I must have had worse luck with puris, I have found them very hit or miss in quality.

Every wedding where it is served, I pour myself a cup and I am set for drinks.

Hold the puri, I just want the pani.

The actual comics Pavitr Prabhakar appeared in were so painfully bad I wished they had never come up with the character.

I think "recommending with intent" is very different from the kneejerk "recommending something I liked" and the former is a skill worth cultivating if you are someone who reads more often than the friends you are recommending books to. It's way more fun to find the right book to rec.

But I really don't need to defend it, and I sure don't need to rec it. There's so much good stuff out there. And also, if I do rec it, it will be because someone is looking for something specific that an older book might offer, and I'd give it some content warnings.

After a week where a lot of things happened tonight I get to sleep at a normal* hour and feel like my work is done for the day.

*ish

A daily prayer I can get behind.

I think the railroad barons are a good example to learn from here. The tech industry has failed to weigh its responsibilities and needs to be forced to stop building data centers carelessly and inconsiderately and AWS can't be a privately owned single failure point backbone of the Internet.

I would like to believe we can treat data centers like the infrastructure they are: developed with intent and purpose and deployed with consideration for where they can be of the most use balanced against their environmental impact, and responsible objection when those principles are violated.

Need to get that cat some talking buttons

I'm very skeptical I can actually get any utility out of LLM models but I am genuinely curious to try once there are well-developed models endorsed by people in this space trained on the Common Corpus.

I talked myself into and out of these last 2 again tonight after putting in the ones I have finished.

I think this is the first time I have thought "bless the APT" for importing a previous cycle's info painlessly.

I just realized I am done preparing for lectures this semester, I just have to show up for student presentations (and grade, but that's not prep).

Got my approval for an immigration change of status, permission to stay here until 1 July 2027, and as long as the magic plastic ID card arrives before 1 July 2026, I will not have an interruption in pay.

I have decided against adding 2 more last minute proposals to my queue. Is this growth? Old age? Infirmity? Cowardice? Lack of resolve? Probably all of those, but I am going to sleep.

SLACs are why I am in this country and why I am trying to stay.

I really think my small school undergrad experience (Wesleyan) was more formative to how I think about and do science compared to grad school. Grad school is where I picked up topics and tools but philosophy gets baked in earlier.

Had to bribe myself with treats to get over Hubble proposal procrastination (I even graded instead of writing) but I did it, one fevered night and I have enough material to edit into submittable things.

I think this makes Tribal Wars the quintessential Mom Game.

Nice to see postseason Rocchio making an early appearance. Extra nice to see Hedges uncharacteristically contributing to the offense.

A sad consequence of terminal Explosion and no known fossils from being buried in volcanic ash or flood sediment.

The existence of the Hisiuan Voltorb evolving to be more like an Apricorn than a Pokeball suggests either symbiosis or a kind of predestination in evolution: Voltorb must take the form of the tool used to capture Pokemon. Is this because of an evolutionary advantage or does Arceus demand it?

"Did Arceus make the Apricorn in the image of the Voltorb or vice versa? In either case, where are the other Voltorb variants?"

Nizam: super-rich, top 10 fortunes in the world.

Hyderabadis: definitely not top-10 by any quality of life or happiness index.

See it all the time in SFF book fandom, never outside of it.

Maybe someday India will have a critical mass of people who share the values of our Constitution and vote accordingly. I would like to see that day.

This is also a small part of why I prefer baseball to basketball or football: a minor league system instead of adding yet another thing for higher education to handle.

This ties in to the pressure on higher education to be about job training and all the distortions that come from reconciling that function with all the rest of what higher education is expected to be about. Private industry has been getting away with offloading training every chance it could find.