Raccoon Dog: Finally, my time has come, as I knew it would. Surely the people want to know about me because of my greatness and the silkiness of my fur.
Who else has been reading the wikipedia entry on Raccoon Dog and learning about the controversy of whether a Japanese Raccoon Dog is actually related to the classic Raccoon Dog?
Andor was so good that I wasn’t sure how I would feel going back to the Mandalorian. 3 episodes into the new season and I’m pretty happy with it. It’s got its own feeling and it’s pushing ahead.
Microsoft made their AI/MSOffice announcement today. It doesn’t change my mind about what I wrote yesterday. They said several times something like, “and of course you wouldn’t send this to a client/colleague without reviewing it carefully.” I think the of course in my paraphrase is making some very optimistic assumptions.
Looking at LLMs and the latest Chat stuff I’m not feeling the anxiety that is building. There’s no shortage of authoritative seeming BS already. I am excited for “boring” improvements we’ll see in searching and building associations in text within a lot of contexts moving forward, similar to the effect elastic search has had over the last several years.
I always forget how fun identity and branding design work is until I get into it again. Super hard, and takes longer than you think it will, but very satisfying.
Today’s church service was beautiful. Many from the congregation stood and explained which Christmas hymn was their favorite and why and then we all joined in singing a verse from it. 40 minutes of joy set a wonderful tone for today’s celebrations. Christ’s invitation is to feel that joy always.
At what depth should you bury a pipe between a well and a house so that it’s below the frost line? I don’t know what depth, but today I learned that ours is not deep enough.
If CSS URL selectors were a thing, I could handle a lot of the way I style websites without junking up the DOM with extra classes. As a little bit of an old school separation of concerns, web standards guy who is grumpy about JS frameworks ruining things, I would love it if this were a thing.
Watching tech media follow the same playbook with a certain troll’s every utterance that political media has with another certain troll over the last few years is dispiriting. I don’t know how to correctly balance newsworthiness vs amplification, but I’ve never seen great results giving people who crave attention like a drug exactly what they want.
Finished reading the Expanse series last week. The whole thing is so great. It starts as a compelling vision of a future where mankind has spread throughout the solar system and grows into something much much bigger. You get to know and love a growing and fascinating cast of characters. Each novel is tells a complete story and the series ends is very satisfying. I love it. Highly recommended.
