead and had a kid. So now it’s three to four cups a day. I do not drink my coffee black. I find that my taste […] | Continue reading
It’s been proven that quite a few species of animals and birds have intelligence, speech, empathy, critical thinking, and analysis levels similar to those of humans. Dolphins, birds, parrots, dogs, monkeys to name a few. What if this is true for all major eras in Earth’s history … | Continue reading
For about a week, I’ve been suffering from an affliction. The ring finger of my write right hand has been hurting since Monday or Tuesday of last week. On Wednesday last, the pain became so much that I shuffled off to an Urgent Care center nearby to ask them to look at it. Before … | Continue reading
For the last six months, I’ve been on a journey. A journey through time. Specifically, from 1715 to 1789 AD. This journey has chiefly focused on one man – Jean-Jacques Rousseau and one country – France, as they both hurl towards the French revolution of 1789. However, surprisingl … | Continue reading
If you want to, you can use a Jetpack feature called Post by Email to send your WordPress posts via your favorite email client. There’s wide support for setting the title, tags, categories, as well as adding attachments and using shortcodes. But if you do… the post arrives as a C … | Continue reading
I find it strange and interesting when people tend to their “digital gardens”. Try as I may, I cannot treat this blog as a sort of self-referential wiki. A blog to me is a log, a journal. It starts afresh every time I begin writing in it. Perhaps if I wrote daily, it would make [ … | Continue reading
There’s a beautiful blanket of snow outside, so it’s a good time to review how the year went. I read thirteen books this year, though “read” is a loosely based concept now. A large part of my reading nowadays is graphic novels, audiobooks, and web novellas. But I do consider all … | Continue reading
Started watching 1899 on Netflix recently. It’s by the creators of Dark, a show we thoroughly loved. 1899 is no Dark, but it’s close. I just hope it keeps getting renewed, as there’s no way one or two seasons can do the story justice. That said, we’re not binging through it. We’r … | Continue reading
When I started hosting this website on DigitalOcean about 9 years ago, the version of Ubuntu that was all the rage was 14.04 LTS. So I started my hosting journey with that. Pretty soon though, 16.04 came along and since I was ever active on my server, I upgraded to that using not … | Continue reading
Saw an ad on Instagram today for Replika AI, where it was touting the romantic relationships feature of the chatbot service, including photo sharing, role playing, and “caring and loving”. All of these, with an AI. Replika started off as an experiment by an engineer who lost a de … | Continue reading
One of the strangest books I’ve read in a while. Even as I was finishing it, I felt like there’s so much more the story can tell but the author knew when to close it so as to leave us with the purity and purpose of the story instead of the comprehensiveness of reality. Excellent … | Continue reading
How do you balance creation vs consumption? — Read on cdevroe.com/2022/11/14/11940/ As I mentioned in my recent post, I’m basically consuming right now. Very little creation. That’s partly because my creative energies are being used in upbringing instead of creation. I’m ok with … | Continue reading
I installed ActivityPub on my WordPress blog and expected to see it in Mastodon immediately. It just dawned on me that it won’t show older posts. It’ll only show new stuff. So this is a test post to activate ActivityPub. | Continue reading
A short status update on what’s going on in my life. With the little one in tow, our days have sort of become more organized, if only by force of taking care of her every day. Her mealtimes, nap times, and bath time dictate what we are doing when. In our “free” time (her naps […] | Continue reading
After a long while, I was in a Catch-22 situation today. I was trying to close two cabinets together quietly. One had latched on to the other and I had to pick which one to stop with my free hand as they swung to a close unexpectedly. Of course when I picked the latter, the […] | Continue reading
gilest.org: There was a medical emergency — Read on gilest.org/there-was-medical-emergency.html Loved reading this post. So simple and inane. Proper example of what a blogpost should be on a personal site. Proper! | Continue reading
Generational wisdom says that babies can sense that you are being impatient with them, and they in response become further uncooperative. You end up in a cyclical fight to tears and bedtime becomes a war zone. But I don’t think this is the case. I don’t think that these tiny litt … | Continue reading
So, The New York Times provides a nice service where they put the day’s newspaper’s front page as a PDF up on an obscure URL for anyone to see https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/08/26/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf If you’re a logged in user who wants to use their webapp instead, you ca … | Continue reading
When iOS 15 dropped, I noticed that it added a feature that Shortcuts could run on their own, without user approval every time. This is a pretty major change to the way they were working before, and allows for some truly good automation. A few months ago, I created a folder in my … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I was thinking about how irritating the Firefox iOS app is. It’s slow, it’s cumbersome, and while I love it for being in sync with my laptop browser, the UX was irritating enough to forget all the features. I switched back to mobile Safari. It took only a few tap … | Continue reading
The war against printing For many, printing was an overwhelmingly positive innovation. Almost as soon as the first presses were established in Italy, learned men rushed to sing its praises. To some, in fact, it seemed almost divine. In 1468, the bishop of Aleria, Giovanni Andrea … | Continue reading
A friend told me, when my wife and I declared that we were expecting, that it’s time to accept that I’m not going to be reading a lot of books or watching a lot of TV on loud any more. He recommended subtitles, telling me that he’s watched almost all the movies and TV in […] | Continue reading