Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1062
Star Wars dreams. Trench digging. Sick family. Personal LLMs. Threads gripes.
Hello. What’s that Johnny Cash song? Damn your eyes? Right. “Sam Hall.” Folk song. American IV. The one with “Hurt.” Anyway, Damn your eyes, Chatham School District. Who the hell coordinates a field trip to a public children’s museum in an urban area two weeks before Christmas? Cesspool of festering germs and kids rubbing their kid goo all over everything. Five kids were sick yesterday in Jane’s class of eighteen. Today it hit Jane. She really wanted to go, too. Absolutely adamant that she was going. Got up, got dressed, came downstairs, turned on the tree, ate her breakfast, docilely took her cough medicine. Well, once I consented to go upstairs and get the purple one. Was so excited about library today, about the profoundly problematic “Baby it’s cold outside” dress theme today, had her Hello Kitty scarf and teddy bear hat and oh man she was so cute. As we were leaving I casually said that she should ask her teacher for help putting on a mask if she keeps coughing at school. We got to the door. She stopped. Stood in the door for a full minute unable to decide. Quietly walked back inside, took off her hat and scarf and came downstairs with me.
I’m sure if I had tried to convince her to not go, right now we would be in the car. Left it up to her. One of those days where you give yourself a quick pat on the back because you did something right in parenting for once.
Whole damn house is sick. Emma’s been sick for weeks. I am sick of this. Why does Jane have to like school so much. Why can’t she come home every day and say she doesn’t like it and she doesn’t want to go so we can just pull her out.
And of course this happens on a day where I took a chanced and actually scheduled something this morning. Was supposed to meet an out-of-town friend at a coffee shop in Pittsboro. Dude came all the way from the west coast to m’fn Pittsboro, NC, population 4,000 (for now) just ten minutes up the road and I can’t make it to see him because everyone is sick.
Damn your eyes.
OK so last night I had the best freakin dream ever and I know its gauche to talk about dreams but not to me you can tell me your dreams all the livelong day (thank you Kellianne for telling me about your dream yesterday). It was so good.
It was a Star Wars dream. It was a dream with a fully realized Luke Skywalker solo adventure (save for a couple cameos at the end). It was freaking awesome. It was also a frame story dream because me, Sean, Abby and Boushard were watching this solo Luke Skywalker adventure dream in the threater (Fenway, I think. Is that place gone? RIP). And the movie was so good.
It started with a super fast montage of a space battle with Luke in his X-Wing only he’s shot down and the last shot of his him careening away from the battle, losing altitude, gravity of a nearby planet (we think) sucking him in. The montage went fast, you’re not sure what happens, it cuts to black. Then Luke is on the ground and he’s running and escaping from AT AT Scouts and tie fighters in a sort of endless warehouse (think the end of Raiders). This is also a super fast scene and he falls and its black again. Then we have a nice, warm, sunny, friendly, happy planet. A village. We don’t know it but it is Alderaan. The village takes in Luke. There are folk dances and customs and late nights in cafes and it’s just beautiful. Luke tries to ask about the Empire and the people are like “don’t worry about them they don’t come by often.” You’re not sure what’s going on, Luke is not sure what’s going on. It’s hallucinagenic, comforting, sort of Inner Light meets Aftersun meets that horrible part of Star Trek Generations where Picard is in the Nexus with that ridiculous family on Christmas. It’s and Luke has to solve it.
Anyway, it freakin ruled. I know the ending but I’m not gonna spoil it for you. The people behind us in the theater were wrong, and we were right we predicted it. Because we watched Clone Wars and, weirdly, that weird Pixar short Lava, which I hated but it has ended up that I think about it all the time.
Okay here is some important information. I figured out that the best way to spread butter onto toast when your butter isn’t soft is to use your freakin butter knife like it’s intended. There is a reason it has that little notch in it. Don’t turn the knife upside down and avoid the notch. Embrace the notch. The notch scrapes off little spaghetti strings of butter that melt more quickly. The notch rules. The butter knife is a marvel of engineering and it took me fifty-one years to figure it out. My god. Butter knives. Screw AI. Butter knives are where it’s at.
Speaking of AI Google’s new NotebookLM is getting closer to what I want for a personal LLM. I’m sure the thing is not up to my needs yet – I’m sure it doesn’t read metadata from photos and songs (let alone parse the), and read data from proprietary file formats like Scrivener files and Kindle files. Also, it’s from Google. Gut imagine if we got there? And it was Dropbox? That would be so amazing. It wouldn’t be everything I wanted — I want something that can do my physical books. But I could work with it. My digitized corpus is vast enough I think it would be a decent LLM, assuming it could peer into proprietary file formats, images, music and PDFs.
Maybe another year or two? This is literally the only thing I am excited about in LLMs. They are going to be useless otherwise. Eventually someone is going to die because of an LLM hallucination, and of course we’ll figure out how to SEO them right around the time they displace traditional Google search, and public LLMs will get filled with Spam and Ads (boy I wish I were a bit younger I would 100% cynically make an ad engine for LLMs but I have more important things to do in life).
Threads introduced hashtags yesterday and they are fine. People are whining that you can only have one. I get this, but it is not a limitation I care about. What I do care about is that they seem to be hellbent on breaking the rest of Threads. The algorithmic feed is now absolutely filled with people ‘introducing’ themselves on “techthreads” which is exactly what I don’t want to see and it is exhausting. So then I turned to my personal chronological feed, which I prefer but I am too lazy to switch back all the time, and it is just… broken? Three recent posts then nothing for three days from friends, even though I know they’ve posted cuz it’s showing them on the algorithmic feed. And it’s still terrible at, you know, actually displaying threads. It really is something how both Bluesky and Threads are still terrible at displaying a thread. Twitter was really good at this! They did not get enough credit for making something that was intuitive, non-repetitive and simple. On Threads, rather than getting actual threads all you see is the first post, and then one of your friends replying to it. And no conversation. It just makes all your friends look like Reply Guys. I mean I guess it’s good, it means I am spending a lot less time on it. The content feels like Twitter of yesteryear, but the format leaves much to be desired.
The crew came over yesterday and dug the trench between the greenhouse and the house. I mean, they started. I don’t know if they finished or not. I am heading over there… well, god knows when now that Jane stayed home. But this means I can get the electrician over here soon and maybe I’ll have a functioning greenhouse soon! I kept myself up all night trying to figure out the electricity, it really is a challenge to figure out where to put the conduits between the lack of walls and the curtains that hang from the roof. I need to somehow get a conduit underneath the curtains, but handing. I don’t quite know how this is going to work. Also I have no idea where to mount the outlets and switches since, well, the walls are glass. But we are close!
Daddy Jane Dance Party watched the Olivia Rodrigo SNL performance — Jane liked the All American Bitch performance — and then her Tiny Desk performance, which Jane did not like because she did not play any dance songs. Then the same painful Blackpink x2, Taylor x2, St. Vincent run. Not our finest dance party. I need to find some new artist to get her obsessed with.
Justa mix for today. Reader, I am so tired of making mixes. Two more weeks. Plus I’ll probabaly half-ass it when we’re in Boston. Not that I’m not half-assing it now. This one’s good, though. The new stuff’s all a little samey - Release Radar is in a indie guitar rut lately. But the oldies make it legit. Did I cheat and start with six oldies straight to lull you into a false sense of comfort? Why yes, yes I did. But they’re not my usual oldies, though. Ha. Yeah right. Verve, Spiritualized, JAMC, Spectrum. Tell me more, Rick-O.
Jane is bugging me to do words with her. It is very hard to explain to a six year-old that her sick day is not my sick day. Alas. Must go.