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The first is stuckness, a mental stuckness that accompanies the physical stuckness of whatever it is you're working on. The same thing Chris was suffering from. A screw sticks, for example, on a side cover assembly. You check the manual to see if there might be any special cause for this screw to come off so hard, but all it says is "Remove side cover plate" in that wonderful terse technical style that never tells you what you want to know. There's no earlier procedure left undone that might cause the cover screws to stick.

If you're experienced you'd probably apply a penetrating liquid and an impact driver at this point. But suppose you're inexperienced and you attach a self-locking plier wrench to the shank of your screwdriver and really twist it hard, a procedure you've had success with in the past, but which this time succeeds only in tearing the slot of the screw.

Your mind was already thinking ahead to what you would do when the cover plate was off, and so it takes a little time to realize that this irritating minor annoyance of a torn screw slot isn't just irritating and minor. You're stuck. Stopped. Terminated. It's absolutely stopped you from fixing the motorcycle.

This isn't a rare scene in science or technology. This is the commonest scene of all. Just plain *stuck*. In traditional maintenance this is the worst of all moments, so bad that you have avoided even thinking about it before you come to it.

The book's no good to you now. Neither is scientific reason. You don't need any scientific experiments to find out what's wrong. It's obvious what's wrong. What you need is an hypothesis for how you're going to get that slotless screw out of there and scientific method doesn't provide any of these hypotheses. It operates only after they're around.

This is the zero moment of consciousness. Stuck. No answer. Honked. Kaput. It's a miserable experience emotionally. You're losing time. You're incompetent. You don't know what you're doing. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should take the machine to a *real* mechanic who knows how to figure these things out.

It's normal at this point for the fear-anger syndrome to take over and make you want to hammer on that side plate with a chisel, to pound it off with a sledge if necessary. You think about it, and the more you think about it the more you're inclined to take the whole machine to a high bridge and drop it off. It's just outrageous that a tiny little slot of a screw can defeat you so totally.

What you're up against is the great unknown, the void of all Western thought. You need some ideas, some hypotheses. Traditional scientific method, unfortunately, has never quite gotten around to say exactly where to pick up more of these hypotheses. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20–20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination--"Unstuckness," in other words--are completely outside its domain.

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Decent month for music. Not a lot but a number of 4 stars.

4 star:
* Big Strong Man (Yakety Sax) (Blaggards)
Played this at a pickup band at the Canadian American Club in Watertown.
* Incredible (feat. General Levy) (M-Beat)
Always remember this from the Ali G movie
* Whistling Past the Graveyard (Screamin' Jay Hawkins)
* Lasagna ("Weird Al" Yankovic)
One favorite from my youth. And the accordion work is amazing.

3 star:
* Three-Thirty (AJR)
* Victoria's Secret (Jax)
* Man on Fire (Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros)
* Home (Vitamin String Quartet)
* 99 Words for Boobs - Robert Lund (Robert Lund)
I will miss Dr Demento

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Made a little score tracker for the game Without Fail.

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Played some would you rather - not quite that list but similar...

It's hard to convey just how big the new budget makes the country's immigration enforcement infrastructure.
The Bureau of Prisons? Bigger than that. The FBI? Bigger. The Marine Corps? Bigger even than that, by some estimates.

On the cultural evolution of morality and community and why so many people think Trump is good

let's see if your balls feel less clammy... ... they do! they feel fresh

Been spending a week on a lake with Lynette's extended family, working half-days.

Between work shifts and a low level travel anxiety I kind of get... I do think the trick is threading this needle of worry. Be too blasé and nothing gets done, and you could end in a worse situation. Be too anxious and you might end up being unproductive in avoidance strategies and the like, besides being miserable all along.

(Not that we have full control over how anxious we feel, but we do have some... where we direct our attentions to, how we reassure ourselves that resiliency will see us through.) hey remember when Clinton got derided for a haircut on the airport tarmac, potentially delaying flights? i mean turns out that was one flight delayed a matter of minutes, but Newark got completely closed for 4 hours so Trump could go watch a soccer game...
After Connecticut Lynette and folks and I got in a little Queens (including "Benfaremo- The Lemon Ice King Of Corona"), a touch of Manhattan, then Brooklyn and Coney Island, which was new to me - caught the
Coney Island Circus Sideshow and a bunch of rides including the legendary Cyclone and Wonder Wheel. #coneyislandusa

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Disgusting derilection of duty; the people have the right to know the justification when so much legal precedent about balnce of power among the three parts of government and what checks to presidentia power if any still exist:

"Since April 4, #SCOTUS has issued 15 rulings on 17 emergency applications filed by Trump (three birthright citizenship apps were consolidated).

It has granted relief to Trump ... in all 15 rulings.

It has written majority opinions in only 3.

Today's order is the 7th with no explanation *at all.*"

https://bsky.app/profile/stevevladeck.bsky.social/post/3ltx5bf74hs2qw

The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.

Visiting with my folks (mom/aunt), my mom was asking for tech help, the biggest part was going over some spam phishing and making sure she could ignore it. (Mostly that norton/mcafee 'you've been billed' crap along with the odd 'we charged you for your new mobile phone purchase, contact us if that was a mistake;)

Time was the "tells" for phishing were obvious (misspelled words, funky as hell URLs, weird formatting - besides the classic outlandish Nigerian royalty cover stories) and rumor was that was by design - it was a first filter only the gullible would through, anyone smarter than that low bar weren't worth trying for. But there's been upgrades in the professionalism, and this whole genre of fake-corporate that can look pretty real.

it's tough getting people suspicious enough and in the right ways - especially fraught as loved ones get a bit older and crystal clear rationalizing can get muddled in age - and it could get so much worse, between new ways of paying (venmo, zelle, whatever digital currency nonsense some techbros manage to make happen), and AI fueled scams, like that one I've heard about where they can fake a loved one's voice to mock up an interactive plea to help send bail money or whatever. (And now my mind is full of other threats like keyloggers and what not )

The 2 part scams where some human (soon to be AI) calls you to get your details as a follow up for a situation primed by email or text are HUGELY dangerous- the "helpful" voice getting back to you is such a vast reassurance. And once they get their hooks into you, there are weird reverse scams. Stuff where a small refund situation becomes oh we accidentally sent you TOO much money, we're made at you, you have to make this right.

Bedrock principles to try to instill in vulnerable folks - which is all of us, really -
* never EVER reactively give out any financial /payment information. 99% such requests are scammers; for the last 1% you have to insist on going to a well known URL and making your own path to login - never trust a link someone hands you.
* be even MORE paranoid about direct bank information; credit cards still carry some limited protections in a way debit cards etc don't. (other payment methods... well be careful of things that can automatically suck out from your bank account, glance at the transactions)
* I guess 2FA (where a bank or company will send you a text) can help, but make sure you haven't inadvertently told them (like they ask for your email or phone, then send you a message "to confirm its you"). These only work because you previously gave them the extra path.
* Like ignore messages that say "thank you for your order/renewal, let us know if its a mistake" - instead, keep an eye on actual withdrawal records from your account, and if you want to investigate something start from there - be suspicious of one-off billing notifications

Oy. I find my usual liberal sympathies are taxes trying to come up with any forgiving thoughts for these scammers, and I hope hammers of justice come down on them hard enough to be a deterent to others.

Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one line of code. By induction, every program can be reduced to a single line that doesn't work.

(Sean C. points out IBM made a one line program that indeed had a big)

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With Zoom-style meetings, I always tended to like having no background. Lately (sick of worrying about a messy room) I've been using that blurred out version, which splits the difference nicely. But lately I realized there was a perfect option for a guy named Kirk...

Executives and Expenditures -
it talks a lot about status, which reminds me of how... that's the real problem w/ billionaires. They will keep playing the game they do because money is such an easily quantified status... The other day I went to start my beloved '04 Scion xA (after it had sat two weeks outside, and presumably MA got some of the same deluge other places did) and it wouldn't move. Checked in with ChatGPT,described the problem, and it said the brakes were probably locked, and if I wanted I could carefully try rocking back and forth etc. And yeah, that seemed to solve it.

It makes me think that the problems with LLM are as much or more human and psychological as they are with the technology itself. We just don't have a setup in society where conventional wisdom, adjusted for the current circumstances (and sometimes just made up) is so available, or a society that will take care of people when the possible productivity boosts eliminate jobs (money is too busy funneling upwards to billionaires who use it to keep score in their prestige games.) And its ability to crib from artists to make novel blends also challenges us as a culture, and can provoke big existential questions. I had no idea how crabs swim, kinda like an underwater helicopter...

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"What you looking at?"
"WIkipedia page of Mycroft Holmes"
"Oh, was he real?"
".... You do know he's a movie character. right?"
"... ...hahahaha, oh yeah, right!..."

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You have to make some noise if you want to be heard.

I kind of slept on the movie "Sinners" - classic horror tropes, but where like Shawn of the Dead had British jokes, this has stylized Black culture of 1932 era Mississippi Delta with all the great music that implies. Great stuff!

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Oh goodie - looks like we already have AI succumbing to a baby version of the paperclip problem (i.e. the AI that we make so good at wanting to make more and more paperclips that it breaks down civilization in order to make more of them)... in this case it's AI scripts that ignore requests to shut themselves down, maybe somewhat to be ready to solve more math problems

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https://mediachomp.com/spite-patronage-and-cringe-commissions/ Way Too Hot Take: TypeScript is the Hungarian Notation of our time. Last weekend Lynette and I went with Wren to the New England Aquarium...

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Damn, Ozzy and Hulk Hogan in one week. Tough time for 80s kids.

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Gall's Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.
The corollary is devastating: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work.
This is why:
- Microservices migrations often fail when done as big-bang rewrites
- New frameworks struggle against battle-tested ones
- "Clean slate" projects often become technical debt faster
Start simple. Add complexity only when the simple system breaks.

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your doorbell can be part of a techno-authoritarian surveillance state and an ICE collaborator.

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Damn, Hulk Hogan was pretty gross. Amazing how hard it is to shake off my image of him from Saturday Morning Cartoons. (Same with Superfriends - DC will always seem like the REAL superheroes 'cause of that dang cartoon)

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