busybee fluffy rambles

Just had a fascinating lunch with a 22-year-old Stanford grad. Smart kid. Perfect resume. Something felt off though.

He kept pausing mid-sentence, searching for words. Not complex words - basic ones. Like his brain was buffering.

Finally asked if he was okay. His response floored me.

“Sometimes I forget words now. I’m so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it’s not there, my brain feels… slower.”

He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain. And now his internal one was getting weaker.

Made me think about calculators. Remember how teachers said we needed to learn math because “you won’t always have a calculator”? They were wrong about that.

But maybe they were right about something deeper.

We’re running the first large-scale experiment on human cognition. What happens when an entire generation outsources their thinking?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m beyond excited about what AI and AI agents will do for people in the same way that I was excited in 2009 when the App Store was launched.

But thinking out loud you got to think this guy I met with isn’t the onnnnnly one that’s going to be completely dependent on AI.

Hi, I am once again writing to request a reconsideration of the state-wide Electric Vehicle Transportation Fee, the additional $75 line-item added to electric vehicles' car registrations in the state of Washington.

The purpose of this fee is supposed to be to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles, but it does exactly the opposite. This $75/year fee represents more than I pay for energy on my electric vehicle in any given year, and I, like most EV owners, charge my vehicle at home on equipment I paid hundreds of dollars for.

This is on top of the already ridiculously-high $150/year fee that is meant to offset the missing fuel tax, which already is for more than the total amount of fuel I would have bought in any given year.

I only drive around 1000 miles per year. I am disabled and on a limited income. I bought an older, used electric vehicle somewhat to reduce my already-low transportation costs but mostly to be better to the environment based on how little I drive to begin with, as the environmental impact of the oil changes that I no longer need was pretty significant, especially compared to how little I was driving.

This $225 total in fees means I am paying vastly more than my fair share compared to drivers of internal-combustion vehicles, and am being actively punished for making the right choice in terms of harm reduction on the environment.

I am also already paying more for the infrastructure offsets actually taken by my (again, seldom-driven) electric vehicle in the form of the two “additional vehicle weight” fees, which total $35 (split up into $10 and $25 for some reason).

A much more equitable approach would be to assess a much smaller fee across drivers of all vehicles, regardless of fuel type, which would actually encourage EV adoption, and would also generate more revenue for the state.

I urge you to please re-evaluate these regressive fees and to consider a more equitable means of offsetting infrastructure costs.

The vet just got back to me with the results of yesterday’s tests.

Her white blood count is elevated (indicating inflammation or an infection), and the radiologist says that the concerning bits on her lungs are just her asthma being especially bad right now.

So, we’re giving her a short course of Prednisone and hopefully that clears things up.

It’s unclear what caused the weight loss but given how enthusiastic she’s been about wet food and how meh she’s been about dry food, I think she’s just going to get a lot more wet food going forward. That’ll make it easier to give her the meds anyway.

The most important takeaway is that she is almost certainly not dying any time soon. Yay!

After having eaten a bunch of wet food last night and having had three doses of antibiotics, Fiona’s getting back to her usual cuddly/climby self. She isn’t sneezing anymore, and while she’s still a bit congested she snuggled up with me in bed this morning, and right now she’s being super snuggly and affectionate. She’s also purring super loudly, which she hasn’t done in a while.

I still haven’t heard from the vet about her bloodwork or x-rays but I feel like there’s a lot less to worry about now.

I finally got a bunch of stuff working on the new Sockpuppet website, including the music browser. Now people will have the ability to actually find something in my vast sea of content!

I still need to finish tagging a bunch of stuff to make it useful but having the functionality in place gives me motivation to do so.

I’ve also improved the “buy box” and added way more streaming providers to the sources (which of course requires more content to be filled out, too), and there’s a bunch of other functionality like being able to browse lyrics and song notes and such from album pages.

The really neat thing is that most of this stuff, even the dynamic stuff, is done using pure CSS! There’s a little bit of Javascript for a couple of things but I have some ideas about how I can remove that stuff, and it’s not like the javascript is particularly heavyweight anyway.

At some point I should release the templates as Publ samples, so that others can use this as a basis for building their own music sites too. Or something. I’m doing a lot of stuff that’s really taking advantage of Publ functionality under the hood.

Anyway, for those who follow me via a feed reader but haven’t added that site yet, it’s definitely ready to be added at this point, and I’ll be posting most of my music-related blogging over there from now on.