Lock up the pool room on the Lord’s Day
The day starts
So I open my Mac in the morning to a terminal window that shows a failed installation. I start work on it, picking at pieces of the failure. Before long, I can no longer remember the product that I was trying to install and why I was doing it. That's a task reserved for the time after I get it to install.
Update: still couldn't get the product (gensim) to install. Giving up
As we get older and stop making sense
A lawyer friend told me that one of the key things he learned in law school is that his first jobs would entail cleaning up mistakes that old lawyers had made. It meant that old lawyers often made mistakes in basic things and, further, that he had to understand what they were trying to do. He wasn't necessarily applying new law. Rather, he was applying old law correctly. New law would come later.
So, this article, Beware tech career advice from old heads, make sense at first, until you remember that most people coming into jobs, tech or otherwise, will be working with legacy stuff. You have to understand the old stuff, such as the default date in COBOL, but do it better.
Oh, great. We’ve broken the AIs
A study in Nature indicates that AI systems can pick up on and ingest our anxieties.
Arguments with a chatbot
I've been using Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash to analyze some of the documents regarding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Mostly, it's gone well, but we've gotten into a bit of a tussle.
I've uploaded about 20 PDF documents, each 600 pages. (Thank you, ChatGPT, for writing a Python script that splits a humungous 36,000 page document into separate 600-page files.)
Using Gemini 2.0 Flash, I uploaded several of the 600-page docs, eventually getting about 20 in place. I asked a series of questions about the information in the set, such as "Was any of the information unverified?" The answers led to more questions, including names of people. For clarity, I also checked a couple of the docs and asked questions about what I saw.
It went well, and then, it didn't. Gemini would provide an answer to a question that I'd asked in earlier prompt, completely ignoring the question I just asked. When I mentioned such, it'd try to come back, but the responses indicated that it was getting tired and confused. I asked about a Prof. Luria from MIT who'd been at an anti-war demonstration with Noam Chomsky and others; Gemini told me instead about Maurice Halperin.
Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking has a limit of 10 documents per prompt. Flash Thinking reached the same tiredness.
Finally, I explained to ChatGPT o3-mini-high what I was trying to do. It wrote some semantic search Python code that has had some problems.
Passwords, bloody passwords
When people learn that I do tech support for family and friends, they'll often ask, "What's the most common problem?" In brief, all problems start with, pass through, or end up as issues of password management. People use password managers, let their browsers manage the passwords, use memorable passwords, or keep a recipe box full of index cards.
It's not surprising that, as shown in a report from Forbes, people reuse their passwords across multiple sites. Multi-factor authentication is both better and worse: better because it's more secure and worse because it adds to the demand of having another device handy.
To be continued …
What, me cranky?
Even though research such as Irritability and Social Media Use in US Adults points to greater irritability brought about by larger consumption of social media, the people with whom I speak consume little and yet are plenty angry and anxious.
Some of you aren’t drinking enough coffee
When I was a kid, I’d get off the school bus and go next door to have coffee and kahvileipä (coffee bread, often called nisu or pulla, depending on the region of Finland). It wasn’t my first cup of the day. From as long as I can remember, I drank coffee with my parents in the morning and pretty much any other time of the day. Of course, I started off with plenty of milk and sugar. Mine is now black, Tanzanian Peaberry from Indigo Coffee.
In spite of the apparent ubiquity of Dunkins and Starbucks, the rest of you aren’t consuming as much as did your grandparents, sez the Guardian: Americans are drinking half the coffee they did in the 40s. One theory that they put forward is that we are working fewer hours than we did 70 or 80 years ago and hence need less caffeine to keep us going.
But, don’t ever think that I’ll consume any of this stuff.