Today is Father’s Day so it was nice to wake up to a card and keychain my son made for me. My wife (and kids, kind of, I guess?) got me a pellet grill which I’m super excited about! It’s a grill/smoker combo and I can’t wait to put it to good use; it should arrive this week sometime.
It was also my daughter’s 12th birthday this past week. We did a combo birthday/father’s day meal out yesterday for hot pot. It was a huge hit - I just wish it wasn’t so expensive. We spent 3 months in Taiwan in 2015 which my daughter still remembers and we fell in love with hot pot then.
This past week I wrote about…
- …adding a number of people to my Junited 2024 post. Check it out to see what I added this week!
- …on creating a postroll instead of a blogroll.
Interesting Links From The Week
- There’s a number of AI related articles for the week. For starters I’ll link to this discussion from today wherein Apple confirms it’s AI stuff is carbon neutral so not quite the environmental hazard expected. Here’s more on their model. Supposedly the image generative part is trained on licensed stock images but the written side is trained on “the open web” which is still quite problematic. If you are interested in blocking the AI web crawlers sucking up your stuff to train on, this is a good write up. Just be aware the bots don’t always respect robots.txt and also sometimes spoof user agents.
- I’m not totally against the idea of AI (including generative models) but I do think it’s quite the fad and a lot more attention needs to be payed to environmental and ethical issues. With that said, I think this post is worth reading.
- Wired posted a fascinating “dive” into the Titan submersible tragedy this week. It’s long, shows all the different ways the tragedy should have been averted and well worth a read. originally read in Apple News
- USA Today released a story about the percentage of parents that have loaded guns unlocked at home. It’s tragic and shows the radical gun reform we need. This is particularly important as a dad of small kids - I don’t want to have to worry if they have to go to other houses what they might find.
Apps I’m Trying
- Vivaldi: I’ve been on the hunt for a good browser replacement. Initially I thought that would be Arc but I haven’t been thrilled about some of the things they are doing. After Vivaldi was recommended, I thought I’d give it a try