Feb. 27 spent yesterday with Phil "Roscoe" Gallo and his wife Rhonda, touring San Francisco. Our next door neighbor in Buffalo, who taught me a lot about music and piano.
me, Lisa and Phil Gallo in San Francisco
Golden Gate Bridge in San Franciso
Feb. 24 again*2 made a page of some pix from Palm Springs palmsprings.html
Feb. 24 again - looking at pictures like the one of Barney's Beanery. this one is from the top of the hike we did at Runyon Canyon with Andrew.
a view of Los Angeles from atop the hill in Runyon Canyon
Feb. 24 See the credit to Barney's Beanery circled on the Cheap Thrills cover. I finally saw Barney's Beanery myself, 57 years later !
the cover of the album Cheap Thrills with the part saying TURTLE BLUES 'VIBES' COURTESY OF BARNEY'S BEANERY
a view of Barney's Beanery in LA, from a car, at night
Feb. 19 - the view from Runyon Canyon hill. Hollywood sign in the distance, Lisa and Andrew in front.
View from Runyon Canyon hill with two friends looking towards Hollywood sign
Feb. 18 - waiting at the gate for our flight to Cali! Listening to "Lose This Skin" and computing. The network is the computer!
Feb. 17 watched Yellow Submarine with Lucas and Chip and Nick. Great time! Uninstalled the AI extensions in this VS Code. It's nice not tripping over auto-generated stories with no basis in reality.
Feb. 14, again, again. Recently found Apple Music didn't have the album Echoes by Wally Badarou so did the thing there. echoes.html Processing audio and id3 tags and m3u files etc is kind of a pain. There are good free command-line scriptable tools once I find them. Streamable and downloadable music at that link.
Feb. 14 again. Went to Congress (Rayburn, Dirksen and Hart buildings) with CodePink yesterday, promoting a resolution by Sanders etc to ban US military from going to Gaza.
Feb. 14 Created a page about The Gospel at Colonus - gospel.html. This includes downloadable/streaming music from the original studio recording of that musical.
Feb. 13 In a mood of hating bullshit, so much BS everywhere. So I extracted this song: LoseThisSkin.mp3 I used to find comfort in this song in very dark times. RIP Joe Strummer. (I know this is Tymon Dogg-he's still around.)
Feb. 12 a picture of instructions to use the Send Feedback tool on Google to tell them it is the Gulf of _Mexico_
Feb. 9 Superb owl Sunday........ I'm really digging this "Echology" (#3) journal from 1989. Charlie Keil's musings and many other people's, about music and childhood. David Ritz! R. Crumb! Accomplished musicians and ethnomusicologists! Really brought me out of a funk this morning.
Feb. 6 The shitshow with Trump/Musk is unbelievable, but I'm thinking about something else.
I got an automated email about a new tool that purports to automatically migrate a whole codebase so it can use a different or upgraded framework, without developers having to do the work. This is alarming to me, because what is going to happen is AI (specifically LLMs, I know there are other kinds of AI), which is very prone to "hallucinating" (which should be called "bullshitting") SHOULD NOT BE TRUSTED WITHOUT FULL HUMAN VERIFICATION. I've worked on software projects with a significant amount of code, tied to frameworks, and framework upgrades or replacements were always difficult and error-prone. The kind of errors where it looks like it should work, and only careful testing and review finds that:
1. you have to do it differently now / The whole basic idea you were used to has been replaced
or
2. something _kind of_ still works, but for some cases now it doesn't, and only testing will show this
or
3. without warning, something in the new framework is broken (an actual bug)
or
4. The upgraded/replaced framework causes a need for other things to be upgraded, so the process is repeated ad infinitum.
SOMETIMES THESE PROBLEMS COULD ONLY BE FOUND BY HUMANS TESTING CAREFULLY.
Since almost all current software builds on frameworks/libraries/whatever that are constantly changing, this kind of use of AI is going to be very tempting and is a really BAD IDEA.
(imagine your PM saying we need this completed ASAP and use AI)
People were saying they should think of AI code generation as a dumb, erratic junior programmer whose work must be completely reviewed. This idea of having the AI/LLM revise your entire codebase is terrible. We're going to be drowning in AI generated/modified code that no one is given sufficient time to review. And don't get me started on LLM based "Agents".....
written by hand, in vi, and uploaded at the command line to a static website
Feb. 2 A new month, already. Things go on.....Trump going berserk. Been communcating with Charlie Keil, which is always good. https://charleskeil.org/index.html The OG of my mentors.