Every year I get pumped for Advent of Code. Then however long the first day or two takes me I start to think of all the other things I could/should be doing with my time and it peters from there. Sigh, I love the idea of it, maybe sometime I’ll take a sabbatical in December and dedicate myself to it.

My wife and I have started painting our Christmas cards. I’m a big fan of Owen Pomery’s style, it kind of reminds me of Hergé. I copied this from Victory Point

I was telling my wife about the raccoon who broke into a liquor store, got drunk, then passed out in the bathroom. She said, “Sounds like an American racoon”, I guess he truly was living the American Dream.

If your worried, they sobered him up in the drunk tank and released him safely into the wild a few hours later.

My daughter really wanted to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” for our November movie night, you can’t rent it you have to subscribe to Apple TV to get it. This gives me at least 1 month to binge all the Apple shows people talk about. We are working our way through Severance.

Wonderful to see this from James Cameron:

…you’ve got generative AI, where they can make up a character. They can make up an actor. They can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. It’s like, no. That’s horrifying to me

He’s a futurist who has always embraced cutting edge technology in his films but only in service of the story, pushing the limits of his creativity and the creativity of those he works with. Generative AI will never do that; because it is not creative. Computers can not produce art.

I used to consciously unsubscribe from things but it’s just too much, now if I get something I didn’t sign up for it goes straight to spam. I’ll still try to unsubscribe from non-profits and stuff I care about; but a random Shopify store… straight to spam.

Whether or not they can ever make this thing safe for children… just don’t buy AI toys. Kids are happy to play with a cardboard box and some paints for hours and hours they don’t need AI.

Marketing in dev docs is super annoying. I was just combing through the docs for a gem, and 50% of each page was “oh it does this” and “wouldn’t it be great if you could do this? now your can!” I like a bit of that on the “Getting Started” page so I clearly know what the library is promising but after that just tell me how to use it!

The Guardian is running an op-ed: “Trump shrugged off Khashoggi’s killing. This is a new low”; but is it really? I’m so tired of all the “firsts” with Trump, does anyone have the capacity to still be shocked or surprised at anything this man does?

My daughter is going to a birthday party today, somehow this means making and writing the card falls on me.