I survived my 5th Rally Colorado. This was the first year it was a National, and the organizers did about as well as could be hoped given the circumstances. This rally is just brutal. Every year I forget just how hard it is, and every year there’s some new fresh hell. Tennessee is the only other rally I’ve ever done, but it was so easy in comparison. This year temperatures were forecast to be in the upper 90s as usual. Colorado has had record low snowpack and Rangely seemed even drier and dustier than usual. The organizers struggle to put…
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…