Diary for Wednesday, July 23rd

Slept a full night without interruptions for the first time in a while. I wonder if taking magnesium yesterday had something to do with it?

Woke up to find all three pigeons, parents and child, at the window this morning. They’re actually all just coming back as I write this. I hadn’t seen the young in like a week since it flew out, so I’m very glad to see that it is doing well! The parents have been cleaning the nest, preparing to lay another egg, I presume. Soon, there will be an entire flock of them.

I wonder if it’s another teaching moment, bringing the young while they clean the nest? These creatures never cease to amaze me; I don’t think any two month old human baby has ever managed to fly up to the seventeenth floor on its own strength, except, perhaps, John von Neumann.

I vacuumed up all the pigeon shit, which there was a lot of. Them cleaning the nest and breaking it all up into little pieces made it pretty easy to clean up. It’s all dried up, so not that hard to deal with. This should help them :).

I used GLM-5.2 + Pi to add an access level feature to the blog, where content can be marked public/friends/private on a per-file or per-block level and Hugo exports three different versions of the site depending on access level. I did have to interrupt it because it decided to find / ... and I got suspicious after 5 minutes of it hanging, but after that it ran unsupervised for 20 minutes and produced a fully working feature. It also independently thought of and dealt with the RSS side of things. Total cost: $0.35. Pretty impressed.

And lookie lookie:

def fun(thing=5):
    for x in range(thing):
        print(f"Hello {thing}")

Nicely styled code blocks :-).

I’ve written a (somewhat polemical) response to Codeberg’s recent anti-LLM statement.

Today I learned that Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash fame – one of my favorite books, by the way) has a substack. Like him, I also do a lot of hand writing, with fountain pens or Pilot G-2 gel pens, so it appears that great minds do in fact think alike.

It’s being a productive day today! I took modafinil this morning, and it dealt with my tiredness nicely. A small dose, 50mg, is plenty for me. I’ve started taking more of my supplements – magnesium, iron, omega-3, tryptophan, tyrosine – in general the past two days. I don’t routinely take all of those, but supplementing at least magnesium and iron is a good idea; I don’t eat much meat.