The blog home of Jeff Putz

I'm rolling into these holiday weeks off from work. I'm also a little burned out. I do this it seems every other year at least. I go four and a half months between significant time off. I think the challenge is that I associate time off with travel, which is hard to do in the fall because of school. With Simon doing better, I suppose we could squeeze in a weekend somewhere, but we didn't know about if that would happen.

It's weird to just have nothing to do, but I welcome it. I'm really embracing being bored, with the hopes that it drives me toward the creative things that I used to do more of. I feel as though life has been imbalanced this last year (and boy, that retrospective blog post is gonna be heavy). I don't really overthink it, but I may in fact underthink it. When I took Simon to therapy last week, I thought about how I have a lot of tools to make sense of things, to balance it all out, but it's so easy to get lost in your own circumstances to do anything with it.

We've got a lot planned for this two weeks. We're getting away, we're going to a wedding, we're volunteering, and you can bet your ass I'm gonna sit around and stare at the sky.

There has been a nagging problem for owners of Stern Pinball's Fall Of The Empire. The Death Star has been extremely difficult to score on. It consists of a steep ramp and internally a tunnel that bends down through the playfield. The idea is that when you lock three balls in there, it starts up a multi-ball experience for lots of points.

But the frame at the front of the toy, which also guides the door, is too narrow. What mostly happens is that the ball bangs around in there, then comes out. It turns out that I was a little too confident about my "fix" that I made last month, better aligning the ramp and the gate. I managed to score three balls right after I messed with it, so I thought it was good. But as time has gone on, and hundreds of games have been played, I haven't been able to do it again. So Stern shipped out a fix that has a wider gate. In pulling out the old one, I could see that the sides of the frame were starting to wear from ball contact.

After dropping screws and washers into and through the playfield, I eventually got the new frame installed. You have to remove the layers of plastics on both sides to get to it. I left that washer under the one side of the ramp, because I couldn't otherwise get the alignment right. Some folks have had success loosening all of the things and wiggling them around until it aligned, but I couldn't do it without the washer slightly propping up the one side.

We fired up the game, and I scored Death Star multi-ball on my second try. Diana, who has also played hundreds of times, got it within six games. Simon had similar results. So I would say that the fix not only works, it changes the nature of the game. Everyone in the house is more regularly scoring over 100 million, and not just because we've all had a lot of practice.

Good on Stern for sending out the fix, even though it seems like something that should have been caught before they started mass-producing the machines. I don't know how many games they shipped, but I'm sure it's in the hundreds. What a weird thing though, that Stern makes a product intended for commercial use, but a huge portion of their business is for home use. Their support has been pretty good overall, but I've read on the Internet that it isn't consistent. As much as their system architecture has improved to use less wiring, there's still a lot of complexity in there. I imagine though that the people who can afford the machines but don't have the expertise to maintain them can afford to hire experts.

Meanwhile, they keep releasing new software versions, mostly tweaking stuff, but often including new content. We've had three updates in two months. This is another situation where I wish they would have it nailed down before they ship, like the old days, but the changes tend to be incremental improvements. Most of the game is "there" from the start.

Poe didn't come to breakfast this morning, and we found that he barfed in various places. As you might expect, this triggered alarms for us because we know he probably has FIP, the same thing that killed Finn in March. Fortunately we were able to get him into the vet this morning.

He had a minor fever, but the X-ray showed no fluid in his lungs, no ingestion of foreign objects, and his blood work was clean. The doctor said it could be some kind of low-grade viral or bacterial infection, and gave him a broad-spectrum antibiotic and an anti-inflammatory drug. Basically, he felt that there was nothing to indicate he was in a downward spiral like Finn. He's not lethargic either, and generally responsive to stimuli.

Hopefully it is just something he has to sleep off. He was nutty just yesterday, whereas Finn slowed down and was hiding for a few days. The foster kittens seem to keep checking on him, which is adorable.

The good news is that you can treat FIP with a drug called GS-441524, and remdesivir, which you may know as the COVID-19 drug. Nine months ago, this was just becoming an option, and it was hard to find. Finn was too far along anyway, apparently, so that's why we have to be on top of it for Poe. The efficacy of these new treatments is pretty high, and pretty expensive, but whatever it takes for our furball. It's just important that we watch him closely.

Coding with AI is definitely a lot of fun, but it sure doesn't require less knowledge. There are countless videos on YouTube showing people "vibe coding" or whatever, but I can guarantee that what they have likely doesn't scale very well, or is perhaps insecure.

ADHD waiting aside, because I was just in the midst of a six-minute wait for some changes I asked for, Claude can do some weird things. For example, I have some backend code that examines the security token and figures out if it's a valid user making the request. It decided to just stub out the user (with userID = 1) instead of actually making sure that it existed. People keep saying that it will get better, but will it? If you look at code out in the world, most of it isn't very good, and the stuff in public is what the AI trains on. I guess we'll see.

I've been working on a prototype for... something that needs a better name than "social network," because I feel like this is something different. It's for me, first and foremost. It's photo journaling and microblogging, which is what socials used to be before they became algorithm driven. It's obviously not something that can exist for free, because cloud stuff isn't free, but what if you could as a paying user invite others to use it in a read-only manner for free? I would pay for that, but who knows if others would.

Hilariously, and representative of my lack of follow-through, I made the first commit to this code more than five years ago. I didn't really revisit it until last summer, briefly, before picking it up again after getting a Claud subscription. I'm tired of messing with the forums, and needed something different. But importantly, I'm doing it for me, with possible (if unlikely) commercial potential. That's what I've always done with the forums, for 25+ years, and I imagine that's why they still exist.

The prototyping, now that I've started it in earnest, goes pretty fast. I'm still trying to find the level at which I'm willing to back off and let the AI leave it in a "good enough" spot. It's not easy, but Claude does a nice job summarizing what it changed and what approach it used. And if I think it sucks, provided I'm committing frequently enough, I can just reverse what it does.  For example, that six minutes that I had to wait involved changing six files, adding about 100 lines and deleting 30.

I've got some time off coming soon, and I hope that I can just bury myself in this now and then.

Simon has always been interested in theater tech to some degree, which is to say that he kind of looks through the magic to see the tricks. He does this with theme park rides, too. Last year, for his first year of high school, we were excited that he wanted to take the tech theater class. My experience with theater is that it's always been one of the more welcoming environments for people who can't really find their tribe. Well, that was my hope at least.

But his theater experience in grade 9 was miserable. Part of it was unkind classmates, sure, but the teacher was the biggest problem. She continually marginalized him, even though he wanted desperately to help in every way, even if it was directing traffic in the parking lot on show nights, or being an usher. He wanted to crew the show, but she literally told him, "I'm too worried that you'll be talking backstage and I don't have time to teach you anything." She fancied herself more a for-profit director trying to get awards than a teacher, which triggers me given the college instructors that I had who felt they were "station managers" before educators. We went around with principals and such, but got nowhere. I have an email that felt like discrimination against someone with an IEP, but did not pursue it. Oh, and Diana, former union stage manager, and I, long-time lighting enthusiast and community theater lighting designer, also offered to help from the start, and she never answered. Whatever.

This year, the School of the Arts at Dr. Phillips Center brought in kids to learn and do the tech work for their Beetlejuice Jr. show. We got Simon into it, and while he was reluctant at first, once they got into the theater, and then into tech week, he absolutely loved it. The kids have generally been nice, and the staff has been caring and sensitive to him. He has been surrounded by professionals (not that hack teacher) who share their knowledge and mentor the kids. He found the theater that I thought it could be.

I'm sure he'll be a wreck after the last show tonight, because he's an emotional kid. But I love that he's been able to have the opportunity. It gives him purpose, and gets him out of the house for all good reasons. I hope we can get him into another program like this.

Fostering cats can be fun, because it often involves the joy of having kittens without having to actually commit to having them for a dozen-plus years. Sometimes we get much older cats, too, and they can be very sweet. And of course, we're kind of auditioning them to join the pride.

That's how Remy came into the house. Well, there was technically another Remy who was destructive or otherwise not suitable (also all-black). The second Remy seemed better, even though he tried to be a badass toward the ragdolls. It was cute until it wasn't. When he got older, he also got bigger, and he was frequently a dick to Finn. He's still a dick to Poe, but Poe fights back. I wouldn't go as far as to say that Remy was a mistake, but he's never really been a good fit. He'd be better off as an only-cat.

So these two girls spent two weeks with us, then were back in the shelter (they have a spot in a Petsmart), then a week back with us. They've had all of their vaccinations and were fixed, so we let them roam free around the house. They were a joy to have around, and they're very much lap cats. They like being around humans. They're also "talkative" and have interesting personalities.

But there's a reason that we don't give them names, so we don't get attached. These tiny ladies hiss and posture their little faces toward Remy. I know, karma, right? While it's funny now, when they get bigger, I worry about genuine conflict. It's a red flag, and it's a serious bummer. We also would really like to see a cat or two that really warms up to Poe, who sometimes seems a little lost without his bro. Poe seemed recreationally interested in them, and they were recreationally interested in him, but it was not a love fest.

Today we sent them back to the store for the weekly adoption event. I hope they find a good home, because they're very sweet. I'll miss them.

We're still two weeks off from the shortest day of the year, but it can't start going the other way soon enough. Tonight I hit 6, and was like, I've got six hours before I'm going to go to bed. That's a long-ass time. So much time for activities!

So what am I doing with that time? I am starting to get back into coding, sort of. Getting an AI subscription has made it fun again because I don't have to deal with the drudgery of stuff that's boring. It also means a lot of waiting around for it to do stuff. Obviously I'm playing a lot of pinball, and my scores are starting to average a lot higher. I'm closing in on my thousandth game on Stern Insider, too, most of which are on our machine. I'm writing more, though not publishing everything, necessarily. Oh, I cranked out a basic lighting rig in Vectorworks right before my subscription ran out, with 50-ish instruments. I'll sit down with that again soon I'm sure. I have a song in mind.

I do feel anti-social to an extent, but I'm very much connecting this to the life of a remote worker. To be fair, we recently went to a show with a friend, we're going to a show this week, and Simon is involved in a theater class that by extension gets me out of the house. And we have lots of plans the rest of the month.

I'm so over early darkness though.

Simon is going through a phase where he says he's bored and wants me to do something with him. This makes sense, because I'm pretty sure that he's outgrowing some of the gaming stuff he was into, as that used to be a primary leisure-time activity for him. But I also find myself telling him that he needs to learn to be bored.

When you're bored, I think it makes you more curious. Being curious leads to new adventures, or at the very least, new interests. Curiosity keeps you learning, too. So in that sense, boredom is a very useful thing. It also gives you time to reflect, gain perspective and rest the mind.

Venturing into social commentary (because where else did you think I would go with this?), I really believe that folks are often incapable of boredom. And yes, it's because of those doom-scrolling devices, or more specifically, anti-social apps. You see it everywhere, even at a place as over-stimulating as a theme park. If there's even the slightest moment of boredom, out come the phones. If you don't see it, you're probably doing the same thing.

Try this: Next time you're waiting for something, or queueing, at the airport or the grocery store, keep your phone in your pocket. Look around, watch people. Observe. If you're really ambitious, try talking to people. If my eye contact-avoiding autistic ass can do it, so can you. I think whatever momentary human connection you have will be far more rewarding than pulling out your dumbphone.

The cure to boredom isn't electronic stuff, it's curiosity.

You know how the Internet can make something untrue fester into alleged fact? This is one of those things, and it drives me nuts.

Getting crystal clear ice is a neat bar trick that is typically achieved by freezing it in a directional manner. It's why ice on the surface of a lake is typically a lot clearer than what you'd find deeper. In your freezer, this can be achieved by putting the water in a deep container that's insulated around the sides, but not the top. If the upper half is separated by small holes, the top bits freeze clear, while the lower part is cloudy.

What almost every words-on-the-Internet say is that this is because it forces the "impurities" to the bottom. This is bullshit. If this were actually true, then the purest of distilled and filtered water would freeze clear in conventional ice cube trays. But it doesn't. Distilled water has effectively no mineral content. The reason has nothing to do with minerals or whatever people claim is in the water. It's because of gases. I imagine it's mostly nitrogen, oxygen and CO2 (i.e., air). It's the air that gets forced down in the directional freezing.

Seriously, every "article" or how-to says it's impurities, but unless you consider air an impurity, it just ain't true.

I had an interesting conversation with my therapist, relative to my recent involuntary departure from Facebook. After a week of FOMO, I was pretty over it. (Sidebar: She asked if it bothered me about the non-justice of AI enforcement, and you'd think it would grind on me, but I don't really care.) But I told her that I still had an urge to post and/or share whatever happened to be on my mind.

It was her observation that most of her clients likely do it for the usual reasons, as in the likes or comments, the dopamine, or whatever they think it's doing to move the needle on some issue. But I'm a weird outlier (as usual), in that I never did it for any specific audience. This blog is kind of in that category too, in that I don't know who is reading it or why, but I don't really care either. My reason is that writing something down, and making it public or semi-public, allows me to process it and move on. That makes sense given the noise, thought spirals and constant context switching that goes on in my head. For whatever reason, writing composition is something that I can do quickly and clearly, in a way that the thought soup can't do. Making it non-private also, in my way of thinking, forces me to be authentic and honest.

When I see a cool music performance or funny comedy sketch, my first instinct is to share it, so it's a bummer when I can't do that. Oddly enough, if we're going back 15 years, this is the social behavior that social media was supposed to facilitate. Before the algorithms, ads, brands and ephemeral nonsense that fills the screens now. I still believe in this as a concept, I just don't know if there's a business model for it. I think paying something annually for it is the model, but I don't know if it's something that people would actually buy it.

There is another reason to post, which a friend of mine described as scrapbooking. This is where I wish I could have retrieved the data (their export after the fact appears broken), because especially as a parent, it's fun to see what you and your kid were up to ten years back. Sure, it's also an easy way to share the same with friends and family, but to me it's the analog to photo albums, only better annotated and tagged with locations.

I've been coding around software that covers the former scenario a bit, though I imagine it could to the latter. While I'm very much thinking about this for my own amusement, along with a few close friends, I suppose it could be a wider used thing, if they'd pay for it. It's not a complicated thing to build, and it's kinda fun to build, so even if it's just for me it's worth it. Then I can get the thoughts out.

So here's a fun thing I've come to realize. Whatever gains I've been able to make by using AI to write code, I lose in the time it takes for it to write code. Stay with me...

When I was coding full-time and not managing, my output was not as voluminous as that of my peers. Now I know that it's because I have ADHD, but at the time, I figured that maybe I was lazy. I now better understand that the then-undiagnosed condition made it hard for me to concentrate on the work, especially if I wasn't able to get into the zone, which I also now understand to be what they call hyperfocus. See also: working in a cubicle office with countless distractions. While I like to think that I wrote quality stuff, it was definitely hard to write as much as others.

Fast forward to today, and I'm mostly writing code for fun on my own time. I've been getting a little deeper into it lately because the AI tools are like having a junior to mid-level developer pairing with you. If you give it the right directions and scope, something that definitely takes some time to learn, the outcomes are pretty OK. But there is a dark side to this as well, and it comes with the whirling icons or messages like "noodling." As text scrolls by and Claude does its thing, the desire to go do something else is overwhelming. The return time for usable code (assuming it compiles) can be at least 30 seconds, which is an eternity for someone with ADHD. I've estimated that in the course of five minutes, my inner dialogue may context shift at least a hundred times. Thirty seconds is a very big window.

I've been unknowingly developing coping skills for ADHD my entire life. When I got the diagnosis four years ago (also ASD), I learned about how neurodivergence forces people to find the shortcuts, the hacks, the compensation for having a brain that's wired differently. But this is the first time since then that I've found something totally new that I'm not used to. And it's crazy that I'm trying to compensate for a machine that's supposed to be helping me!

A lot of this is still right-sizing the work for the AI. When you ask it to take a big swing, it often gets stuff very wrong. But when you model entities up front, think about efficient ways to do stuff, and really design a solution, it's like giving the AI well-formed ideas and letting it figure out the glue. That's the boring part anyway, so knock yourself out, Claude. I do wonder how folks stay focused with the start-stop rhythm of using AI.

I know this is obvious, that everyone knows the aesthetic, but why were there no railings on anything in Star Wars? It's already weird that everything was built with cavernous pits that went on forever, but you know, maybe have something there to keep anyone from falling?

Imagine being a building inspector or OSHA person working for the Empire. You can literally phone it in, because it doesn't matter if there's a deck with a giant hole that goes, somewhere. Need a bridge through that shaft where the tractor beam controls are? No problem, I'm sure that narrow walkway will be fine.

Meanwhile, at the rebel base, there are more trip hazards than you can possibly imagine. How do the droids get around? Don't they have a union?

I don't think the average person looking down at their phone could survive in the Star Wars universe.

Sundays, for me, have become a routine where I have a little too much time to think about stuff. I'm not going to write again about the constant noise in my head, but I do know that the best method of getting away from it is to be present in literally anything. Diana typically works, and Simon has become a little obsessed with going to the parks solo (which I suppose is better than sitting in front of the computer all day). I am left to my own devices, as they say.

I imagine that survival instincts, whatever bit humans have left, are the reason that we tend to inventory all of the sucky things. There is a lot of that, and much of it I can't control. Parenting is hard, and I wouldn't say I can control that either. But my caveman brain seems trained on knowing all of the bad stuff, past, present and future, and keeps me on high alert to be ready for the next thing. Of course, there's nothing actionable there, so you just feel defensive and gross.

But there are things that bring me joy that I can do. When I feed that positivity monster, it grows. It's just so hard to divert energy to it. It feels like you're fighting instinct. When I can get there though, it sure feels good. It's something that requires practice.

This is around the time of the year that I have to decide whether or not to re-up my Adobe subscription. It's super shady the way they do it now. If you do nothing, they charge you like $800 and that's that. But if you go on and try to cancel, they offer you a rate of $480 for a year. Like, if that's the way they're going to play it, why not just give me the better rate in the first place? I hate these stupid games. It's the kind of thing that SiriusXM used to do before they gave me a permanent forever rate of $10 or whatever. I don't really use it much anymore. I could probably just drop down to the photo tier, which is Photoshop and Lightroom. That's around $240, which is more reasonable. I don't use Premier at all, since I have a perpetual license (and free updates) for DaVinci Resolve, which is superior in every way. Illustrator and After Effects use are rare. I've probably used Acrobat more.

One bit of perspective: When the Adobe suite was boxed and perpetually licensed, I would typically buy the new version every two years, and spend $1,200 in aughts dollars. So technically, $480 is a deal. I just don't like how they go about it.

Then there's Vectorworks, which I decided to try about a year ago with a Black Friday deal. That's a legit CAD app that also does lighting. So full on rigs that you can export to MA3, plus a very nice visualizer. That was an expensive self-taught "class" so to speak, but for $900, I did actually learn quite a bit. I get the software to an extent, but it's really overkill since I'm not doing actual rigging, including weight and power stuff. But because it's also CAD, I could theoretically build anything in it, and 3D print it. I have a feeling that's yet another expensive hobby I could land in.

By contrast, the Vectorworks folks are actually very cool, and real humans. That makes sense given the cost and niche of their product. When I found a bug early in the subscription, they were very supportive. As I neared the end of my sub, they reached out and asked if there was anything they could do to help, though they weren't going to extend another discount, which I get. At least they're honest about it.

I keep having this experience where I'm like, "Oh, it's only 6:30, I have plenty of time for activities!" You'd think that I've never seen winter.

But despite the slight sense of dread, it's kind of energizing. I know intellectually that there aren't more hours in the evening, but it feels like it. I've found myself getting back into my various hobbies. I'm interested in too many things, and finish few of them. Ah the ADHD brain.

I did ship a new forum version today, though it only has one new feature.

I'm not gonna lie, life without Facebook is definitely better. Since getting bounced off of it by what I assume is AI enforcement, and a false positive to something, I've mostly confirmed what I already knew: The algorithm is for attention, not for tracking friends. There's a great video by the CEO of Patreon, of all people, spelling it out for you, if you don't already get it (embedded below).

It's weird how the doomscrolling can radicalize people, not in the terrorist sense, but in the "I'm a victim and it's 'their' fault" way. My experience has been that being a hetero white male has resulted in little to no systemic discrimination or disadvantage for me. No amount of DEI efforts, anti-racism or other corrective action has changed that. But I suppose if people are telling you anything enough, you might believe it. It's unfortunate that critical thinking hasn't headed this off. But while older generations subscribe to the, "If you see it on TV (or online), you can trust it," and the younger people don't remember three network newsmen whose credibility was everything. In many ways, a lot of people have never had to think critically.

Again, I was using FB less and less. It was basically a scrapbooking mechanism. I saw so little of friends, because Facebook's intent is not to keep you connected with friends. That ended years ago. The only issue, maybe, is that there are a few folks I was hanging on to in terms of contact, but I don't know if that was ever that important. Maybe it was just hanging on to feeling like I know people. I know for sure that not seeing endless things intended to enrage is better for me.

Hard to believe that it has been almost two years since I first tried using an AI agent to help write code. Looking back, I seemed really optimistic, but I recall giving it a ton of context, and the thing I was working on was specifically math. I tried again a few months ago to add a feature to POP Forums, and wasn't that excited about the results. Despite it being a mature code base, if not necessarily the most well-structured or coded, it just got a lot of stuff wrong. Maybe that was just the state of Github's Copilot, but that was not ideal.

A friend of mine kept raving about Claude Code, so I forked over $20 and gave it a shot on a new greenfield project that I started. I took the guidance to have it generate its own readme first, and it seemed to figure out a number of the conventions that wanted, in terms of the project structure. It's a Blazor-based WASM app, meaning it runs in the browser, so I wasn't sure how much it would "get." But it actually did really well, provided I was giving it specific context. So for example, I wanted to create a class that scraped a web page, pulled out the title and any social-protocol for meta tags that would correspond to an image. I did this in two parts, knowing that's how I'd structure it. First I had it code a class to fetch the page, and then I had another class parse out the title and image location. This involves a bunch of regular expressions, the bane of my coding existence, so I was happy to let the machine figure it out. Finally, when the result came back, triggered by typing a URL in a text box, I wanted a link and the image to appear in a box that you could remove, and it did all of that, pretty much first try. There were some tweaks I asked it to do, like un-HTML-encoding the title, and some other minor things, but it worked.

This was a much more positive experience than I had last time, but to be honest, a lot of that has to do with the context. I keep saying that over and over, that AI needs context to get stuff right, so I gave it a lot of context. Having something that is new and not infested with years of bad decisions also helps. I'm also limiting the scope of any given problem. I'm not telling it to do some end-to-end thing that involves many application layers.

And that's why, at this moment, I still see so much value in senior software developers. The analogy that I recently saw was to plumbers and plumbing. Sure, with PVC pipes and twist on couplings, you don't need to solder pipes anymore. It's all much easier. But knowing how the system is supposed to work, and all of the associated nuance, is still something that requires plumber knowledge. Well, code is in many ways like plumbing, so that experience is important. Sure, you can find a bunch of YouTubers who are "vibe coding" until they have something that works, but it doesn't mean that it can scale, that it's secure or robust enough to handle humans breaking it.

"Just you wait," say people selling AI stuff. But many predicted that it could be there by now, and clearly it is not. In fact, I'd say the last year has been kind of stagnant in terms of improvement (specifically in the code generation realm). I'm not saying that it will never get there, it's hard to know, but as I've said before, if AI eventually hits a point of having to train on its own work, it will break.

The funny thing about the "internet of things" and "smart" stuff is that most of it seems like convenience, or marginal quality of life improvements. But as time has rolled on and we sit with this stuff, it's more than that.

For example, my recent issues with HVAC spotted a potentially expensive issue. The short story is that a wiring problem, in combination with a blower motor problem, resulted in the system turning on the stage 2 heating coil. This was happening with the AC running at the same time (since the heat pump and blower communication is pretty crude). It may have taken awhile for me to notice, since it was blowing room temperature air, but I noticed immediately that we were pulling an absurd 14 kW from the grid. Even having caught it when I did, we used something like 120 kWh that day, and it could have gone on for days.

In this case, the thermostats track run time, and the electric plant (solar and batter) measure usage. Ordinarily, this is just something neat to see, predictive of your electric bill and a record of the climate. But in this case, it also identified a serious issue.

Even when you go smaller, there are unexpected benefits of devices. A self-cleaning litter box seems like a luxury for people who tire of dealing with the cat shitters, but it turns out that they also weigh cats. So combined with the usage statistics, this thing is giving you a picture of your cats' health. Without this, you likely have to be reactive about cat health, but with the data, you can be proactive before something becomes serious.

The HVAC guy has something in his electrical panel where he can spontaneously measure everything on a per-circuit basis. That would be cool, if generally unnecessary.

I feel like I've had enough experience with AI this year to conclude that the thing it's not good at is context. I have some very recent examples of this.

First off, my Facebook banishment is a perfect example of what happens when you turn things over to the machines. I don't know what it thinks that I did, but I'm certain that cats and theater selfies are not against the rules. Enforcement is probably the worst application of enforcement of any kind, as false-positives in law enforcement can attest. It kind of reminds me of a variation on Minority Report, where people were convicted for crimes before they happened. This is an example though of the stakes are too high to use tools that get it wrong. Facebook banning doesn't matter in the larger scope of things (other than the continued enshitification of the platform), but civil rights violations are serious. The context of any situation, not simply markers that might relate to an actual problem, has to play a part. But AI doesn't do that.

The coding agent stuff gets a lot of attention lately, because people really believe that it can reduce the number of people that you need for those jobs. So far, that hasn't been true. Putting aside for a moment that software developers probably only spend about 40% of their time writing code, at best (because of meetings and other stuff), the AI tools today only write code if you can tell it exactly what you need. I have first hand experience with that. First I have to correct it over and over to do what I ask, then I end up having to ask it to do it in a way that is more readable, maintainable and scaleable. If that weren't enough, it confidently gives you code that won't compile. I've seen people liken this to plumbing. You don't have to solder pipes together anymore, because of PVC and snap-together bits, but you need a plumber to understand how the system works, and various quirks and concepts. You might be able to DIY stuff, but you aren't an expert.

What I really don't care for is the chat bots in customer service situations. Admittedly, this might be how they're trained and programmed more than what AI is capable of. If you've ever used these, all they're really doing is steering you toward support articles that may sound like they could help you. They generally do not ask contextual questions that get closer to the root of what you're after. So yeah, they're fine for the kind of "level 1" first line that's just following scripts, but when does your issue ever fit a script?

I had my tires replaced at my house today. They only had 28k miles, but two had already been patched and slow-leaked, and a third had a huge hole from something. Totally not fun thing to spend money on. But while they did cost more, it's certainly more convenient to have it done at home. That, and I don't have a spare, and it was very flat.

Beyond the convenience though, having stuff delivered, or services rendered at home, is actually much better for the world. Sure, the ethical and moral situations with Amazon are not great. But it is far more efficient to have drivers bringing stuff to you, and potentially dozens of others, than for you to get in your car and go to places to shop. It's better for the environment, too.

The weird thing is that this was more common back in the day, before cars became such a dominant part of our culture. Ask your grandparents about having milk delivered to their house (mine actually had a little door on the side of their house). I also get my propane delivered, infrequently as that might be. Obviously online commerce is almost entirely delivered. The pandemic seemed to bring us back to this, and then it stuck because it's so convenient. Not sure about where food is going to go, because it's never fresh and the fees are ridiculous.

So yay for new shoes on the car that I didn't have to go anywhere for. Though ironically this enables me to drive places. It's sun-powered, at least.