(A series in which I ramble some personal perspective on ICYDAK's "30 Proven Tactics to Resist Authoritarianism in Daily Life," because most of this stuff is just default daily life to me.) ICYDAK: 30 Proven Tactics to Resist Authoritarianism in Everyday Life #1: know your rights 2. Secure Your Communications...

The title is a quote from a Calvin and Hobbes strip. I read it as a kid, and I've found many, many situations in which it applies. Today, for instance. I'm skimming through books on basic computer programming for teens, trying to find some suitable additions for the school library. In one of them, I run across the...

That's the title of a book I found on Project Gutenberg today: Good Things to Eat, As Suggested by Rufus - by Rufus Estes The title amused me, so I downloaded it. And the title may seem silly, but this book slaps. Turns out Rufus Estes was born into slavery in 1857. He started working at the ripe old age of 5, after...

You may or may not remember a couple posts ago when I (1) thought this list of ways to resist authoritarianism was just how people lived: ICYDAK: 30 Proven Tactics to Resist Authoritarianism in Daily Life and (2) then had the cringe-inducing "revelation" that actually, no, what I think of as "default" is actually no...

Just got a note in my work inbox: There's a spread of Chick-fil-A in the break room, courtesy of the franchise that just opened its doors next to our district admin building. I cannot eat Chick-fil-A. I have celiac disease, and those sandwiches are megaton gluten bombs that can and will turn my intestines into a...

I will grant you that "we have too many books to fit on shelves" is a good problem to have. BUT. It also means I am mega-weeding the fiction right now, which also requires me to remove every weeded book from the database by hand, which TAKETH TIME. So no, I don't have any new thoughts to contribute to the AI in...

My grandmother loved Groundhog Day. She always felt it was a holiday that "didn't get enough love," so she made a huge deal of it. She sent flowers to all her friends and made a big dinner - which, of course, always ended with the family watching "Groundhog Day." In totally unrelated news, I am contemplating various...

I swear (I assume) I'll get back to having Actual Thoughts soon. There's just a ton of reading about AI in education that is stuck in my head right now, trying to turn itself into...something. Meanwhile, this thread about cyberpunk food options: Cyberpunk Forums: cyberpunk food general especially the posts about...

No, really, that's what it's called: Fruity Game I found it on F-Droid last night while seeing if anyone has made a version of Fruit Ninja that hasn't been thoroughly enshittified in the name of PROFIT$ yet. And I was going to blog about something more serious today, except I cannot stop thinking about this game. I...

Today I installed Windows 10 on the household's newest laptop. Said laptop has to run Windows so we can run Pyware, but I refuse to live with the billionaire-spyware that Windows 11 has become. I wanted to install Windows 7, but too many things are no longer compatible with it, so 10 it is. Rolling back to Windows...

Like many of my fellow Americans, I am currently buried under a lot of snow, ice, and freezing temperatures. I have been home since Wednesday afternoon, amusing myself during snow days. At some point, I thought it would be fun to write a little guide for people just discovering cyberpunk. Just a few lines. How hard...

A lot of unspoken assumptions underlie the whole "AI thing" right now. But I think the biggest is that LLMs think like we do. We jump to this conclusion almost immediately, because LLMs generate plausible-reading text. The LLM sounds like a person, so it must think like a person, somehow, right? We then end up...