📝 I actually blogged! I wrote last weeks weeknote and a post about my linkblog. I also updated the homepage to have my top artists and what I’m currently reading, hoping to get closer to Cory Dransfeldt’s homepage at some point.
🧑💻 I did a bit of interesting coding this week. The biggest was a little calendar parsing tool for my personal journaling site. I gave it a bunch of ICS files for nearby cities, parks, community events, etc. and it shows me new ones. Some of the ones I really wanted to include didn’t have ICS links, so I’m throwing the page URL to an LLM and asking it to parse out an ICS file with schema. Works shockingly good.
🫎 My parents were in town and the weather was great, so we went to the local (small) zoo. It happened to be the 10th birthday for their wolves, so we were a handful of people who got to join the birthday party. It was mostly them tearing apart boxes full of meat, still fun to watch!
🏠 Took down my Christmas lights… Yes it’s May. We added an attic space to our garage a few months back, so I was waiting until that was finished and we had space cleared. 😅
📚 Still reading Rhythm of War, Read 213 pages this week (now 73% complete). This is probably the toughest of all the books in this series so far. A lot of flashbacks that just feel jarring and disruptive. Knowing Sanderson, it’s about to pick-up again though.
Media
🎙️ A bit more WFH than normal this week, so only 39 minutes of podcasts. Finished Critical Role C3E54 Treacherous Toys and started C3E55 Hope Within History.
🍿 Managed to sneak away for date night to see Thunderbolts and really liked it. A good balance of humor and action. (slight spoilers: What happened to the helicopter pilot?!)
🍿 Took us three nights, but we also watched Back in Action on Netflix. Not going to thrill movie critics, but was a perfectly fine spy movie/comedy to have on in the background while doomscrolling.
Jumping between genres I guess, listened to 169 tracks this week:
Madeon - 19 plays
Mayday Parade - 18 plays
Illenium - 13 plays
The Chainsmokers - 9 plays
My Chemical Romance - 8 plays
🔗 Cool Posts
Stretching Google’s prefetching: I know the basics of speculation rules, but this is an interesting take. Almost wonder if it’s a bug?
GitHub - leafeye/lunchmoney-mcp-server: I’ve been using LunchMoney for budgeting and it’s a great tool. Haven’t really had a chance to use MCP much, so I’ll definitely need to go play with this.
Understanding the recent criticism of the Chatbot Arena: More LLM drama - Anyone using LLMs for serious purposes needs to make sure they have evals representative of their real use-cases when comparing new models. Benchmarks and leaderboards mean nothing.