But what does it meeeeean?
Street art spotted today. It’s two blind (injured? crippled?) rats pointing to what used to be the night collection box of a bank that closed years ago. I have no idea what that means.
To change the subject, I was reading earlier about an unofficial plugin for Claude called Caveman, which makes the AI respond in the tersest possible terms. I asked Claude to explain it to me and it said “Why Use Many Word When Few Word Do Trick?”
It compared the result to the sort of language we used to write telegrams – “ARRIVE TUES STOP” – or classified ads. This is about reducing the number of tokens people who buy their AI in chunks have to buy.
In practice, the natural language mode of AI uses a tiny fraction of the tokens used in writing code or working through problems. Claude estimated a maximum 4% savings. And the language part is what makes it fun to talk to.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
July 10, 2026 — 3:36 pm
Comments: none
Oh no! I haven’t posted anything!
I just realized it’s long past the usual time and I haven’t posted anything! I don’t do that very often. So let me tell you what I was doing instead of posting.
Sitting in a lovely sunny garden surrounded by chickens watching videos from an account called Mad City Modern. He’s a gay man named Barry who lives in Madison Wisconsin and refinishes 20th C furniture he buys at yard sales. He keeps a running stream of consciousness commentary as he strips and refinishes furniture.
Which shouldn’t appeal to me but does. I find his voice and his philosophy soothing. I hate his taste in furniture but I love his taste in wood and finishes (I’m a shellac girl from way back). I like his dog.
The channel is four years old and he’s humble about his skills. I gather from his later videos that he’s developed a following. He does a live social thing on Wednesdays and people regularly give him stuff from his Amazon wishlist. He gets enough sponsorships that he doesn’t have to resell everything he refinishes. He ends up keeping most of his furniture, as far as I can see, because he makes a connection with it while he handles it so much.
This honestly makes me so happy for him.
July 9, 2026 — 7:46 pm
Comments: none
Turds in Spaaaaaaace
Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe sent home this picture of a near-earth asteroid. They weren’t expecting to get images anything like this good. Lead scientist Yuya Mimasu said he was “absolutely over the moon” – which I think is a hilarious way for an astrophysicist to put it.
He thinks it looks like a snowman. I’d say two Ferror Rochet chocolates stuck together. Or, you know, a turd.
Joking aside, this stuff blows me away. Like all the amazing footage of the surface of Mars. Like, holy shit – that’s Mars!
Somebody pointed out the Mars is a planet in our solar system populated entirely by robots.
July 8, 2026 — 5:47 pm
Comments: 4
Well, it wasn’t a one off
It’s definitely the pekin, though it’s awfully hard for me to believe. She’s tiny. She’s laid an egg nearly every day since the first one.
As much as I love pekin eggs (they’re nearly all yolk!) this is not a good thing. Laying eggs is stressful on a hen and she’s not likely to have a long life, poor thing.
My first two chickens, one would go broody every summer and stop laying. I went through ructions with her every year. I bet she didn’t lay a dozen eggs in her life. She lived to be eight. The other one laid eggs regularly and dropped dead at three.
Let that be a lesson: don’t lay eggs!
July 7, 2026 — 5:59 pm
Comments: 1
Yes, yes…it’s a stupid Facebook meme
It’s the “what medieval owl are you today” meme from Facebook. It came across my feed earlier and I couldn’t find it when I went back to look. To my surprise, when I did an Images search, there are at least three variants. Plenty of weird Medieval owls to go around, I guess.
I’m fobbing you off with a meme because I’ve been in an all day conference about Sussex geology and I ain’t got nothing to say about it. Hope you had a wonderful Fourth! My neighbor on the corner made pie for the occasion, so I had that.
July 6, 2026 — 6:05 pm
Comments: 3
Happy birthdays all around!
Tomorrow is Sam’s 8th birthday (4th of July is why he’s called Sam). Everyone asked me today what I’m doing and the answer is…nothing. The Fourth was never a favorite of mine – it was hot wherever I lived and the last thing I wanted to do was stand over a grill.
Then there was the year I climbed up on the roof to watch the fireworks and the neighbors fired bottle rockets at me.
Have a good weekend. Doing anything special this 4th?
July 3, 2026 — 4:25 pm
Comments: 12
I did it first!
In London in 1997, life-sized plaster noses appeared all over London affixed to walls. They arrived without explanation or credit and, human beings being human beings, legends began to spring up around them.
They were all wrong. It wasn’t until 2011 that an artist named Rick Buckley took credit. They were all casts of his substantial hooter and they were placed directly beneath CCTV cameras. To protest CCTV cameras. You’d think someone would have noticed.
As it happens, way back in 1978, when I were in art school, I discovered an annoying fact. I wanted to learn real art skills – painting and sculpting and so on – and my teachers were all into thinky performance art. The only common ground I could find was surreal art: they’d let me do representational things if they were absurd.
I did a series of cartoons featuring a life-sized plasticine version of my own substantial nose. I really don’t remember anything about it except that I finished the project and had these…noses left over.
So I stuck them on things. As you do. And I don’t remember anything more about that except my fellow students were surprisingly tolerant of them and it was some time before the last one was stolen or destroyed.
I understand some of Buckley’s noses are still out there.
July 2, 2026 — 5:57 pm
Comments: 6
I simply don’t believe it
Sam the rooster was in the henhouse making a terrific noise this morning. To the point I finally checked him out. He was sitting on THIS! And no, I’m quite sure he didn’t lay it himself.
If the seller was right, these two ladies are now three months old. That simply can’t be. Point of lay is, on average, six months. Up to nine months for a silky. I asked around Facebook and nobody has ever heard of a hen laying before four months (and that’s a bit of a freak).
The obvious answer is that I misheard him or he was misinformed and one or both of them is actually four months old. But Winneretta, the little pekin, is the most likely culprit and she’s just over half the size of a full-grown bird.
I’m astonished. [insert thesaurus.com list of synonyms for ‘astonished’]
July 1, 2026 — 5:58 pm
Comments: 4
Well, that’s boring
We had friends in Alfriston at one time. We loved going there. It had an interesting high street and lots of places to shop.
And this thing in the public parking lot. It’s old. It’s an object of mystery. Some thought it was a temporary lockup for criminals. Some thought it was the lower part of a windmill. Some suggested it was a kiln. You’d think there’d be records, but there are not.
Well, according to this BBC article, it’s a dovecote. Boring.
You know what? I’m not sure I believe it. There are no holes for the pigeons to get in, just that one shuttered window at the top. And you think there would be evidence of ancient droppings.
I’m re-declaring it a mystery object.
June 30, 2026 — 5:34 pm
Comments: 6
Interesting times…
Okay, here’s how I fixed the blog, with a lot of help from my robot friends. Someone I know who manages a lot of web sites says he switched from ChatGPT to Codex and hasn’t written a line of his own code in a year. So I downloaded Codex (it’s a separate program) and asked ChatGPT how to drive it.
It had me zip together the whole blog and feed it to Codex in one big gulp. It absorbed the whole thing and wrote a detailed report and then told me I’d used up my credits FOR THE WHOLE MONTH.
I suppose I should drop back and describe what the problem was. The blog wouldn’t load the latest version of PHP, which is the programming language used by things like WordPress (this is a WordPress blog, if you didn’t know). If I loaded anything newer than 7.4, it returned a terrifying blank white screen. And that was a problem because the latest Akismet (the module that runs our antispam) wouldn’t run on anything but 8+. Hence all the manual approving of posts.
When I built this place nearly twenty years ago, I tinkered with the code a lot. You probably don’t remember, there used to be little sidebar animations and all kinds of weird stuff. I was sure it was some dumbass thing I did that was holding it back.
Fortunately, I had the report and I had plenty of credit with ChatGPT. It showed me how to turn error reporting on, so when it crapped out on me with 8.0 we’d know exactly why. And it wasn’t anything in my code after all – Codex said nothing I did was a problem. It was the plugin that let you edit your own comments. It had some line of code that wasn’t compatible with PHP8.0.
So! While I had the robot’s attention, we tweaked a few things and everything is now running great. The automatic thingummy that audits your blog health is rated Good for the first time in years. I’ve come to the conclusion that plugins are evil – every technical issue I’ve ever had here was due to a badly constructed plugin.
The man who turned me on to Codex? The one who’s a bigger booster of AI than even I am? He told me AI is starting to frighten him.
June 29, 2026 — 5:24 pm
Comments: 9