Fragments

Mounted the starlink mini onto the roof of one car. Drove around into a zillion different previously dead zones.

Review: just bought a second starlink for the other car.

Read this in the local paper about the local ski mountain, and the birth of snow making.

In Mohawk’s second season, Mohawk did not get any snow and resorted to ordering several tons of ice blocks, crushing them and spreading them on the slopes. This process was time consuming, costly and overall a worse experience than real snow. From this season, Shoenknecht got the idea to look into snowmaking. Shoenknecht enlisted the help of the TEY Manufacturing company, run by Wayne Pierce, Dave Richey and Art Hunt. The three engineers used the research of Ray Ringer to build the first snow making machines. These machines were brought to Mohawk and are the first documented case of a trial run of the snow making machine.

Examining Mohawk Mountain’s rich history - The Lakeville Journal

This winter has been a real one – so much better than last year, there's actual snow on the ground for the last few weeks. The ponds are frozen over, ready for ice skating.

In the years following his major breakthroughs with microwaves, thinking there might be a sort of electrical life to everything, Bose began experiments on vegetables. He attached electric probes to various vegetables, and claimed to record a "death spasm" in the form of a spike in electrical activity. He hooked a cabbage to a voltmeter in front of the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was reportedly horrified to witness the electrical "convulsion" of the cabbage as it was dropped in boiling water. Shaw, it must be said, was a vegetarian.

– The Light Eaters

Turn on search, ask it about the cornwall market in ct, and it spits out this gem

Recent Developments

According to local coverage, the market underwent a significant renovation and rebranding under new ownership. Will Schenk acquired the space in late 2022, renovated it extensively, and relaunched the venue as the Cornwall Market in January 2024—marking a new chapter for this iconic local business. LITCHFIELDMAGAZINE.COM

Pretty impressive overall.

When I worked at a newspaper, we were routinely dispatched to “match” a story from the Times: to do a new version of someone else’s idea. But had we “matched” any of the Times’s words—even the most banal of phrases—it could have been a firing offense. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of minor differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.

– David Shields, Reality Hunger

The context window on Gemini is really amazing. Both for the main app as well as notebookllm. I've been pulling entire books down from annas-archive and throwing them in, asking a bunch of questions, pulling out quotes, having it do further searches, etc.

Truely amazing how deep it will let you get into a topic so quickly.

I work with AI professionally and as an individual that thinks things are cool. Actually getting the overview and understanding the big picture vs figuring out practical things that work is very different, and depending on what I'm doing different things catch my attention.

Ksenia Se and I see a lot of the same stuff, but the things that catch my attention are quite different. Things like OpenAI releases, new mid-journey models, the dramas of OpenAI's board room or interesting Inflection "acuihires" are generally intersecting and gives you a sense of where the industry is going.

If you are in the trenches, as it were, there are slightly different thoughts. I'm very interested in things like Ollama, DeepSeek, and the Vercel AI SDK for example that aren't necessarily interesting from a general perspective but quite fascinating on what they can enable. I'm getting to be more of a claude champion (their artifacts are way better in practice, token caching amazing) which is sort of a gut feeling based on working different APIs.

ollama lets you run models in the privacy of your own computer; easy to download to "regular hardware", no "cost", and playing around with various parameter tweaking is super interest. There's something freeing about this.

DeepSeek is wild both in how cheap it was to train, but it goes back to the idea of how small can a foundation model really be. There's something very exciting with this, it feels transformational that smaller models will be smarter than we can imagine now.

The Vercel AI SDK is like low level code plumbing, that you technically don't actually need and you could probably just rewrite it all but it hits the sweetspot of abstractions and usefulness. Its a breath of fresh air after poking around with LangChain – what it attempts is much less, but the balancing of complexity and functionally is Just Better.

Getting your hands deep into it gives a different perspective and it's hard to generalize.

From Sherlock Holmes:

"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

On the one hand, lets remove some personal information because

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42292960

https://justine.lol/history/

I’ve recently started up a company called The Focus AI.

I’m going to keep writing up things here as I find them, and then cross posting them as it makes sense. Think of what’s happening over there as part of the new mailing list.