Dave's WordPress home in the Fediverse :-)
Sunday, May 31, 2026

Just watched the first episode of Star City, really good. Somewhat like The Americans, but takes place in the USSR. A spinoff of For All Mankind, which started out interesting and then became unwatchable, though I did enjoy the sets on Mars. I also liked the character who was inspired by Elon Musk, obviously. #

The purpose of standards is interop. That’s it. No other purpose. #

Claude always tries to understand what you’re saying. I like that. We do a lot of communicating, and have a lot of misunderstandings, I see its flaws as a programmer, it makes mistakes. Today I asked it to help find an error in the subscribe code and it showed me a lot of things that were wrong, I fixed them, but we didn’t find the thing that broke it. We managed to get it back on the air, but that broke something else. A few hours later I looked at the code myself and mathematically deduced that when you read a file, even if the content was the same, if you ask if the result is equal to its previous version, the result would be no. It would say there’s a change when there’s no change. The computer is doing what it was programmed to do, it’s our job as programmers to say the same thing a different way that does what we want. That’s the kind of thing you expect Claude to be incredibly good at. I think the problem is that it can’t see the various apps running and see what they say. It has to figure out how it works just from reading the code. That makes it a completely new kind of computer in addition to all the other things that are amazing about it. #

How bad was it with the Knicks. As something of a joke, but not really, Knicks fans would disguise themselves with paper bags with eye cutouts. Fans got accustomed to the feelings of betrayal and hopelessness. When was the actual lowest point? A good candidate was when they traded some good players for Bargnani, an Italian who apparently for some reason was the top draft choice of the Toronto Raptors. He wasn’t much good to begin with and he went downhill from there. There were quite a few other moments when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, but then it did. We finally got management with a heart and a mind with Leon Rose and that’s when team-building began for real, and the reason the Knicks have been such poetry on the court this season is due to Rose’s eye for talent and an understanding of the big picture. He picked players that work well with each other, and sometimes amazingly well. In the right margin is an image I used for posts about the Knicks in the past, a reminder of how far we’ve come. The look of doom. We all remember that mode so well, we stood with them then, so here we are with high hopes and reasonable expectations. #

There have been problems reported with subscribe.scripting.com. At least some of them are fixed. It’s hard to test this kind of software because you can’t really tell what went wrong. If people report problems they just say it didn’t work. But real problems were fixed, so if you’ve had trouble subscribing or unsubscribing, now is a good time to try again. And thanks for your patience, and sorry for the screwy app. 😉 #

Congrats to my friend Manton Reece, a San Antonio fan, for their victory in the Western Conference last night. The Knicks will be playing them starting on Wednesday for the NBA championship. Knicks representing the east, Spurs for the west. #

Last update: 6/11/26; 12:18:56 AM.