zukzuk

Love it!

Biggest obstacle for me is the giant invasive Ailanthus tree in my back yard. Apparently its roots produce allelopathic chemicals, and I’m finding that some native plants are unaffected (spicebush, wood fern) but others can’t cope at all (asters, cup plant).

I can’t find much if any info on this, so it’s been an ongoing experiment.

I haven’t tried it myself yet but I’m under the impression that Hermes Agent might be what you’re looking for?

We build text-based (e.g. SMS rather than voice) agents for various medical conversations (e.g. preparing people for complex appointments).

Our user base skews elderly. Going in, I was really skeptical about how much engagement and value we could provide to these older patients. I'm blown away how well it all turned out and how valuable it's been for our patients and client clinics.

For example, we were able to reduce no-shows for some high-cost appointments by 80%. Turns out that the reasons why people don't show up are a complicated and diffuse — everything form anxiety, to not speaking english, to being confused about how to get into the building — and properly configured LLM-based systems are really, really good at dealing with exactly this sort of problem.

There are many strains. You will develop immunity to one strain, but not the others.

I assume a vaccine would try to be multivalent.

Also bad news if your dog is prone to seizures, as mine was.

If you found this interesting, you might want to check out The History of the English Language podcast.

I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying it. And I can’t believe I have 195 episodes left.

Apple Music has a totally separate app for classical music. It was specifically designed to address exactly this.

For each composer, it shows all their well known works, and then you can tap on each to see all the recordings of that particular piece.

Smart move on Apple’s part, if you ask me.

NYC is very different in that regard from most anywhere else in the US. Random people tend to talk to each other. There’s a vague sense of “we’re all in this shit together”. Maybe it’s something to do with living on a cramped island, with no choice but to work together.

I find that Claude almost always ends its response with some sort of follow up question, despite my system prompt telling it not to.

I never really used ChatGPT much though so maybe Claude is just relatively less egregious?

Some mushrooms, like many oyster species, are saprotrophs and will grow on just about any waste organic material with enough cellulose.

Or Pixelfed, for a decentralized fediverse option.

We've been using Zulip for our company chat for 2 years now. It does what we need it to do — while letting us control where it's deployed and where the data is stored (!!). But the UI is dated and awkward. The general feeling I get is that everyone at our company is okay with Zulip, but no one loves it. It just has that air of mediocrity about it. It's "okay".

Glad to hear E2EE is coming soon, but it’s been “soon” for probably a year now. It’s a bit odd that encrypted notifications still don’t work, and I’d argue it’s a very big caveat with regard to privacy and security.

Our main reason for using Zulip is that we work in a highly regulated space (healthcare) and would like to be able to safely talk about things. I suspect this sort of situation is a major motivator for Zulip adoption, so it’s weird that transit encryption was left as an afterthought.

Yes, exactly. The lack of any sort of permission controls for extensions in VS Code gives me the creeps