Hard-hitting journalism from the San Francisco Standard:

People who work at restaurants near the building said OpenAI employees dine at their businesses but don’t speak openly about their jobs. They do, however, often take their coffee cold and with milk, according to one barista at Dandelion Chocolate.

Not sure what we would do if we couldn’t confirm that people like iced lattes.

Swift’s string manipulation is one of its biggest misses. It focuses on Unicode clarity at a cost of what programmers actually need it to do. Converted this random Swift script to Python and its readability spiked.

Before:

let bold = "\u{001B}[1m"
let reset = "\u{001B}[0m"

for character in CommandLine.arguments[1...].map({ $0.uppercased() }).joined(separator: " ") {
    if let transform = map[character] {
        let firstCharacter = String(transform.first!)
        let remaining = transform[transform.index(after: transform.startIndex)...]
        print(bold + firstCharacter + reset + remaining)
    } else {
        print(character)
    }
}

After:

bold = "\033[1m"
reset = "\033[0m"

for character in " ".join(sys.argv[1:]).upper():
    if transform := map.get(character):
        print(bold + transform[0] + reset + transform[1:])
    else:
        print(character)

Part of the @system76 terms for purchasing hardware includes this weird provision:

You will not register or use any Internet domain name that contains an System 76 trademark or trade name (i.e., System 76) in whole or in part or any other name that is confusingly similar thereto.

The best part of macOS 14 is turning off iCloud Drive and still having CloudKit function.

Surprisingly easy to send myself pgp-encrypted email from a server without thinking about it:

… | { printf "Subject: subject\n\n”; gpg --armor --encrypt --always-trust --recipient zac@zac.us; } | sendmail -- zac@zac.us

Grabs my key via WKD (or keys.openpgp.org), encrypts it, then emails it. In reality I’ll hard-code my key in scripts; this was just testing, but how easy!

Moving from Fastmail to Proton Mail, it compressing mail contents reduces my email storage size from 5.7 GB to 1.7 GB.

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★☆☆: A fun but minor side story in the Fionavar Tapestry world. Happy to enjoy it, but a little outside of the things I find most satisfying in a Kay novel: a plot that lasts longer than a few days. Felt a lot more stretched out than it needed to be, and I never really doubted where the ending was going to be.

This episode of Sesame Street (5304) features a segment of a discussion between Sarafina and Meadowlark. Absolutely baller names. Like S-tier.

Empire of the Damned (Empire of the Vampire #2) by Jay Kristoff ★★★★☆: The world is so rich and interesting, and the added viewpoint really helps sell the expanded world. I wish I could say I was surprised by the ending, but it was projected from the beginning and without it the next book wouldn’t be possible.

Well, at least I didn’t accidentally shoot myself in the foot:

$ ansible -a “xz –version” all

xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.2.5
xz (XZ Utils) 5.4.1

Assuming these aren’t backdoored, too.

There’s something really fun about poking at a project monorepo: apps, browser extension, docs, and web all in one tidy place. I have no experience with React Native, but it was fun browsing.

I didn’t realize you could write arbitrary fractions in Unicode. On macOS, the shortcut key for the fraction character is ⇧⌥1. For example, “123⁄456” (depending on the text renderer).

By a magnificently large margin my favorite band of all time is mewithoutYou. I couldn’t describe why if all the forest trees were pens and all the oceans ink.

Anyway a lot of their final tour was recorded extremely well, which has been fun to enjoy slowly.

I am in awe of the contrast between these two tour videos of “Four Word Letter (Pt. 2.)”: June 22, 2007 and June 29, 2022

The Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★☆: After reading several of Kay’s novels in a row, this one felt like the rare miss. I enjoyed the story and world building, but it didn’t feel like I built up or resolved anything. It was kind of a glimpse into the life, not really a well-unified epic story. I did enjoy the long-term impact of The Sarantine Mosaic in some side conversation of characters in the book.

Vivaldi is such a great power user browser. I don’t trust extensions, largely; having built-in ad blocking and now forced dark mode is such a boon. And that’s on top of its ridiculous existing level of customizability.

Lord of Emperors (Sarantine Mosaic #2) by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: The back half of this novel really kept me on my toes; I couldn’t predict at all where we were going, and I loved it. As I’m finding more and more reading his back catalog, Kay’s ability to pull at emotional threads is unmatched; I’m sympathizing with the protagonists and antagonists alike!

Very impressed by Manet, an iOS music player for Jellyfin.

From Pebble Hunting:

In 1951, when Bobby Thomson homered in the ninth inning to win the National League’s regular season, that single swing—a regular-season swing—was worth about 31 percent in cWPA. It sent the Giants straight to the World Series. In the modern equivalent, it would be a home run that clinched a playoff spot and the Wild Card Series and the Division Series and the League Championship Series all at once. A regular-season swing like that no longer exists.

Monthly costs to stream baseball this year:

$73 YouTube TV (no MLBN)
$77 Hulu (no MLBN)
$95 Fubo (and +$11 for MLBN)
$100 DirecTV Stream (incl. hidden fees)

Cannot wait for the end of MLB.tv blackouts. I would gladly pay for just sports. This is far too expensive!

Updated 2024-04-11: Hulu appears to have gained MLBN in the intervening period here, making it the clear winner in this annoying race.

Sailing to Sarantium (Sarantine Mosaic #1) by Guy Gavriel Kay ★★★★★: I’m finding the best part of the author’s writing is the room to breathe and establish ideas and inferences myself without being bashed over the head with the conclusion. From start to finish the first of this two-part series let me soak up the rich world-building and amusing characters. The time-jumps were a bit unexpected, but helped set the stage, and I can’t believe I moderately care about chariot racing.