July 31 ThreeViewsOfASecret.mp4 This is so beautiful! So sad how Jaco's life ended, and I think he was being a bit manic even in this video. I'd feel manic too if I had written and
was playing something this nice. RIP Jaco/Mr. Pastorius.
July 30 ** 2
As can be seen, I'm working on the RSS feed system I have. Apparently an "image tag" of HTML makes it through the RSS.
July 30
July 29 added video Hedges2025-07-29.mp4
July 28 ** 5 -- seeing if I can add RSS.
July 28 ** 4 -- maybe should attend this: https://html-day-dc-2025.vercel.app/ !!!! (https://html.energy/html-day/2025/).
July 28 **3 -- read something praising the old days of the web. Can't find it now, but it led me to https://neocities.org where it is easy to create a static site for free.
Domain names, video, etc, is a little more work, but it'd be nice to see people go back to basics. I whipped this up: https://harpo.neocities.org
July 28**2 - MehdiHasan.mp4 This is an amazing performance by Mehdi Hasan. If only he could run for president! I extracted it so there are way fewer commercials and it can be freely shared and preserved.
July 28 - https://www.timesofisrael.com/knesset-votes-71-13-for-non-binding-motion-calling-to-annex-west-bank/
Seems like this should have gotten more attention. It's "symbolic", but it shows their intentions. Maybe they're going to just quietly carry this out while we're all watching Gaza.
July 26 - Support public radio! Donate to your local station. See https://cpb.org/aboutpb/what-public-media#supportpb.
This video talks about how important it is: PublicRadioVsColbert.mp4
July 22 again ** 2 - It's been in the news, the Venezuelans sent to CECOT were sent to Venezuela. A trade for some Americans that were held in Venezuela.
Has this whole thing been a cynical game, to get the Americans out? The legal issues
of contempt of court etc. are not at all solved by this. Glad people are out of CECOT, but
the illegal actions of the Trump adminstration in all this have not been properly dealt with.
July 22 again - a brief dialog with llama3.1. I wrote a python program for the game of War, which was the subject of
a lot of classes at Don Bosco. During the time at DBCR, I figured out what I think is a
very clean way to handle all possible events, including some unlikely ones. I pasted the code
into llama3.1 and it summarized it, but it didn't "understand" it completely. One of its suggestions is
totally wrong, I think. So I asked it to improve the code. What it came back with didn't run (a couple bugs) and changed the
functionality - added some and removed some. I told it what it no longer did, and it gave new code that also doesn't run,
and still doesn't have the lost functionality, and has a new bug. It's like a parlor trick; it's producing
English text and code but it's "close but no cigar". It doesn't "understand" what I told it.
It did rearrange the code into a "structured programming" style, I had written one function for everything. It wasn't that big a function, though.
For free-as-in-beer software, though, it's amazing as a technical achievement. But I don't know if it's useful as it seems unreliable.
July 22 Loving the Late Show with Stephen Colbert rn, DVR is a pleasure. Daily Show as well. Good stuff to start the day!
July 18**5 still not impressed by AI. it(deepseek 1.5) spews out a lot of text but it's pretty useless ramblings about its "reasoning". For laughs,
I pasted in the Ecclesiastes quote from Orwell's "Politics and the English Language " (remembering freshman comp :) ) and asked it to rewrite it.
What it produced no longer meant the same thing at all, actually the opposite. Seems like a waste of time and resources. Llama 3.1 is somewhat better, though.
Its "poetic" rewrite of Orwell's example of a modern English version is sort of flowery, but I think the original is a lot better. 🤷
July 18**4 running some LLMs - Llama4 taking a long time to download. DeepSeek 1.5 b gives well-written English language responses to questions about Hector Lavoe, El Cantante, and The Sirens of Titam that, while proper grammar, are COMPLETELY WRONG. It is using the AMD GPU. Sigh....
July 18 again**3 - I'm sitting here uploading these videos I just downloaded and recombined, while having ollama pull a llama4 model - wirelessly, from MacBook M1. Computing capabilities nowadays are really insane! Maybe we could
stop the hardware upgrade grind and enjoy what we have.
July 18 again, again - grabbed this, too. RubenPedroNavajaJOLC.mp4 I like how the trumpets,
including Wynton Marsalis, just sit (stand) this one out. Salsa as concert music. Great musicianship, audio and video. This one was available to download in 4K but I didn't go that far.
July 18 again - Thanks to Elizabeth Croydon on Bluesky, I found my way to this:
RubenElCantanteJOLC.mp4 (I wanted to liberate this video, thanks to the great folks at yt-dlp).
Ruben wrote this song for Hector Lavoe, apparently. Interesting arrangement. I like that he says "Oye, Hector" .... Kind of decent musicianship..... 🙄😂
July 18 - Interesting book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/proof-the-art-and-science-of-certainty-adam-kucharski/21778148?ean=9781541606692&next=t& PROOF by Adam Kucharski. On certainty and evolving ways of attaining it.
July 11 - It's just shy of FOUR MONTHS since this happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.G.G._v._Trump
These men have been in CECOT (CECOT.pdf) ALL THIS TIME. Our government did this.
July 6 again - I love Vonnegut so much. This revbobby.html is an excerpt from a
speech a character in the novel The Sirens of Titan gives - imagine a fundamentalist preacher delivering this.
July 6 - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250703-how-the-biosphere-2-experiment-changed-our-understanding-of-the-earth This experiment is really important! These people like Musk that
think we're going to move to Mars are delusional.
Tilman estimates that, if future space colonies are anything like Biosphere 2, they'd cost $82,500 (£61,000) per person a month to live in, and even that would be no guarantee of sustaining human life. "It's incredibly expensive to try to replace the services that the Earth's ecosystems provide for free to humanity," Tilman says.
We need to realize there are things we don't know that the Earth does for us.
"I think that was a really important lesson to learn: that that [soil] microbiome, even though we can't see it, is extremely influential," Adams says.
July 4 - Not writing about current events, which are mostly horrible. Thinking about RMS (Richard Stallman). His website https://stallman.org has a "Political Notes"
section, visible right away and can be loaded as a page by itself. I mostly agree with his notes and sometimes find things there
I didn't find myself. He's a little extreme about "Software Freedom". For instance,
he recommends an actionnetwork.org campaign but includes lengthy instructions on "how to use it without running non-free(sic) Javascript".
Looking at one of their campaigns, viewing source, the Javascript seems to be Bootstrap and a small file with some pretty transparent code.
The whole idea of "software freedom" as he defines it means access to the source code, in the preferred form for development, and possibly
restricting reuse of that source under less "free" terms. This would make sense, if there could be a world of applications that followed these rules.
There's a mindset or assumption, though, that what you run will be based on some definable piece of source code. Javascript served to a browser can
be dynamically generated, or just revised, pretty much instantaneously. A lot of computing now is done by browsers interpreting
Javascript, sometimes large quantities of it. Caching aside, all that code is possibly
revised every time it is run. I think this paradigm of computing may render his beloved GPL
sort of obsolete.
Stallman is a public figure and tries to set an example of how to live, for instance, refusing to pay except with cash when at all possible,
trying not to patronize questionable companies, etc. He has many detractors and they may have some valid points. Looking at his "Political Notes" page today, though,
I do think he has a lot of good ideas. I actually went to a dinner with him, like 15 years ago, with other FOSS (look it up) enthusiasts. At the time I tried to tell him I thought cloud computing
was a good thing for allowing people a platform for less money. He was opposed, because it didn't involve complete control over the "software freedom".
July 2 - another month. Forgot to say "Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit" yesterday morning; didn't think of it til I'd already
spoken about something else. :( Our 30th wedding anniversary is the 8th. Lots of terrible news about the US and other places. It hasn't hit me directly -
sort of guilty about that. Don't want people to miss these two videos:
MilesQuintetItaly.mp4 colorized and enhanced version of
video of Miles Davis Quintet Teatro dell'Arte, Milan, Italy, October 11th, 1964.
MilesQuintetItalyBW.mp4
Non-colorized, possibly more authentic, version of
Miles Davis Quintet Teatro dell'Arte, Milan, Italy, October 11th, 1964
also:
AllOfYou.html a page with a piano transcription and mp3 of the quintet
on July 27 1963 (with George Coleman instead of Wayne Shorter).