Notices by Amir E. Aharoni (aharoni@wikis.world)

@evan @datn Not familiar personally. It's a phone representative from a medical services company who reads questions from a script without pausing to consider that the script occasionally makes no sense.

Such things happen very often, and this instance was particularly amusing.

Somebody has just asked me if I received COVID-19 vaccine before the outbreak of COVID-19.

So I said that I didn't, because the COVID-19 vaccine didn't exist before the outbreak of COVID-19.

So they said: "oh, so you didn't receive the COVID-19 vaccine?"

And I said "no, I did receive it, but not before the COVID-19 outbreak. Because, you know, the COVID-19 vaccine didn't exist before the outbreak. I received it during the outbreak, like most other people."

"Oh, I see, you received it... during the COVID-19 outbreak. Mmm... OK."

This actually happened.

For well over twenty years, I've wondered whether the actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Richard Dreyfuss are related to the famous French soldier Alfred Dreyfus. Today, I finally checked Wikipedia.

Julia is related, Richard isn't.

@evan On Fediverse and elsewhere, chunks of up to 20-ish lines of LLM-generated code that you actually understood and carefully tested are okay. And there can be many such chunks. But if a chunk is longer than 20 lines, it's highly unlikely that anyone actually understood it and tested it. Whenever I hear people saying that they created "whole apps" or "whole websites" using LLMs, they usually later add "it was impressive initially, but didn't actually work".

@evan LOL. They don't yet have anyone that they love so intensely that they are very interested to see them in concert, but when they do, I'll go to the end of the world for that.

I did take the older one to see the LEGENDARY Russian band Aquarium in Boston. I'm much more of their fan than he is, but I did use some of their quieter songs as lullabies when he was much younger, and he identified them. They are playing in Toronto and some other North American cities soon.

@evan True.

@evan
I flew from Israel to see:
Sonic Youth in Strasbourg.
Pixies in Coachella (which also had Flaming Lips, Radiohead, Trail of Dead, Mogwai, Stereolab, and The Cure).
Pavement in New York.
And perhaps I should mention that I drove from Providence to New Jersey and back the same day to see Herbie Hancock.

I'm not wealthy, I love music.

I'm not following new @Mastodon features closely. It looks like this is a relatively new feature: suggestions of accounts to follow. I find it quite good in principle. Unfortunately, it appears to be broken in #RTL languages: the suggestions go from right to left, but the arrow that is supposed to allow scrolling to see more suggested accounts only points to the right, so it can't be used. How do I even report it?

@legoktm @LucasWerkmeister @evan perhaps you know?

@MastodonEngineering

I'm a forty-five-year-old man, and I've been using desktop web browsers for twenty-eight of them, and only a few months ago I learned how to highlight text that is a hyperlink without clicking the link: by holding Alt why highlighting. I use it many times a day now. How did even use the web before that?

In case you still didn't know it, now you do.

Thank you @jhsoby for teaching me this.

The wife left me with two kids for a week.

— "If you don't know what to do about school, clothes, food, etc., do you know who to ask?"

— "I guess I can't always call you because you're in another time zone. Did you train a language model on your emails?"

— "No, but you're close. I have been training a language model for seven years. It's our daughter. She knows everything you need. You should talk to her more."

I've been using Instagram for two years, and there's something I don't get.

I mostly post pictures and videos of:
* my city, #Providence, and some other places I visit
* food I make
* music events
* selfies

Consistently, selfies get the most ❤️s, by far. Food is at the second place. Music and #Providence get the fewest, even though these are my favorite ones.

I wonder if this what people really love, or if an algorithm drives it somehow. Am I really that handsome?

@LucasWerkmeister @tamzin I love how UTC is intentionally wrong in both English and French.

Два года назад Константин Сонин предсказывал в подкасте ФБК, что путинский режим не протянет больше двух лет. Я себе тогда сделал напоминание проверить. К сожалению, не сбылось.