I wrote about how I reached 1000 subscribers on Substack (people see my name and think I'm Dave Barry): pappubahry.substack.com/p/number-go-...

Every day I arrive at work, log in to my email on web Outlook, go to the settings, and turn off Copilot.

Films that aren't Star Wars 17: pappubahry.substack.com/p/films-that...

Marty Supreme: 5
Is This Thing On?: 7.5
The Secret Agent: 8
Send Help: 6
It Was Just an Accident: 9
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man: 8.5
How to Make a Killing: 6.5
Project Hail Mary: 7
The Drama: 8.5

Seen in the microfilm today, an idle curiosity: neighbouring advertisements in decimal and old currency in 1966:

I don't see a joke here. A "bad bishop" is a standard chess term, often used in the phrase "good knight versus bad bishop", when the knight can jump around relatively freely, but the bishop's movement is restricted by its own pawns.

Claude gently suggesting to me that I didn't need plan mode for a task (sorting a fixed-width table and updating cross-referenced row numbers inside it) by making a plan that simply hard-coded the desired result.

The skill documents (in full, I assume) appeared in the reasoning trace. I asked it to make the python script available for download, so now I have that available for myself locally.

Interesting to me:

I got ChatGPT to extract an image from a pdf. Evidently there are pre-written skill documents for this task:

/home/oai/skills/pdfs/SKILL.md
which sends it to
/home/oai/skills/pdfs/tasks/extract.md
which says to run
/home/oai/skills/pdfs/scripts/pdf_extract.py

Only clear hallucination I've found in my test page is getting the wife's name wrong here (I had to look up the obituary to figure it out):

Gemini is better at reading handwriting than I am.

Reaching for the Moon, by Edward Mason Eggleston, 1933 (flipped), 📸 by @godovasquez

Rain in Perth; time to switch back to reg.bom.gov.au/wa so that I get a more up-to-date rain radar.

I'm spending some time in the microfilm section of the State Library at the moment, primarily looking for news about the Perth Chess Club -- its AGM's were quite reliably reported until 1954. Today I found a brief tournament report from 1962 mentioning two people I've played (Leonhardt and Lilly):

Maia Mindel writes a lot.

I've been thinking I should learn about how exp(pi*sqrt(163)) works for ages and write it up as a blog post, but I've been scooped:

The Atlantic has comments again.

"I was struck by how the spectacle and conduct of the [France v England rugby] match provided in many ways most of the elements of a traditional epinicion." vamoul.substack.com/p/a-pindaric...

Crikey removed a series of AI-written articles; I feel that my AI spidey sense isn't strong because I've seen people who can distinguish ChatGPT from Claude (I can't), but maybe I'm in a higher percentile than I think. I put one of those columns into Pangram when I first saw it on Substack.

Quite frustrating when I give Claude Code very specific but subtly wrong instructions, and it figures out what I should have asked for and does that instead. It's right, but I am not happy about it.

AGWA

I am old and very slow:

I needed to multiply 1.4 by itself and then take the square root of the result; I typed "1.96 @" into the Windows Calculator; I have a very short context window.

Too much vibe-coding at Anthropic 😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠😠 github.com/anthropics/c...

Enormous memory leak in WSL without even sending a prompt.

New shoe size:

After some time with Claude Code (and a bit of ChatGPT), my website is now free of Google Maps. I no longer live in fear of fluke virality leading to Google charging me for map embeds.

Entering a new era of giving more money to Anthropic (I'm only on the cheap plan):

I learned a little about PowerBI dashboards during covid, writing nightmarish scripts to spoof being a web browser and scrape data from Australian state government dashboards; a skill I have happily let atrophy.

Based on all the tweets, I thought Chalamet must have said something problematic rather than something funny.