Photo of a number table tent on a wooden table. The number is "86".

On my Birthday, we got 86ed from some place in Park Slope (see photo). The woman behind the counter wasn’t all that impressed by my attempt at humor after she handed over this number. Perhaps she’s tired of the not so original reference, or maybe she thought it was some sort of middle-aged 67.

I did up a very quick app (I’m using the term very loosely here). Thanks to generative AI, I spent less time on this digital version than on laying out the printable version I was using before. It’s just a little tracker to help me stay on the right dietary path using the DASH diet (from the days before the government added beef tallow to its recommendations). After using it for a week, I made a couple tweaks and am pretty happy with it. You can check it out here: Simple DASH Diet Tracker, if you’re interested in such things, the code is on Codeberg.


Links

Photo of a whole-wheat, sourdough sandwich loaf on a stove top.

Checked out Luna at Bowery Ballroom on Thursday night, they put on a great show. Based on observations from some recent shows, I have some advice for my fellow middle-aged concert goers: If you want to stay on your feet, maybe have one less edible.

Hadn’t made sourdough since before we moved due to the general moving chaos and then a malfunctioning oven. Despite both me and the starter being out of practice, we managed to turn out a reasonable looking loaf. The new kitchen is such that the stand mixer is on the counter and available for use at any time. At some point, I really need to take advantage of that for some different types of bread.


Links

Photo of two Big Green Eggs flanking a pizza oven outdoors in New England during the winter. The egg on the left has smoke rising from it and the pizza oven has a visible wood fire inside.
Eggs and pizza!

I forgot my phone one day this week. I hadn’t gone far and could have gone back for it. But, I decided I could survive a work day without the infernal thing. It was wonderful not being interrupted by it throughout the day, and I only felt an ever so slight disconnected feeling once, or maybe twice. The only real bummer was the basketball game invite that I didn’t see in time. While I’d like to say this made me totally rethink my relationship to technology and am going to forgo all mobile communications, my phone hasn’t left my side since.

Hot on the heels of last week’s human.json, I added an AI policy to this site.

On Saturday, we successfully extracted the Big Green Egg from the deck at the old apartment. I was worried we’d have trouble getting it down the stairs, but it turned out to be lighter and easier to handle than than expected. It now resides on a farm in the country with other, old Green Eggs.

This also gave us an opportunity to have one of our infrequent live jams. Jamulus is amazing in that it lets us play together every week, which would be impossible otherwise. But live is so much better. I think we sounded pretty good, I hope the neighbors agree.

Links

After seeing mentions of The human.json Protocol not once, but twice this week, I added a human.json file to this site. Seems like a good idea. It would be good to have a web of trust that indicates whether the site you’re looking at is run by people or by LLMs. Their browser extension does just that. So, I hope this has legs and more sites do it.

Links

The new apartment is coming together. I look forward to a time when boxes are no longer a major part of our day-to-day lives. Between those we unpack and the near-daily arrivals bearing needed household items, I’ve become adept at breaking them down and getting them out of the apartment. Come to think of it, the super is probably looking forward this being over as well.

I usually relegate the AI references to the links section, but I thought this piece in The Times was worthy of note: The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived via FlowingData.

“It might fail a company’s quality test, but it would meet every deadline. That is what makes A.I. coding such a shock to the system.”

Indeed, quantity over quality. This is the world we are living in today. Perhaps it has always been that way, but these large language models can turn stuff out at a volume that was previously unimaginable. I do hope we can, collectively, figure out how to use these things so that they are a net positive.

Links