anotherevan

My admittedly more puerile thought upon reading that bit was to change to code so it only loads goatse.

"Why are you travelling with a blank phone?"

Detained in a room for twelve hours.

"Unlock your phone."

"No, I don't have to."

Detained in a room for twelve hours.

"Okay, okay, here's my phone."

I'm rather partial to MyBatis (and Liquibase) but I might have to give Jooq a try.

I really like this idea. Gonna need an "Awesome Axe" page that collects agents.

One idea I'm thinking of is, after an agent has been in use for a while, and built up and understanding of the task, would be something like, "Write a Python script to replace this agent."

I could imagine this would work with agents that are processing log files or other semi-structured data for example.

True, although I wonder if that was one of the points he is trying to make.

In any case, you could go to his Mastodon account listed at the bottom of the article and check out who he is following.

“For months, callers to the Washington state Department of Licensing who have requested automated service in Spanish have instead heard an AI voice speaking English in a strong Spanish accent.”

For some reason this reminds me strongly of an old play-by-email game called C++Robots[1]. I loved the idea, but the timeslice limitation[2] I found too annoying.

I had youthful dreams of re-implementing something similar that would run on the Java Virtual Machine, where you could run the submitted robots via the debugger interface so you could keep "real-time" in the game environment more authentic. Ideas are cheap, follow-through is hard.

[1] https://corewar.co.uk/cpprobots.htm

[2] https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/pbem_articles/cpprobots_environ...

> assume I'm an LLM

I've noticed a habit of late of people accusing a comment of being LLM generated if they disagree with it. It was getting quite tiresome a few weeks ago but seems to have died down.

I suppose it is possible that they are actually LLMs making the accusations? :-)

(I'm one of those weirdos that try to use proper grammar and complete sentences in text messages and instant messages.)

How have you been tracking down all the bits and pieces from your operating system that the agent still needs to do what it needs to? I'm working with Java projects and Gradle builds and the list of stuff is getting crazy.

The biggest hold-back for me is that, here in Australia, Google Wallet (aka Google Pay) is the only way you can do tap credit card payments that I know of. Can't with Paypal. Not with any banking apps that I know of.

It's just so damned convenient. And the recording of transactions on the phone saves me having to collect paper receipts.

I'm surprised it's only 90%.

Hey, at least you didn't pull the reflexive, "this must be AI slop!" comment that seems quite prevalent on HN lately.

It's also absolute awesome how every person's brain works the same way. It makes it some much more convenient that what works for one person works for every person.

I think perhaps the author's 35th lesson¹ is that brevity can lose nuance.

I interpreted this one to be in the context where having them in your orbit is causing you (or others) harm, and it ain't something you can fix.

¹ Actually it would be the 50th lesson. For some reason tacking on fifteen "bonus" lessons annoyed me. Felt like having your alliteration and eating it too. 51st lesson: math.

Is there any way to take a cloned voice model and plug into Android TTS and/or Windows?

I have a friend with a paralysed larynx who is often using his phone or a small laptop to type in order to communicate. I know he would love it if it was possible to take old recordings of him speaking and use that to give him back "his" voice, at least in some small measure.

I think we also need a /dehumanizer skill.

Part 2: https://00f.net/2026/01/19/xet-intro-2/

Hyperacusis is a real thing. One of my kidults has it, and yes, they use active noise cancelling ear plugs or over the ear headphones and sometimes the world is still too loud.

Sidled up next to the guy and said loudly, “Mr Smith? Mr Smith? The mistress is ready for you now!”

If you are enjoying the coffee, then no, you are not doing it wrong.

There are a lot of different recipes for how to brew coffee in an Aeropress.

I have two Aeropresses so I can make two cups at once for the two coffee drinkers in the house.

I recently got a second shelf rack[1] so they can hang side by side instead of needing to put a plunger in the tube when one is hanging behind.

[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B09NL9GDTQ

drawl “G’day mate.”

You've pretty much said what I was going to say. I think John was absolutely inspired in coming up with Markdown, but was a terrible steward. Or perhaps I should say he was unwilling to steward it.

My impression was he pretty much threw up a Perl implementation that was good enough for what he wanted, refused to refine it at all, and declared by the power vested in him by nobody in particular that if any parser implementation differed in behaviour to his (like, to fix bugs or make it better), wasn't true Markdown and wasn't allowed to be called Markdown.

Or perhaps I am being uncharitable in my interpretation of events.

> there is a Drupal 7 site that I need to migrate to something

You may be interested in Backdrop, which is a maintained fork of Drupal 7.

https://backdropcms.org/

(No experience with it personally. Only know about it from a friend who uses it.)

If nothing else, having to go to church every Sunday in my youth taught be to be able to sit still while bored off my brain for an hour a week.

I want to add that to my quotes database[1]. Would "Patrick May" be the right attribution?

[1] https://q4td.blogspot.com/

My reading is largely split between Sci-Fi and Australian crime fiction. So far this year I consumed 16 audiobooks and 68 ebooks. Given the Oz fiction would be a bit more unique to this audience, here are the highlights:

The Fall Between and Burning Mountain by Darcy Tindale recount the investigations of main character Rebecca Giles.

The Survivors by Jane Harper. Seriously, get any book or a shopping list written by Jane and you'll not be able to put it down.

Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth. Another author who's complete catalogue is well worth your time.

Black River and Broke Road by Matthew Spencer.

Unbury the Dead by Fiona Hardy.

Other authors worth noting are Margaret Hickey, Chris Hammer and Christian White.

On the sci-fi side of things, I found Infinite Archive by Mur Lafferty quite cozy. Also the Lady Astronauth Universe series by Mary Robinette Kowal, that starts with The Calculating Starts. Flybot by Dennis Taylor (of Bobbi-verse fame).

I was less enamoured with A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine than others are, and don't feel the need to tackle the second in the series.

I also revisited the John Cleaver horror series by Dan Wells that starts with the excellent I Am Not a Serial Killer.

I've just started Slow Gods by Claire North. I find her books a bit hit and miss for me but so far, so good. I absolutely love The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, and Touch was also quite good, but some of her others I could not finish or didn't event start as they were just not for me.

If you're on a Heinlein kick, try and catch Farmer In The Sky. It's about the only one of his I re-read every few years or so. Don't know why.

We've been using Element/Matrix for quite some time now and are fairly happy with it for the most part. The only major hiccup was hosting providers, not the software itself, per se.

We originally signed up with element.io back when they were called vector.im. Service was good, but a year or two in they decided they wanted to focus on those sweet, sweet enterprise licences and the pricing changes were untenable for our little 15 person operation. (I bear them little ill will for this, gotta do what you gotta do and all that, but it was a real PITA at the time.)

We moved to etke.cc who have been quite good. They were responsive to my modest support requests, and apart from being initially a bit surprised we wanted an unfederated server (which to their credit they dealt with with alacrity and aplomb) it's been a service we've just used and not had to otherwise think about.

The only sticking point was there was no way to migrate our messages from the older service. If memory serves, this was due to a deficiency in either Matrix or Synapse due to changing domains (originally an element.io customer subdomian). So always your own subdomain if you can is the moral of the story, I guess. I don't know if the migration story has improved in the years since.

If we had to leave Element/Matrix for whatever reasons I would definitely look at Zulip based on the many recommendations I see for it here. I think back when we went with Element I was quite interested in Zulip, but there just wasn't any good hosting options at the time and we didn't want to go with self-hosting (time-sink vs $$-sink).