LLMs are finally getting genuinely good at recommending things. I have no idea why the streaming platforms aren’t better utilizing AI for this, but you can talk to it yourself and get really good recommendations. It takes some time–you need to spell out what you like, don’t like and more importantly why. We just recently watched and loved The Detectorists, a thing I would never have found on my own. I’ve got a list of 10 things to watch next that I’m genuinely excited about. I asked Claude to sum up my taste in TV shows, and while it’s weird…
We deserve a better word than spatula. The kitchen is full of simple-sounding implements: tongs, knife, spoon, fork. Even spork. Single syllable. Concise. Precise. Spatula, on the other hand, sounds scientific, clinical, declinable, Latin (it is). It’s fun to say. But the term simply means a long handled implement with a wide flat end. A spatula could be a rubber tool used to scrape food out of a bowl (a pot scraper). It could be made of metal and used to flip a burger (a pancake turner). It could even be a wooden stirrer. If I’m holding a heavy hot…
I’m loathe to give a single penny to tax prep software because some significant percentage of money they take in gets redistributed in a lobbying effort to make sure that Congress keeps our tax code complicated and does absolutely nothing to simplify tax preparation for Americans. But I’m way too lazy to actually prepare my taxes by hand. That’s fairly complicated, error-prone and annoying. Normally I pick the cheapest tax prep software I can find. This year and last year, that meant OLT (OnLine Taxes). The cheaper software works fine, but the biggest limitation is that it won’t import forms…
Berck got us robot floor cleaners for Christmas, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. They’re apparently smart enough not to fall downstairs (at least the upstairs one is; the downstairs one might well be an idiot). They can vacuum and mop. They’re surprisingly fairly good at all-terraining it over doorway thresholds. They don’t do a terribly good job at cleaning, but they work hard (if you choose the work hardest setting), and the floors are a lot cleaner than when they don’t clean. They also freak the cat out. They aren’t very loud, which is good, because the house can get…