• 220 Posts
  • 663 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle

  • Depends on the season. In winter it’s a vintage 1980’s shirt-jacket thing that I found in my dad’s storage closet: red/black plaid, soft flannel exterior, thinly insulated. My parents had matching shirts and dad’s old one fits me perfectly.

    Pretty soon my favorite will be a thin blue cotton-linen button-down that’s perfect for hot summer days. And it goes well with my big straw shade hat.

    Thanks for asking. 😁









  • Medical device industry here. Some of our software and electrical engineers are using Claude as a sounding board for ideas, or as a starting point to find possible paths forward when they get stuck with a hard problem. Nobody trusts the model to give an accurate answer. Nobody is being encouraged to use AI models. At the end of the day, all work committed to a project is done by real humans with the normal review processes.

    Management is cautiously looking at potential uses for AI in our products, but there is a healthy dose of skepticism all around. If your machine is displaying diagnostic data to a doctor there cannot be any question as to whether the machine is hallucinating.




  • My parents had an old car with a manual transmission, no power steering, no power brakes, and no steering wheel lock. My dad and I had a game where we would shut off the engine about 1/4 mile from home and coast all the way into the garage. Whoever could coast the furthest without speeding or needing to restart the engine would get bragging rights. If you did have to restart the engine, you got points for putting it in gear and clutch starting rather than using the key.







  • InDesign is on subscription licenses like the rest of Adobe’s products, unfortunately.

    My wife does book layouts and miscellaneous graphic design work, and she’s been using Adobe tools for so long it’s like muscle memory. Using anything else that’s slightly different is akin to someone rearrange your kitchen while you are away. The tools you need are still there, but now you have to go hunting for every little thing.


  • For various reasons, my family is tied to a small number of programs that don’t have 1:1 equivalents on Linux. So far nobody is willing to deal with the inconvenience of switching to alternatives. I’m trying my best to convert them, though.

    If GIMP and Inkscape looked and felt closer to Photoshop and Illustrator, that would help greatly. Also, if I could find a good alternative to InDesign that wasn’t tied to a cloud service or a subscription license.