Jonathan Doughty

@jwd630
71 Followers
286 Following
134 Posts
Former #ITProfessional still following tech topics; if my ‘helpful’ replies are not don’t hesitate to say so - old habits are hard to break. 
In life I'm #cooking, doing #yardwork and #gardening, #biking, and still expending effort noodling around #software far too much.
GitHubhttps://github.com/JonathanDoughty

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jwd630/116649344118021208

Daughter still very upset about losing 5 months of work, hoping someone who recognizes the effort will lead to a miraculous rescue

Caught Copilot talking to itself

You’re right to call this out. The failing go test ./coolCode output indicates the....

I didn't say anything.. just watched it catch it and fix it.

/me imagines GoLLM and Smeagol talking back and forth..

GoLLM: It asks us to refactors the packages... filthy humans..never with the pleases... never with the thankses...

Smeagol: He does say "please" sometimes...

GoLLM: Nevers! always calling us Clanker... We hates it.. We hates it and its filthy askses..

Come on #mastoart #urbansketchers of #nova, please do what you can. Daughter #lost her current sketchbook with months of content in downtown DC today. DM if found, boosts much appreciated
Being anti-Trump is not good enough. Democrats need a progressive agenda.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jamescherti/116562135498079203

@jamescherti That seems like a lot of "essential" packages. But thanks for the cross-outs that clued me in to now built-ins that (may) replace some that I use.

One that I find essential is Purcell's https://github.com/purcell/envrc

Reviewing envrc's README and some open issues, however, I am now wondering if perhaps my heavy reliance on it is the cause of some TRAMP difficulties I am experiencing. Probably not the last time interactions among too many "must-have" #emacs packages will bite me.

RE: https://mastodon.online/@SInce/116556674701290245

So true. #retirement does give one the luxury of doing things right or not at all.

Newspaper withdrawal at the breakfast table

Mornings haven’t been quite the same around the house since Feb. 26–the last one that started with a print copy of the Washington Post landing somewhere near our front walk, making less of a thud than it once did, sometime before dawn.

That marked the end of a streak of Post home delivery that had run decades, going back to my first apartments out of college in Arlington and D.C. The wanton destruction of much of my old newsroom, followed by my seeing the sad results of Jeff Bezos’s act of civic vandalism and then facing an imminent renewal of our print subscription, pushed me to terminate that streak–in sorrow, not anger.

(The Post’s site didn’t even offer me a discount on my way out.)

Since then, the demise of a daily habit of analog news reading has left me with a breakfast-table problem: What do I read instead to ensure I still start the day by informing myself? Ideally, without bringing a touchscreen device to the table?

One early answer had been collecting dust on other household surfaces: the print magazines we get.

I’m one of the many people who subscribed to Wired in early 2025 in appreciation of that publication’s outstanding coverage of the Trump administration’s abuses of power. But until the dead-tree edition of the Post wasn’t occupying space on the breakfast table, I let copies of that magazine pile up.

We also have back issues of such other print mags as the Air & Space Museum’s Air & Space quarterly and the UVA and Georgetown alumni magazines my wife and I get. I’ve been reminded that they’re worth reading with a morning coffee–among other things, I now know that the coffee company I keep buying from at Costco was founded by another Hoya.

And there’s a slightly less-portable form of printed media, books. My current read is my Post friend Sara Kehaulani Goo’s memoir Kuleana, in which she unpacks her Hawaiian heritage and her family’s struggles to hold on to the last of some ancestral land.

If I must turn to a touchscreen, I’ve realized that my digital reading should be one of the most newspaper-like forms of online publishing, RSS. Catching up with favorite sites via that online-syndication format seems healthier than flipping over to social media.

I can also read the Washington Post on the web or in its Android or iPad apps–my Arlington and D.C. library cards provide free online access, notwithstanding the occasional glitch renewing that freebie. And yet I don’t turn to what I think of as my alma mater of journalism as often as I did when I paid for it. I feel a little bad about that.

#AirSpace #books #digitalMedia #Georgetown #Kuleana #mags #newspaper #printPaper #printSubscription #ReallySimpleSyndication #RSS #SaraGoo #washingtonPost #Wired
Memorabilia from my first stint as an Election Officer in Virginia’s redistricting amendment ballot measure yesterday. A very long day of civic duty #nova #virginia

So the wife and I have both figured out that we start lots of conversations by saying "So, ... "

So I suspect it’is mostly a boomer or generation X thing, like "like" seems to be a word later generations use to excess.

So I thought I'd make you aware of that verbal tic too.

As expected, the AI emperor has no clothes either.
https://toot.cafe/@baldur/114409085381297723
Baldur Bjarnason (@[email protected])

“We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All - WSJ” https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-ai-thinks-356969f8?st=JK4ruj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink > All of this work suggests that under the hood, today’s AIs are overly complicated, patched-together Rube Goldberg machines full of ad-hoc solutions for answering our prompts. There have been researchers who pointed this out from the very beginning and yet they're only getting airtime now.

Toot Café