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  Last night at 1 AM as I was riding my bike home, a fox started to pop out from between parked cars, directly into my path in the bike lane. It jumped back out of my way, thank goodness. I’ve already run over a rat. I don’t need to find out what happens if I hit a fox. I’ve seen foxes in Petworth and Brightwood and the fancy neighborhoods of upper northwest, but this was the little stub of Florida Ave between Sherman and 10th, across from the Whole Foods. I guess urban foxes have adapted to supe...

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  Our next #TalesOnTourDC event is in Georgetown, so we are on a bus stuck in traffic where Pennsylvania and M merge. Why on earth do people drive here.

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  Landed at DCA, waited for bags, and then got on the Metro. No yellow line. Our blue line train has mysteriously held three times so far. The train operator made one announcement, but it was inaudible. Ahh, WMATA.

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  I lock my bike up behind the bar and leave through the alley, and the alley always smells like, uh, something, so I didn’t notice quite how bad the air was until I got onto a regular street. I pulled over at the first opportunity, put on a mask, and texted my wife “air bad.” My eyes are still stinging. And this isn’t even the worst of it yet.

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  I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or digitally transform anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or digitally transformed, or buy anything sold or digitally transformed, or digitally transform anything sold, bought, or digitally transformed, or repair anything sold, bought, or digitally transformed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.

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  We are flying to see my mother-in-law to deal with financial planning stuff. It's 5½ hours in planes each way. I'm 6'2" (1.88 m) tall. Main cabin seats are $499 per person. Upgrading to get more leg room costs an additional $198 per person, but it also includes earlier boarding and a checked bag. Should I pay extra, because it's worth it not to be grumpy before I have even laid eyes on my MIL, or should I just suck it up and pace in the aisle when I need to stretch my legs?...

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  There’s one for everything.

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  How do you pronounce UNIX (-like) directory names?

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  Y’all, shingles is AWFUL. One friend of ours needed to be in a nursing home for her recovery; my wife got it before she turned 50 so she couldn’t even get the vaccine when she recovered. The data saying the vaccine reduces dementia is just a lovely bonus on top of NOT GETTING SHINGLES. https://infosec.exchange/@allanfriedman/116527956695379856

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  “Oooh, we could watch [MOVIE]. Is it on any services we have?” “Try Tubi. Last time I tried it the network ad blocking worked. If it doesn’t work we’ll try something else.” Reader, the network ad blocking worked.

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  How do we get people to stop putting AI "art" on their blog posts and articles? Your content may or may not actually be good, but I won't know because I close the tab as soon as I see that you've made that choice.

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  @adhdjesse @kims I am in this post and I don’t like it.

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  The ElementaryOS browser "Web" (which is Gnome Web, FKA Epiphany), is janky when scrolling in Phanpy (it jumps around and sometimes flips rapidly between the before and after states) so I thought I'd try some other browsers. Firefox doesn't let you install PWAs as apps without installing a third party extension (which has many negative reviews). Vivaldi does PWAs, but its scrolling speed is different than the system scrolling speed, and it doesn't respect two finger swipes...

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  Here’s something I just don’t get about The Discourse on AI coding agents: people talk about how letting it handle boilerplate makes them faster. I realize I’m not using the latest trendy frameworks so I don’t know how much more boilerplate they require than the coding I’m more familiar with, but … I have never once thought typing out* boilerplate slowed me down. Usually that stuff is all muscle memory and it gives me a chance to think about, say, function signatures and how I might want simpler...

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  I was thinking about "AI-assisted" coding, legal risk, and what it would mean to allow only "trivial" assistance (like formatting or "find the bug" interactive sessions) while disallowing "significant" contributions (like whole subroutines or larger blocks of code). I personally don't think it's possible to set aside the moral component of these models (stolen training data; excessive land, power, and water use and general "bad neighbor"...

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  DC recently got a Total Wine store, and the first time I went there I couldn’t help thinking of the Dril candles post when I looked at pricing for a few things. They’ve updated their pricing a bit since then, but the economics still don’t make enough sense. (Photos are old/new pairs in that order)

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  The People's Republic of:

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  Another thought about "AI" coding agents: lines of code produced has always been a terrible metric, but at least until now lines of code produced and lines of code understood have been roughly* at parity. Agents have now made it possible for the number of lines of code produced to grow exponentially without growing the number of lines of code understood at the same rate. In fact, the number of lines of code understood may be static or even shrinking as people rely on agents to...

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  As if Vincent Orange’s quixotic campaign for mayor weren’t enough, yesterday I saw a sign for Kevin Chavous’ campaign for an at large council seat. Turns out it’s a second generation politician with that name (and a different middle initial), but before I found that out I felt like I’d gone back in time 20 years.

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  Just had reason to cite this piece about the crispy gone soggy food texture. It holds up. (Paywall: disable JavaScript). https://www.bonappetit.com/story/crispy-gone-soggy

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  It’s groovy, I guess.

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  I know it's fun to complain about Daylight Saving Time, but how many of the complaints are just related to the jarring shift of an hour all at once? What would happen if we all just agreed to follow the sunrise for the roughly five weeks in the spring that it takes for the day to shift by an hour? Say that every Sunday for five weeks we all just got up 12 minutes earlier than the day before. Would that be so terrible? (Shut up, software developers, this is just a thought experiment).

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  (new thread; previous one ended with https://distraction.party/notice/B41Iw15N6Ymwh8BKl6) Connections Puzzle #1001 🟪🟪🟪🟪 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟩🟩🟩🟩 Skill 98/99 Uniqueness 1 in 212

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  Our new oven has wifi* and it’s supposed to be able to update its own time, but it resolutely has the wrong hour today. I even tried toggling the setting off and on, which was fascinating because it would briefly flash the correct time before becoming wrong again. The problem with software eating the world is finding out how bad most software is. * Please do not reply to me to tell me that it’s bad that I let it connect to the internet. Rest assured I know the risks and I am capable of configur...

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  Safeway had pork shoulder on a decent sale last weekend, so we bought one. I roasted it a few days ago and we’ve been pulling meat off for meals since then, but now I’m making an All Day Bolognese™ with the bulk of it. The bulk of the active time is simply chopping and sautéing aromatics, then it just goes in the oven for a while. The house already smells so good.

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