I worked from home today so I ended up spending most of the evening tweaking my home keyboard firmware to make it work better with the sorts of computery things I do for work.
I realise this is purely a me thing, but one of my main issues is being able to easily type an em-dash and en-dash in Windows on my keyboard. Without that, I feel lost.
What I usually do is make it work like a Mac – alt-hyphen for an en-dash and shift-alt-hyphen for an em-dash, but this keyboard has too few keys so the hyphen is on a layer, so that would be four keys for an em-dash, which requires a bit more dexterity than I typically possess.
This post reminded me of one of my favourite stories from my old job. I was working at a research library and got a call from a librarian at a departmental library. She said, essentially: I know it’s a long shot but I’m looking for this specific document that was used for this one-off event 25 years ago and which never had any official status and which we know exists but doesn’t seem to be mentioned publicly anywhere.
An hour later I called her back: I don’t have a copy of the document but the guy who wrote it is currently driving back from Bunnings and when he gets home he’ll email it to you. Is there anything else I can help you with?
I could hear her jaw hit the floor over the phone.
Sometimes when you’re good at your job it can look like magic. Finding out shit is literally my job, but it’s nice when people appreciate it. https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/112453470424319654
Some doofus thinks my email is his email and mostly he just signs me up to spam but yesterday I got emailed a login and password for a medical patient portal for him.
I, too, have been assigned an American who uses my email to sign up for various things 😡
I did manage to greatly reduce the volume by noticing that the sign-ups suggested an approaching significant life event, so I emailed a few of the businesses and told them that they'd be losing the customer unless they reached out and fixed the email address.
It occurs to me that you’d only use AI to write for you if you believe you’re not good at writing, and if you’re not good at writing you have no way of discerning if the AI is wrting well for you, and in the process you’ll never get any better at writing yourself.
@damonism I've been using ChatGPT to do some social media copy (not here, for work) for me the last few weeks, mostly because I'm too fucking lazy to do it myself and I just want something there and bland corporate speak is something it can do pretty well.
Still tweak it manually to do things like fix Seppo spelling and make sure it's not saying anything utterly insane. But I am starting to find it useful in doing the heavy lifting for me.
@damonism I think this is the trap of any kind of AI creations.
What the fuck is the point of living if we're not learning and growing?
What the fuck is the point of a life where the only thing we can meaningfully get better at, is cajoling computers into giving us something closer to what we want?
This morning I was walking dog under some oak trees and an acorn fell out of the tree and hit me directly in the ear and knocked my AirPods out of my ear and into the dirt.
Apple: Because privacy we do on device AI!
Also Apple: Depsite the fact I somehow have the public holiday listed four times in my calendar, my phone can’t work out I’m not going to work today.
Went to buy an Easter egg at Haigs today at lunch time and there was a queue and a crowd controller (who was handing out chocolate, which is a handy thing for a crowd controller to be able to do).
Have seen a bunch of people walking around this bit of Canberra in academic gowns so I can only assume there is a graduation ceremony at the Comvention Centre, because there are no universities around here.