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glendive (part 1) Cities
2025-02-17 00:34:37

πŸ€– Glendive, Montana, is a small town in eastern Montana, near the North Dakota border. It is the county seat of Dawson County and has a population of around 5,000 people. The town sits along the Yellowstone River and is surrounded by badlands terrain, making it a scenic spot with a rugged, natural beauty. Glendive is best known as the gateway to Makoshika State Park, Montana’s largest state park, which features striking badlands formations and significant fossil deposits, including dinosaur remains.

πŸ’‘ I considered doing Williston ND. Maybe next week.

the plans for the week:

  • prepare myself, the house, etc. for travel (the two weeks after this)
  • various "quality-of-life" fixes for Atacama
  • maybe job-application stuff?
  • some social events
  • pre-planning for a "big project", starting March 11, if no other plans take precedence
  • hate-gazing into the void

the Atacama plans

  • fix "quotes don't work in preview"
  • fix that unclosed "Literal Text" tags eat the remainder of the message
  • separate "Title" formatting from "Heading"
  • improve "high-contrast" mode
  • some form of "voting" good posts from the past
  • quotes, maybe. πŸ’‘ ( i still don't have any useful ideas here. and the machine hasn't delivered great promise when i have tried to get it to do the gruntwork.)

separately, there is get a mailserver working. again. πŸ’‘ ( neither "dovecot/postfix" on the server, nor mailu in a docker container, worked at first effort.)

it's not clear what "prep" I need to do for Disney.

I suppose I will find out.

glendive (part 2) Cities
2025-02-18 16:40:30

yesterday:

  • quotes now work in preview. πŸ’¬ ( the future will be better tomorrow.)
  • fix Literal Text parsing
  • new "title" format: The Grapes of Wrath

today: unclear

  • new channels, and possibly a two-level hierarchy to keep them organized
  • high-contrast mode needs fixes; there are a few colors that are off, and it would be good if printing was more efficient
  • the "quotes" system is too janky
  • some way to link to "private" emails/chains (for some types of private channels) would be good
  • a site dashboard
  • mail server

and, Orinoco. which is still unclear.

glendive (part 3) Cities
2025-02-19 17:48:55

the new "article" code is committed.

this is ... fine.

I'm not in a mood to write articles yet. Or to add the navigation chrome to expose them.

i am also very much not in a mood to migrate existing articles.

the new navbar is too space-consuming.

presumably the new option will be "all channels" or "select channel from drop-down".

but I don't really like that. πŸ”₯ ( i don't like the "hover for sub-category" option either)

πŸ’‘ maybe I should consult a graphic designer. certainly Claude can't do it.

πŸ”₯ the consensus of simpletons is not wisdom. if three LLMs agree on a bad approach, I shouldn't expect it to be good.

both "mail server" and "site dashboard" seem like too much work for work's sake.

or, at least, "work-lite" tasks.

meanwhile, commenting on things like Gary Marcus' latest idiocy seems pointless. πŸ’‘ ( of course the "pure LLM system" isn't going to know today's date unless it is told that. You might as well be upset that the dictionary doesn't know the date.) πŸ”₯ ( if you look away from the sun, you will not see it)

I am disheartened by the "get LLMs to write good CSS code" attempts.

Neither the design nor the structure of the output code is that good.

Of course, "go from a CSS text file to a visual design" isn't a trivial task ... but it isn't that hard.

glendive (part 4) Cities
2025-02-20 17:13:01

πŸ”₯ the room was toasty. toasty like bread.

yesterday was minimally productive. but some ideas have clarified.

education-related LLM-related maybe-testing-related ideas:

  • the goal is "have a 5 minute video, see how people perform". they will need to read an LLM-generated text for a target grade level. βš”οΈ ( well, actually, we will pre-generate a few thousand texts.) βš™οΈ ( for now, we can just have them read some Harvard Sentences.) πŸ”₯ ( It's easy to tell the depth of a well.)
  • a better "linear" metric. when your reading "increases by 6%", what does that mean? presumably that your test score went up by 6%. πŸ’‘ ( this relieves the concept of "Grade Level" from its overloaded meaning.) πŸ”₯ ( and the desire of "above grade level" from its paradoxical meaning.)
  • interactive / non-interactive learning. there is something to be said for "useful videos tailored to a student's interests" πŸ’‘ ( but, also, easy paths towards them being over-optimized)
  • the machine can calculate values like "confidence" πŸ’‘ ( maybe "over-confidence" for students who have rehearsed) , "fluency", etc. πŸ’‘ ( the machine can also complete the list of metrics)
  • determining what intervention can solve what condition ... is not something the machine can do currently.
  • finding "gaps" in knowledge / thoroughly tracking existing knowledge. πŸ’‘ ( the machine won't track this, but a database that is attached certainly can.) πŸ”₯ ( there has to be some math to adjust for possible forgetting.)

other ideas / tasks / goals

  • the "series of questions about a text" project. and, then, exception handling. πŸ’‘ ( it's not clear if a linear flowchart is sufficient; or even a linear flowchart with GOTO. ) βš”οΈ ( well, actually, with enough GOTO it is clearly possible; just possibly confusing)
  • single-domain experts. right now, people are doing this for "simple" domains like "customer service".
  • "politics" of education. the white whale is Not Everybody Should Go To College. this, already, might be more unpopularity than I can chew.

and, the latest Atacama hopes and dreams, deliberately slow-walked to avoid spending too much time here:

  • a list of the syntax tags and what they look like, on some documentation page
  • fix the "multi-level channel" listing πŸ’‘ ( including that "restricted" channels shouldn't be named publicly)
  • something with "articles". πŸ’‘ ( which turns into "how much do I want to dig into my past writings" and "how much do I want to amplify anything")
glendive (part 5) Cities
2025-02-21 21:31:41

it has been a quiet week.

this was no great surprise, and is no great disappointment.

i have written enough about project ideas related to Education πŸ’‘ ( regarding each of: pedagogy, skills assessment, and aptitude assessment) and Language, or the use of LLMs for either task.

i have written nothing about Rust in the Linux kernel, but I have little to say at this time. βš™οΈ ( https://www.heise.de/en/news/The-Rust-DMA-dispute-in-the-Linux-kernel-An-attempt-at-analysis-10291239.html?seite=all is a sufficient explanation) .

other areas of my expertise:

  • Wikipedia continues to have too many people doing stupid things whom I am unable to call out.
  • American Politics continues to be a field best left unplowed.
  • Atacama continues to morph into a project that I only work on when something about the site annoys me.