I was amused by “AI” when it took off in the winter of 2022-2023. My friends and I took turns generating comedic images, probing our imagination for the most incongruous prompts to see what humor could manifest. More than one year later, I’ve developed a distaste for generative technology, but more than that a sense of foreboding. I doubt that I have any new opinions here but I find it worth writing down anyway.

…and the jobs that benefit the most people pay the least. We’re incentivized to benefit the fewest people and wonder why resources are concentrated into the fewest hands. 2024-09-06: I found this expressed in almost the exact same way in a documentary about burnout. One of the most pernicious things about our current economic system is that the more your work benefits others in an obvious and immediate sense, the more your work has a clear and undeniable beneficial effect on other human beings, the less you are likely to get paid for it.

I’ve done it! Finally got my website all sorted. TLDR: RTFM. The config section of the docs had the answer the whole time; needed to set config to point to my subdirectory instead of the root. Clear your cache, and the web server’s cache. Band-aid is to open your browser’s network section of the dev tools and disable cache, which apparently also has the effect of requesting fresh content from the web server as well.

Finally got around to updating this dang website. I’m using straight Hugo, built on a WSL Ubuntu, and rsync’d over to my website (why is rsync on Windows so hard?). I might use quarto going forward to render any notebooks I have. For R and python I’m using micromamba to manage installation and environments. Formerly I’d relied on the R package blogdown to create the website; however, I felt that it abstracted just a bit too much of the process away, I wanted to be more involved in maintaining hugo settings and understanding the system a little better.

Twitch was at least 12 years old, perhaps as old as 14. Twitch was a centerpiece at my cousin’s wedding – a Chinese wedding – in New York City. Goldfish symbolize wealth, abundance, and fertility in Chinese culture. According to wikipedia, Jinyu (金鱼, the word for a goldfish) is a homophone for “gold in abundance”; therefore, they are perceived as suitable gifts for wedding. Facebook tells me the wedding was in 2011, but for some reason I seem to remember it being earlier.