Things Claude says no to:

"I'm thinking of a GUID...can you guess it?"
"Starting with Aardvark, build me a Wikipedia clone. Ask no more questions."

My grandparents' household in #LowellMA in the 1950 Census

But at least the Boston Massacre soldiers had to answer and stood trial. John Adams defended them and got most acquitted. Due Process and Rule of Law is good.

With the rise of AI and its intrusion into The Discourse, it's fun to think back to one of the first pieces of Fake News. The Good Guys (Paul Revere here) drew a photo of an orderly line of soldiers firing into a defenseless crowd. Not at all what happened.

Yes yes BlueSky works differently yes yes.

🤔 Watching people be *very upset* that Larry Ellison now owns TikTok instead of the CCP (and complaints about biasing the algorithm towards his politics) has me questioning this entire social media thing. What if they're all biasing their feeds‽ 🤔

Fun game. Name these four states by tax burden, and no cheating!

Heh. The new food guidelines just put out I'm pretty sure are pushing whole fat dairy again! There are something like 225 calories in a soda can's worth of whole milk even before jumping into good/bad fats.

This year, for my mental health, I'm going to practice just letting people be wrong on the internet.

"That's not X, that's Y!" (The convo is simply about bacon doneness...)

The current insufferable ChatGPT phrase construction is...

A red square representing the size of the Dallas High Five Interchange overlayed on downtown boston and the surrounding cities.

Jeff Jacoby has a Globe opinion today about how great Dallas is at moving cars, how much he loved the High Five Interchange, and how Boston's multimodal mobility solutions will never work for him specifically (or his straw men).

Anyway here is the area of the interchange overlayed on Boston.

Nobody tells you--loud enough at least--that middle age goes like this:

"What ever happened to West Lynn Creamery? Were they...in West, Lynn, Massachusetts?"

"ChatGPT: Yes they were in Lynn, but, Corey, they closed in 1998."

Today in “Dudes Rock”:

A dude playing Dire Straits’s “Sultans of Swing” guitar solo on…a recorder.

UMass Lowell engineering students design toys to keep animals at shelter engaged Animals at a shelter in Lowell, Massachusetts, got something new to play with Wednesday thanks to the final project in a college class. Students in UMass Lowell’s “Introduction to Engineering Design” course made pet toys to help enrich the lives of animals at the Lowell Humane Society. The project required students to study how each animal plays and what keeps…

The project required students to study how each animal plays and what keeps them engaged. They used 3D printers, laser cutters and prototyping tools to bring their ideas to life. on.nbcboston.com/xOsKhWp

As someone who works in one of America's biggest "maker" sectors (tech) in a massively "maker" metro (Boston)...I'm not sure I'm gleeful about this.

I just don't feel that I'm all that important. Sometimes I wonder if winning by the rules of the game is as virtuous as it sounds.

People love that stat about makers and takers where we point out Red states tend to be takers and Blue makers.

People love that stat that Democrats win the majority of GDP even when they lose elections.

But then there's the "but reverse racism!" people who complain that they got beaten out for a job by a "DEI hire."

But yes, Americans are absolutely allergic to the idea they aren't the sole source of their own success, but also need someone to blame for their failures.

My guess is they mean de jure vs de facto. I think the concept of emergent systems makes de jure wildly incomplete, but de facto is too academic for casual usage.

But, more importantly, I think people are masters at starting at a comforting viewpoint and then inventing a reality that supports it.

Adore (Super Deluxe) | The Smashing Pumpkins

Sure is! Not sure why Apple says 1998. It's 2014. The original color was b&w.

smashingpumpkins.com/music/adore-...

Absolutely not on Adore 1998. Is a deep cut on the billion disk 2014 reissue

The Smashing Pumpkins - The End Is The Beginning Is The End Explore songs, recommendations, and other album details for The End Is The Beginning Is The End by The Smashing Pumpkins. Compare different versions and buy them all on Discogs.

Shrug. I have this and it's stamped 1997

www.discogs.com/master/48739...

Oh I have the single from whenever Batman came out (1997 it looks?) with the slower version on it. Which popped up twelve years later in Watchmen!

I never understood how this happened. "What if we reuse the Batman song from years ago?!" Are memories that short and as a Pumpkins fan it's unusual that I didn't forget? Was it deliberate for some reason?

Done with Claude, and very quickly for a first pass. The effort was entirely tuning the algorithm. I had an Applebees in San Francsico and one in suburban Los Angeles as my anchor points.

BTW, censusreporter.org is really cool. Tract 44 at the far extreme is Stuy Town. The next most populous is in Washington Heights, but this isn't directly density.

All to say, what I really built is "is the Applebees somewhere people can walk?"

Exactly, its very low for Manhattan. Still, OpenStreetMap doesn't seem to have population. Perhaps using Census data would've been better if I found the right APIs.

I wanted to use WalkScore but that won't work well because Applebees tend to be near grocers, etc...but not houses.

Yeah, it's hard to decide what data to use from OpenStreetMap. Originally, I was looking for things like wide roads, lots of parking, not lots of housing, but then Times Square got nearly a zero and strip malls did well. So, I settled on intersection count. You have ≈ 4,000 people in eight blocks!

============================================================ APPLEBEE'S NEIGHBORHOOD ANALYSIS Are they eating good in the NEIGHBORHOOD? ============================================================ Total locations analyzed: 82 Average Neighborhood Score: 24.4/100 Median Score: 20.0/100 Distribution: Highway Strip Mall (<30): 51 (62.2%) Suburban/Mixed (30-59): 25 (30.5%) True Neighborhood (60+): 6 (7.3%) Intersection Density: Well-connected grid (20+ intersections): 14 (17.1%) Transit Availability: Locations with transit stops: 45 (54.9%) Location Type: On highways/motorways: 35 (42.7%) High speed roads (>35 mph): 58 (70.7%) ============================================================ 🏆 Top 5 Most Neighborhood-y (Connected street grids!): 88.0/100 - San Francisco, CA (27 intersections, 46 stops) 88.0/100 - Times Square, NY (27 intersections, 50 stops) 85.4/100 - Philadelphia, PA (37 intersections, 17 stops) 73.2/100 - Antioch, CA (16 intersections, 10 stops) 68.7/100 - Alhambra, CA (12 intersections, 21 stops) 🚗 Bottom 5 Least Neighborhood-y (Isolated/highway locations): 0.0/100 - Grand Rapids, MI (2 intersections, 13 parking) ⚠ High speed 0.0/100 - Cleveland, OH (3 intersections, 1 parking) ⚠ Highway ⚠ High speed 0.0/100 - Nashville, TN (1 intersections, 0 parking) ⚠ Highway 0.0/100 - Hartford, CT (2 intersections, 0 parking) ⚠ Highway 0.0/100 - Atlanta, GA (0 intersections, 0 parking)

Today's vibecode: Do any Applebees actually exist in neighborhoods? H/T OpenStreetMap