I feel like I'm turning into a Claude shill, but I've been completely blown away by the low level Mac troubleshooting advice it's provided on a couple of tricky user issues over the last couple of weeks.
Finally have a clear chip class differentiator on the Pro, Max, and Ultra Apple Silicon naming conventions: memory bandwidth. Pro are in the 150-300 GB/s range depending on generation, Max 400 GB/s, and Ultra 800 GB/s.
Used to "To dare is to do." as a test phrase for Esperanto translation for locally hosted Gemma4 models and learned that Google translate and all of the Gemma4 models have a similar slavic root hallucination "asidi" for "to do". "Aŭdaci estas fari" is the best translation and Claude gave me a nice explanation of why and where Google is going wrong.
All that said, I still find the smaller locally hosted Gemma 4 models incredibly impressive, and want to explore code generation a lot further with them.
First rainy day in a while, but disappointed that after today we're just going to be cool and dry through the weekend. The grass in our front yard really needs some consistent moisture after the recent hot weather, probably need to start watering this weekend.
Had a fun night at Nathan's Winter Guard Showcase, where the A and B teams performed their shows one last time for family and friends, and the coaches and captains gave out a bunch of awards and recognition. I'm not in a rush for my kids to grow up, but I'm kind of bummed out that we're two years away from having another high school age child because of all the great activities at Mt. Spokane High School.
This is a quick test to see if posting is broken on this computer too or just my main iMac. It was fine, now testing updating from the iMac.
Bohemian Rhapsody 👍👍 Rami Malek is so good as Freddie Mercury, and the whole cast is solid. I didn't realize how collaborative the whole band was, but they were clearly good before Freddie brought the voice and vision. Lead guitarist Brian May is such a unique Isaac-Newton-reincarnate figure; Gwilyn Lee, really brought him to life as a super-talented musician in his own right, and the even-keeled rock of the band.
Just heard that Egypt is the World Cup team that Spokane and Gonzaga will be hosting. Wild that Mo Salah will be practicing less than a block from my office this summer!
Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO of Apple and turning things over to current hardware boss, John Ternus in September. That has been rumored for a while and seems like a logical change.
I discovered The Physics of Basketball this morning and it's the first book I've wanted to actively dive in and just start reading immediately in quite a while.
Warm afternoon 4.1K run with the girls on the Children of the Sun trail. First run since February. Lots of little aches and pains (probably due for new shoes soon), but felt good overall.
Fiddling around with ANSI/Unicode and SVG generation with Claude's Sonnet 4.6 (my default choice) model today. SVG generation is pretty impressive, but semi-challenging text-based art output like a basketball court diagram is hilarious.
Did some yardwork and got some more rays. Front yard is still in really rough post-winter shape and the sudden hot weather isn't helping. We need to start watering this week.
TOT 2-2 BRI FT
Actually caught the second half for this one. So close, and yet so far. Glad we got the point, bummed out that we didn't capitalize on an outstanding Xavi performance, and let the full three points slip away in added time.
Just in time for the girls' spring soccer season, the first Saturday Spurs match in a while when they take on Brighton at home. I feel like they're probably more likely to have good luck when I'm unable to watch anyway, so it's probably a win-win.
Made a bunch of progress with Claude's guidance on my home server yesterday. Despite knowing what I wanted to do, I had completely stalled out on it after setting it up over the winter break because of the learning curve. Now I've got podman running a couple of different containers and a cloudflare tunnel connected to the nginx one.
As much as the NYT regularly irritates me, very pleased to learn today that my complimentary access pass through work now includes the Athletic, and NYT games. I'm a big fan of both of those.
Seems like a typical overcast and windy April day today, although I was surprised to see frost on our cars this morning and it's still only 45°F according to my watch. I definitely froze at my daughter's soccer practice last night.
Listened to The Changelog: Opus 4.5 changed everything (Interview) (from February) last night and a really interesting tidbit jumped out of me. Both Adam and his guest, Burke Holland, felt like in the Anthropic/Claude space Sonnet was a lot more pleasant to plan and coordinate projects with than Opus. The high end model was brilliant at development, executing a plan, and building the software, but like an elite developer was maybe less interested in the soft communication skills that go into a successful project.
Claude is pretty dreamy for server setup and config. I've had a little Ubuntu home server set up on my LAN for months that I've wanted to host some containers on, but I never knew quite where to start. Made a ton of progress with updates and security in less than an hour's worth of work tonight.
Finally succeeded in signing up for Claude Pro, looking forward to getting to work on some new projects this month and figuring out how frugally I can do the kinds of things I'm interested in. I expect local and cloud instances of Gemma 4 to play a role.
Heh, decided to sign up for a month of Claude Pro this morning and of course Anthropic is having a bunch of issues.
Another very wet April morning. Gassed up on the way into work and between standing at the pump and walking across campus really needed my rain jacket!
Daredevil: Born Again S2E5: The Grand Design 👍👍 What a performance, D'Onofrio actually had me crying for the Kingpin. Fantastic flashback episode for the whole cast and arguably the best of the series to date.
Some absolutely egregious Trump sane-washing in the New York Times today over his fixation on Pope Leo. They even consulted an art expert on his Trump-as-Jesus AI-slop memes.
Emmanuel Innocenti is going to ASU to play for Randy Bennett. Seems like a very shrewd pickup from a smart coach who recognized an underrated Gonzaga gem. I'm intrigued to see what kind of team Bennett assembles at Tempe.
Finally started trying out local model AI using Ollama on my work M4 Mini today. I specifically requested the 24GB model for this possibility, but just never pursued it until now. Gemma 4 seems completely responsive and usable. I asked it about the Strait of Hormuz and it gave a very thorough and insightful answer.
What if Romero being out with a knee injury for the rest of the season ends up being a wildly improbable silver lining for Spurs? I don't this is likely, particularly with how well-suited he is for De Zerbi's approach, but there have been times this season that I've preferred Kevin Danso because he's a reliable and steady center back.
Started raining hard when I went to drive into work today. Made for a wet walk across campus too. Seems to have let up for the moment, but these scattered periods of intense rain over the last several days feel unusual for Spokane.
Accidentally trashed a couple of this morning's posts because of a sync mistake on my part, but it was relatively easy to repair thanks to my markdown export and import functionality.
Wasn't expecting such a foggy morning. Not what I would call typical Spokane spring weather.
SUN 1-0 TOT FT
Saw some promising build-up, and Kolo Muani looks rejuvenated under De Zerbi, but no calls, no goals, and no points.
SUN 1-0 TOT '61
Absolute garbage deflection goal.
SUN 0 - 0 TOT HT
Can't complain too much about the start to the De Zerbi era. Spurs have been aggressive and had good chances. Kinsky's been fine. EPL refs are still EPL refs, making the usual EPL ref calls against Spurs.
The biggest surprise of the day, that's simultaneously unsurprising, was how much AI came up.
Had a great time at Gonzaga Experience Live (GEL) with Mary and my son Nathan (who will be attending in the fall). We didn't need to be sold on Gonzaga, but I was really impressed with the program that they've put together to help close the deal for accepted students and their parents considering Gonzaga. As a long-time employee, it was very cool to see an entirely different, student-centric perspective on things for a change.
The astronaut helicopter ride back to the ship is cool and all, but seems kind of extra all things considered. All four are now safely on the USS John Murtha.
I do find it weird that they're taking so long to set up the stabilization ring and front porch, and that they didn't do it before they opened the hatch. It's only supposed to take 10 minutes or so to set it up, according to the sailors in charge.
Integrity splashed down successfully, they've powered down, and we're just waiting for crew extraction by the Navy recovery team that's circling nearby!
WHU 3 - 0 WOL 68'.
Think I can safely turn this one off now that the Hammers have added two more in the last couple of minutes. Spurs in 18th.
Emmanuel Innocenti hitting the transfer portal is a fascinating one to me. He started most of Gonzaga's games this season, was an absolute glue guy that I personally valued way more than some of our flaky "high talent" transfers because you could count on him every game, yet he's one of the first to look for a move.
I'd heard of Old Enough! (👍), the Japanese show where they send young kids out in the world to do a grownup task while a camera person follows them wihout them knowing, but I'd never watched it before last night. It's cute and funny, but a little bit uncomfortable at times. The second episode, where a little boy had to do a lot of heavy lifting while the little girl "helping" him was a complete flake most of the journey was pretty frustrating. The epilogs at the end where we saw the kids again in adulthood was pretty poignant too.
Artemis II returns to Earth tomorrow around 5 pm Pacific. It's been an amazing mission, but still really worried about the heat shield.
Fought through my sore muscles to do another round of ball passing practice with two of my daughters. How can you say no when they ask you to do it? On a funny note, the one who wasn't feeling it had sore muscles of her own!
You know you're getting old when passing a soccer ball around with your daughters the last couple of nights has left you stiff, sore, and achy. Also doesn't help that I was sick and sedentary for most of March.
I'm fascinated by the intersection between software engineering practices and effectively working with agentic AI. I have yet to do anything with the latter, and I've certainly never been a software architect or manager, but I'm interested in the whole process.
Just went through and deleted a bunch of podcasts I'm never going to listen to from Overcast. Noticed it was using 7GB+ worth of storage last night, now it's more like 2GB.
Not sure if I've forgotten how to use Scryfall or if something's up with the site because simple set/card queries that I swear I've done in the past are just hanging this morning.
Daredevil: Born Again S2E4: Gloves Off 👍👍 We're all winners when Bullseye gets an entire episode to unleash his special talents on Fisk and his AVTF goons. Can't wait to see the fallout from this one because it seems likely that Kingpin is going to start lashing out.
Daredevil: Born Again S2E3: The Scales & the Sword 👍 Didn't realize this one was released back-to-back with last week's episode, so kind of late to the game. There were some good moments related to the Swordsman, but felt a little bit let down overall. I'm definitely ready for some of Matt's old super friends to start helping out.
Just had a really promising meeting about a topic that could save Gonzaga a lot of money annually and improve some other issues at the same time. Already in a better mood than I was earlier.
Beautiful day outside, but I feel pretty meh at the moment. Attempting to push through and have a productive afternoon.
Michigan wins its second national title in 37 years. I'm old enough to remember the first one, an overtime thriller over Seton Hall back in 1989 at the Kingdome, no less. I was rooting for bearded coach, P.J. Carlisimo, and his star Australian guard, Andrew Gaze.
Refs missing a lot of sliding pivot foot travels this game. I wanted Michigan to just dominate the game, but since they haven't done that, I'm rooting for UConn to come back. 63-67 with 29.9 to go.
In light of the Artemis II mission, I'm kind of curious about the NASA moon base proposals. Instead of futzing around with manned missions to the surface, I feel like we should be doing a ton with robots to establish a long-term presence.
Looks like something is broken in the rendering code, investigating further. Think we located the issue, which VSCode had actually complained about as well and I didn't fully understand.
One more try on the UI fix. Didn't quite have it right the first time around. Just noticed this post hadn't published so editing and trying again.
Noticed an archive picker UI bug on index.html where there was no entry for the current month (Apr at the moment), so worked with Claude to correct the issue. Should go live once this post is published.
The trouble with post tagging for me is all the freedom and conceptual drift over time. I prefer minimalist tags, and it always takes me a while to figure out best practices. This is also exacerbated when I go back and tag previously untagged archives, and inevitably, I end up with tagging schisms.
Had a nice Easter dinner of ham and scalloped potatoes at Mary's parents' house tonight, but unfortunately, Mary had to stay home with L, who has been sick the last couple of days.
Made a fair amount of progress on tagging all of my old 2025 microblog.php posts today, and working on 2024 now with an eye towards importing everything into Microcosm in the near future.
It's the late 1980s, and a rambunctious teenager with limbs like twigs is shooting hoops by himself in his driveway in Kelso, Washington, mere miles from the Oregon border. Up in the second-floor bedroom window, a boombox is blaring a cassette of "Licensed to Ill," the groundbreaking debut Beastie Boys record. Young Tommy can play "Brass Monkey," "Paul Revere" and "She's Crafty" as loud as he wants; there's not a neighbor within 300 yards of the Lloyd family home.
"In the country, the sticks," Lloyd said, thinking back on the first album he ever loved. "I would listen to it all the time."
The Beasties were Lloyd's first musical love, and nothing's changed since. The NYC trio's punky appeal to a lanky kid in Kelso was similarly felt for millions across the country in the 1980s. Diehard Arizona fans know the nod to his fandom that is the unofficial start to every Wildcats home game, when "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)" is played on the loudspeaker as he emerges from the locker room and walks onto the floor.
I had no idea about this side of Tommy Lloyd, and I already liked him, but this adds a whole new layer to my appreciation of who he is. It's particularly cool to find out that he's been able to develop a genuine friendship with the Beastie Boy's long time DJ, Mix Master Mike in recent years.
This Michigan team handed Mark Few the worst defeat of his career, so not shocked at all by what happened tonight, just disappointed that Tommy Lloyd and his team didn't have an answer either.
Michigan - Arizona going way too similarly to Michigan - Gonzaga went. AZ completely out of sorts and trail 48-32 at the half. Thinking about skipping the rest.
The video quality from the recent astronaut briefing onboard Artemis II was solid, and there's a live feed with a lot of interesting shots as well when they have bandwidth available. Pretty cool that we can get glitch-free HD imagery from that far away.
Exported all of my March microcosm posts into so.axodys.com with minimal effort thanks to all of the export tooling Claude and I created. Still working out the kinks of my image and link posts process since I don't do those types of posts that often currently.
For All Mankind S5E2: The Hard Six 👍👍 Baldwins being Baldwins (and even a cameo for the crime-against-pasta cheese powder Ed insists on), gotta love it. Kind of hilarious that Kelly wasn't even really angling for the Titan mission for herself, until the doofus project lead pissed her off. Seems likely that events are going to fully galvanize Alex, who was already showing interest in the cause, and I'm looking forward to more corporate conspiracy discoveries from Boyd.
Caught up on my dailies this morning and made it to Gold 4 in Ranked after not playing for a few days. I've played less this set, but I think I'm still on track to complete the Mastery Pass (even though I didn't buy it) before Secrets of Strixhaven drops.
Feeling kind of sleepy. Might take a nap this afternoon or at least lay down and read for a while.
Went for a quick afternoon walk by the river. Flow is strong and the water level is still above a couple of the stanchion bases for the Don Kardong bridge. Enjoyed the fresh air and looking forward to the weekend.
Listening to The Talk Show 445:'Apple at 50', with John Siracusa 👍👍 You simply can't beat two and a half hours worth of Apple history discussion between two of the top Apple-centric podcasters in my age range.
Campus felt completely dead this morning as I walked from my car to my building. I wonder if a lot of people have left a day early for the four day Easter holiday?
Successful (and impressive) launch, sounds like they're just coasting for a bit now, and will deploy solar panels in about an hour. Pleased that everything is going smoothly so far.
Not going to lie, as cool as Artemis II and going back to the moon is I'm very worried about the risks NASA management is taking with the lives of the crew.
Nice rainy day to welcome April. Looks like it's going to take a break during my drive home, but continue most of the day otherwise.
Daredevil: Born Again S2E2: Shoot the Moon 👍👍 Very ripped from ICE headlines vibe as Kingpin and his AVTF lackeys start arresting and harassing community members, but resistance is growing. Meanwhile, Bullseye remains an agent of chaos who may be stalking Vanessa, and we get a surprising reveal about who's doing the Masked Mayor Kingpin videos all over social media.
Finished rebuilding the problem fence section in our backyard. Dogs shouldn't be breaking out of that spot again, at least.