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Just had my last consultation with my doctor. For a time I thought I had a doctor, but he’s moving out of the practice. A real shame. It’s always the good ones that leave.
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I’ve been burned by my designs of something that’s “future proof” so often by now that I’m skeptical of any thought I have along these lines. Future proofing is not a free endeavour, and simplicity and readability are usually the sacrifices made for a design that may or may not be suitable in a future that may or may not actually come. And of course, with these coding agents now on the scene, seemingly unfazed by all this introduce complexity, it doesn’t make the decision any easier.
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Saw this in a Mastodon reply:
Why do we do the things we pour our life energy into?
I’ve been wondering this myself lately.
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Reminder to myself: not everything said on a podcast, even “news” based ones, is true or accurate.
Another reminder to myself: even though it may seem to some that the world is very small right now, it’s still bigger than you think.
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Managed to get a count of how many photos I have in my Google Photo library. The roundabout way I did it was to open a file picker on Vivaldi, select Files, and select Photos from the app banner at the top. Current count is 15,082.
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People go on about the quality of code generated by AI coding agents, but I just encountered a careless copy-and-paste bug I made that completely screwed me over. So maybe having something that would catch the little details I missed isn’t such a bad thing.
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go checkout.git build .. Just some of the miss-types I’ve been making in quick succession this morning. -
I think I’m coming round to liking passkeys, but they’ve still got quite a way to go, particularly in their UX. Tried enrolling a passkey for something in Vivaldi for Android. The presented modal was a little unclear as to what device I was actually enrolling. There wasn’t a clear “Passkey” option. Instead, in a menu of four items, I saw NFC card, or USB dongle as the first two. “This device” was the last one.
I tapped it and went through the prompts. It seemed like it produced a passkey, but when I tried to login, it wouldn’t present it as a login option. It offered something like “Use other device” or something, but nothing to suggest that it had a passkey on file.
I did eventually enroll my phone the desktop browser. The QR code exchange worked surprisingly well, but again, it was unclear which option I actually wanted. I think the choice was “Use other device.” Use? What do you mean by “use?” Either “Enroll other device” or “Setup other device” would’ve be clearer.
This could just be a Vivaldi/Chrome issue, but really, it would be nice for browser to refine this a little. The technical aspects of passkeys are amazing. It’s the UX that’s holding it back.
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First proper fog for a while. Saw plenty of people with their cameras out on my walk to the office this morning, for good reason.
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Hmm, either these barriers received a software update, or I was completely wrong about why PTV staff is attaching printed out “no entry” signs on them. Because…
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Achieved a pretty decent transfer on my commute home. Train was pulling in at both Anzac and Melbourne Central when I arrived at the platform.
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I don’t know why I get drawn to motion graphic and animation tools. It’s not like I use them. I guess it’s because if I ever did need to use them, I know there’s one out there that’s featureful and not too expensive. I have something to turn to for all the other creative domains I’ve dabbled in.
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🔗 The Verge: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe
Lot of links to high quality creative tools that are free and cheap. Cavalry looks really interesting.
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Note to anyone else trying to tune caching in your web-app. If you’re using the dev tools, make sure you actually enable the cache. All the cache-related response headers will be ignored until this is done. Hopefully I just saved you the 20 minutes it took for me to diagnose this “problems”. 🤦
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Today was a bit of a write-off, but I did get out for a walk this afternoon, along the Darebin Creek.
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Oof! It’s been quite the month. Just came off an 11 day work week, plus a double-barrel cold and Covid infection. Fortunately the weekend is here, so recovery can begin immediately.
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🔗 Platformer News: The scientific case for being nice to your chatbot:
Being polite to a large language model can feel strange or even silly — roughly equivalent to thanking a toaster. And yet a recent paper from Anthropic lends scientific weight to the theory that chatbots work better when you’re nice to them.
Looks like in this brave new world, we’ll all be saying thank-you to our doors. 😀
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Interesting behaviour I’ve started to notice in myself when browsing repositories of coding agent skills: I now question whether a given Markdown file is intended for human readers or for agents. Use to be easy:
.mdare for you to read, source files are for machines. You can’t rely on this anymore. -
Closed a credit card account a few months back. Thought I had it all balanced but it turns out it was closed with a credit, a few dollars I can’t get because the account’s no longer accessible. But I still get a monthly paper statement reminding me of this fact. Not sure how I can stop them now.
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Two episodes away from finishing A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. At the big battle scene, that I just can’t commit myself to watch. 😐 Not ready to call it a “did not finish” though. I may get back to it eventually.
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🔗 Birchtree: Where did the MP3s come from?
Not to make everything a comparison to what we’re living through now, but I do think that it’s notable that one of the most nostalgic, good-vibes products of many of our youths was fundamentally built on stealing from artists.
Seems to me that the nostalgia comes from having media that you “own.” Maybe not in a purely legal sense, but certainly from a technical one. To be able to manipulate media as plain files on a file system, that you can move and play anywhere, is something that’s been lost with the move to streaming.
The good news is that it’s still possible to get music as MP3 files, legally even. Bandcamp and Qobuz are two I tend to visit, and both are quite good. And yes, it may not have everything you’re looking for, but it has more than you think. Enough for me to go there to look for something before resorting to the streaming services.
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It’s quite amusing seeing Markdown used in yet another domain that previously had to make do with ancient XML-based standards. Markdown is truly eating the world.
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🔗 Simon Willison: Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS
Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS today, a new text-to-speech model that can be directed using prompts.
Oof! This looks like a pretty good TTS system. The example Simon gave was quite convincing. I had a play myself using Simon’s online tools, giving the model this prompt:
Say dynamically: “[surprised]Wow, impressive! [neutral] Although I do wonder if this is worth the two cents I paid. Would be nice if I chose the right word to say. [mocking] Impression? [laugh] So cute!”
(Some context, I wrote “impression” instead of “impressive” in my first test).
Here’s the result (it’s a download link download to avoid the post showing up on the podcast feed): gemini-speech.wav
Pretty decent.
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It’s been 21 months since I moved away from GitHub to a self-hosted Forgejo instance. So far, no regrets. I am considering a smaller setup, just to keep the bill down a little (not that it’s expenseive, around €20.00 /month). And while I do have occasional wistful looks at the integration GitHub enjoys with the larger ecosystem, I have no drive to move back.