Weeknote #39 (20250615-20250621)

meta

This week was both Father’s Day and my birthday (which are always closely adjacent, when not on the exact same day). The family gifted me tickets to a Portland Thorns match, which was a great experience for everybody. Slightly less great, I’ve been massively congested all week, to the point where I felt compelled to take a Covid test — which turned out negative. Current theory: developing a grass allergy as I get older?

did

  • As I mentioned, we attended a Thorns match on Sunday, watching them win 2-0 over the Washington Spirit — sad to see Caiya Hanks end her season with an ACL tear
  • I had a two-day work week, because I took my birthday off (floating holidays FTW!) and then it was Juneteenth, and eff going back on to work on a Friday after two days off…
  • I rebuilt Emacs because why not (I mean, it had been a whole month!), also spent a little bit of time doing some Emacs config tweaking
  • Also installed new versions of Git and Forgejo in various places
  • Completely lazy (aside from cooking) days on Thursday and Friday; hermitted on Saturday because of weather — as usual, about the time I was getting comfortably relaxed and thinking about, ya know, doing some stuff, my time off was coming to an end

exercise & shoulder recovery

  • Sunday: morning stretches
  • Monday: morning stretches, afternoon ran C25K W6D3
  • Tuesday: morning stretches, afternoon gym (shoulder stuff, EZbar curls)
  • Wednesday: nothing because BIRTHDAY MASSAGE
  • Thursday: nothing because …laziness
  • Friday: morning stretches …should have run but weather was crap and my head was stuffy
  • Saturday: nothing because …laziness and congestion

read

  • Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill

    Great big “hell fuckin’ yeah” to pretty much this entire article…

    The actual moderate position on this topic is that today’s genAI tools are dangerous and unethical and should be actively avoided.

  • Contra Ptacek’s Terrible Article On AI

    I loved this one, because he bounced off the exact same point in the Ptacek post that I did: the godawful “coders don’t care about copyright” handwave around the massive IP issues with LLM training sets:

    Thomas — can I call you Thomas? — I promise I’m trying to think about how to put this gently. If this is your approach towards ethics, damn dude, don’t tell people that. This is phenomenally sloppy thinking, and I say this even as I admit that the actual writing is funny.

    …

    Ethics are complicated, but nonetheless murder is illegal! Do you really think that “These are all real concerns, but counterpoint, fuck off” is anything? A lot of developers like piracy and argue in bad faith about it, therefore it’s okay for organizations that are beginning to look increasingly like cyberpunk megacorps, without even the virtue of cool aesthetics, to siphon billions of dollars of wealth from working class people? No, you don’t, I think you wrote this because it’s fun telling people to shove it — and listen, you will never find a more sympathetic ally on the topic than me. You should just be telling Zuckerberg to shove it instead of the person that has dedicated their lives to ensuring that Postgres continues to support the global economy.

  • How to keep sea-monkeys alive

    …bit of a theme, this week, I guess…

    AI is Sea-Monkeys.

    The promise is there and it’s exciting. The hope of new friends that will live, laugh, love in a little fishbowl next to my bed. Keeping me company. Laughing at my jokes. Saying things like “We wish you could come down here and play with us in our super cool Sea-Monkey castle.” The reality is three dead brine shrimp at the bottom of a fishbowl that your mother eventually flushes down the toilet after calling you an idiot. At least dead brine shrimp don’t tell you that Hitler had some good ideas, actually.

    Can AI be useful in certain circumstances? Sure. So are brine shrimp. (They’ve been to space!) Is it all that? It’s not. AI is a Sea-Monkey ad being peddled as a promise of something that it is not.

  • What will happen if the United States bombs Iran?

    Note the publication date, folks, this is from Thursday, a couple days before …the United States bombed Iran. No pull quotes on this one, just go read the whole thing.

listened

  • New W O L F C L U B album? Fuck yeah, on repeat
  • Fugazi has been dropping live show recordings recently, and I wanted to highlight this performance of Facet Squared from a 1993 show in NYC — the initial guitar breakdown will melt your face

watched

  • TheWife and I continue to grind through NCIS: New Orleans, currently mid-S6
  • Ted Lasso - I Lived — lovely fan vid, made me want to re-watch the whole fuckin’ thing (did not particularly enjoy that watching this made the YT algo think I wanted to see a bunch of “Ted & Rebecca should get together” fan vids tho…)
  • I think I first discovered Billy Pettinger when she did a duet with Frank Turner; since then, I’ve really enjoyed both her original work and her stunning covers — please enjoy this gender-flipped cover of The Hold Steady’s “You Can Make Him Like You”
  • Speaking of The Hold Steady… for years now, I’ve been a huge fan of the “so. much. joy.” version of the song the band does at the end of their shows — to the point where I’ve literally given a talk about it (which, mercifully, seems to have not been recorded…). Anyway, I accidentally discovered maybe the earliest recorded version of this, which is pretty cool
  • Gang of Youths doing an acoustic version of The Angel of 8th Ave. — brilliantly beautiful violin accompaniment, and let it be known, David Le’aupepe has FUCKING. PIPES.
  • I remain a sucker for a good New Order or Joy Division cover, and this version of Temptation by the Kingsgate Chorus does not disappoint

cooked

  • grilled chicken Caesar salad on Monday
  • grilled steak tacos on Tuesday
  • steaks, prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, bleu cheese sauce on Wednesday
  • ceviche y guacamole, Thursday
  • chile colorado and way too spicy beans, Friday

photo

The dried chiles that went into the chile colorado sauce

The 8 guajillo, 2 ancho, and one tiny árbol pepper that go into the sauce for the chile colorado I cooked on Friday. Believe it or not, almost all the heat in the sauce is from that one tiny pepper on the right.

looking forward to

In Seattle most of next week for work; looking forward to seeing some folks in person, and a little time out of town for a mental reset is not a bad thing at all.