3 Body Problem
Current Wx: Temp: 70.57°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 19.57mphWords: 154
Mitzi and I stayed in Vilano Beach last October for our anniversary, and I would have sworn I took pictures of this hotel. But I did take a picture of the TV screen last night and texted it to Mitzi in New York.
That hotel is in Vilano Beach, just down the road from here. We didn't stay at that place, we stayed at the newly-opened Hyatt Place. But we did notice it, and I thought I shot the neon rabbits, but nothing in Photos. Maybe they're on the SSD I use.
Anyway, surprised I hadn't seen anything in local media about Netflix filming locally. Kinda cool.
Finished the series yesterday. I liked it. Would like to see it continue.
I decided not to read the trilogy. I have other sf books lying around here I haven't read. I seem to be more interested in non-fiction history than imagined futures these days.
✍️ Reply by emailFound It
Current Wx: Temp: 71.35°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 19.57mphWords: 78
Okay, I wasn't hallucinating. It was on the SSD. I guess I didn't think it was good enough to get added to the Photos library, which is a pretty low bar. But it's a pretty cool little place. It even came up last month at the Photography Club meeting, because they're doing a lot of construction down there and much of the "old Florida" charm is being renovated into "modern" sterility. Magic Beach is supposedly safe.
For now.
✍️ Reply by emailThis and That
16:12 Monday, 25 March 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 71.73°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 21.85mph
Words: 182
The black E-PL7 arrived today, and it's beautiful. Cleaned up well. A couple of minor scratches on the screen, but you have to look for them. Once I get my office cleaned up and squared away I'll do some glamor shots. Maybe.
Captain's Log continues to be useful, and I'm adding "features," as necessary. Although I don't wish to replicate the functionality of Reminders, since that is available on my iPhone and iPad, I decided I did want something in the Log to pull together entries that may require a revisit. So I created a "DontForget" boolean and made it a Displayed Attribute. I'll create a Don't Forget agent and open it in another tab. Tabs are another feature of Tinderbox I'm beginning to make use of more.
This came up in my NASA Hubble RSS feed. Click through to the download. Makes for nice phone or tablet wallpaper.
Got an interesting email from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology with a link to this video about how owls turn their heads. I think I could watch owl videos all day long.
✍️ Reply by emailNo Surprise
06:00 Tuesday, 25 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 62.46°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 4mph
Words: 175
It should come as no surprise to anyone with a room-temperature IQ that our national security apparatus is being run by a cabal of morons. (F-47? By Boeing, of course. They need all the help they can get. So too will the pilots who have the misfortune of being assigned to that aircraft.)
Anyway, the snark is a little over the top, but here's a compilation of remarks by the idiots on that Signal group chat, complaining about Hillary's private email server and mishandling classified information.
Of course, it won't land with the people it needs to hit. For this crowd, hypocrisy is a flex. "I know what you are, but what am I?"
Category 6 shit-storm.
Calling it "amateur hour" is an insult to amateurs everywhere.
It's incompetence, criminal conduct, and just an utterly grotesque display of immature, unserious, juvenile irresponsibility.
There will be no accountability. Because we have a supine legislature of cowardly lickspittle sycophants.
Where's the prayer-hands emoji? America needs it.🙏
“We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
✍️ Reply by emailE-Mail to Rick Scott and Ashley Moody
06:21 Tuesday, 25 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 62.71°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 12.66mph
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Riffing off the foregoing, here's what I sent to my two senators:
It comes as no surprise to anyone with a room-temperature IQ that our national security apparatus is being run by a cabal of morons, confirmed by a Senate of cowardly, lickspittle sycophants. (That would be you and your colleagues.)
Calling it "amateur hour" is an insult to amateurs everywhere.
It's incompetence, criminal conduct, and an utterly grotesque display of immature, unserious, juvenile irresponsibility.
There will be no accountability because your party holds the majority. But know that everyone, everywhere is pointing at you and laughing.
David M. Rogers
CDR, USN(Ret)
Ponte Vedra
✍️ Reply by emailWierdness
08:22 Tuesday, 25 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 61.61°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 0mph
Words: 127
Just heard and felt a series of very low frequency intermittent rumbles. Not like thunder. Staccato. Like a couple of booms, a pause of a couple of seconds, and a few more. Maybe three episodes? Enough to make me get up from the desk and step outside. Nothing to be seen, and nothing else heard.
Neighbor had stepped outside as well, I'm not sure if it was because of the sound or to collect her recycling bin. I asked if she heard it and she said she had. She wondered if it might have been the train. We can hear the train, but it's unmistakably the train, and I've never felt the train before. About 0819 EDT.
Just noting it because it was out of the ordinary.
✍️ Reply by emailLooks Like Waltz Will Fall On His Sword
08:28 Tuesday, 25 March 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 61.61°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 0mph
Words: 86
"Chatter" on the inter webs suggests Mike Waltz will take the fall for the Signal debacle. But that would only mask the larger issue of the criminality of conducting official, classified, government business on a non-secure channel, and one specifically intended to circumvent records retention laws.
I'm happy to see Waltz leave in disgrace. He's an ambitious man who leveraged his election to Florida CD-6 into endless appearances on Fox, exactly duplicating Ron DeSantis' playbook, getting his face and name before the MAGA faithful.
✍️ Reply by emailDave Ain't Here, Man
07:31 Wednesday, 25 March 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 27.23°F Pressure: 1029hPa Humidity: 76% Wind: 4.68mph
Words: 230
So the dental visit went fairly well yesterday. No significant amount of pain, though there was the disturbing experience of someone using a hammer inside my mouth.
He was able to preserve the existing crown on the tooth that required a root canal. The tooth that required a replacement crown had a significant amount of decay beneath the margins of the crown, and the dentist had some fairly alarming things to say about what it might feel like after the novocaine wore off. I'm happy to report that those haven't seemed to materialize.
Nevertheless, it was two hours in the chair and when I got home I didn't much feel like doing anything.
I'm back there today for a cleaning, happy that I can open my mouth wide enough. A little anxious, but not incapacitating.
Just a reminder, boys and girls, of the importance of good oral hygiene.
I have continued my discussion at the Tinderbox forum regarding "the illusion of thinking." I'm afraid my interest and enthusiasm have largely been exhausted, but it was an interesting discussion.
I still want to see if Claude can use Numbers productively, and I may take a stab at that when I get back. I'm tentative because my most productive hours are in the morning, and I find I do mostly consumption in the afternoons.
Anyway the beat and the beatings go on...
✍️ Reply by emailRate Limited
16:31 Wednesday, 25 March 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 53.46°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 32% Wind: 11.92mph
Words: 453
I spent some time with Claude and MacOS Numbers. I had to give many of the same relevant permissions that you give to other automation features in MacOS, access to folders, Accessibility, screen capture and so on.
I first established that Claude could open and rename a new Numbers file. From there I think I may have been a bit too ambitious. I wanted to see if Claude could convert an Excel spreadsheet to Numbers format. So I opened an Excel spreadsheet in Numbers, and when I did so it reported a number of conflicts and incompatibilities. I left that window open and asked Claude if it saw the file, which I offered by name; and, if so, could it read the dialog window reporting discrepancies?
Claude could "see" the file, and to read the dialog it made a screenshot and read the relevant window, by OCR no doubt.
Claude made a lot of screenshots to interact with the file, perhaps because it doesn't natively understand the Numbers file format? Nevertheless, we seemed to be making good progress. Claude's analysis identified the chief incompatibility was with the "Spill" option of the "Transpose" command. Numbers apparently lacks that feature.
Claude offered to redesign the spreadsheet architecture to avoid the need to use that feature. I have no idea if that was actually the case, but I decided to let Claude roll with it. This is in a project I created in Cowork, and the description was to familiarize me with Claude's facility with MacOS Numbers. Since this was merely a test and the spreadsheet wasn't important to me, failure would be equally as valuable as success.
Claude diligently plodded along, identifying unexpected UI difficulties, overcoming them and learning the structure of the spreadsheet. (Or "workbook" perhaps, it has a number of sheets in the file.)
At some point we encountered a screeching halt, and I got a feedback form to send to Anthropic. It was an API: Rate limit error. I guess I was working Claude too hard. I did some searching, and I gather this will reset in about three hours and we can continue.
It was a productive session nevertheless. When we're able to resume, I will instruct Claude to summarize the challenges he faced in navigating the UI and the things he learned and make a note of them in the project folder. We may continue the conversion at that point, or I may ask him if he understands the goals of the spreadsheet sufficiently to create a similar one in Numbers from scratch, and whether he thinks that would be more economical in terms of token usage than continuing the conversion within the existing file.
That'll probably be tomorrow morning.
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