busybee fluffy rambles

So, today I took a rather small trip down to Tacoma, and stopped at a friend’s place in Puyallup on the way back. I very quickly discovered that in the current cold weather, my Leaf consistently had an actual range of around half of what it predicted, and if I’d relied on its range estimate I would have probably been stranded around 5 miles from home.

Some thoughts about lighting fires, both literal and metaphorical.

Today I found out that the Hobbes OS/2 archive is shutting down.

I ran this archive back in the 90s, when I was a student at NMSU. It was, for reasons not worth getting into, one of my ancillary duties when I worked part-time for the IT department.

The tech world is abuzz with the announcement of the Rabbit R1, a little handheld AI assistant thing that has an interesting goal.

The tl;dr is that it’s a ChatGPT model that will run little AI agents (called “rabbits”) on your behalf to make complex API requests for you. I actually think it’s a pretty cool idea and one of the few things that I don’t hate about the modern AI push (ethics of ChatGPT aside, of course).

At $200 for the hardware it’s obvious that the LLM is running in the cloud somewhere, and it’s not like the other stuff wouldn’t also require cloud to operate anyway, though, and that raises the one big question I have about it: who foots the bill for the actual backend services? Because at $200 it’s probably being sold at-cost or for a small profit, and operating the necessary cloud services ain’t free.

A random conversation tonight awakened a memory in me, namely, back in the 90s, we didn’t refer to fursonas as fursonas, but as “personal furries,” and I had it in my mind that the term “fursona” actually started out as derisive and came from an anti-furry space. Which led me on a bit of a quest.

>>> import datetime
>>> apollo = datetime.datetime(1969,7,20,20,17)
>>> delta = datetime.datetime.now() - apollo
>>> apollo + delta / 2
datetime.datetime(1996, 10, 13, 20, 57, 7, 893840)

Anything that happened on or before October 13, 1996 is now closer in history to the Apollo 11 moon landing than it is to today.

It’s way too easy to get heated while in the thick of things and for bad-faith interpretations to take over from the point anyone’s trying to make, and that is absolutely a two-way street.¹

For now I’ve removed Toot! from my phone and DNS-blocked plush.city from my home network, so hopefully any posts I make to Mastodon are just from my automatic crossposter (like this one). I’ll still (eventually) see replies to my blog posts that come in as Webmentions, but hopefully not being Always So Online will be better for my mental health, which hasn’t been great as of late and I’m definitely lashing out at others much more than I would like.

I forgot to check up on my previous annual goals post, but better late than never, right?

Notes to self:

• 6 minutes of kick time seems like a lot until you suddenly have to patch your mold because you’ve noticed there’s leaks in it
• Adding more water after it starts to kick does not slow it down, it just makes it fail entirely
• 1mm is not enough thickness on your outer shell, either
• Starting with a 100mm square pot was probably a bit ambitious
• It’s probably easier to mix the plaster in multiple small batches instead of trying to make it all go at once

Oh well, it was a good learning experience, as long as I actually learned from it.