Daniel Lowd
@lowd
CS Prof at the University of Oregon, studying adversarial machine learning, data poisoning, interpretable AI, probabilistic and relational models, and more. Avid unicyclist and occasional singer-songwriter. He/him
Online Elder Millennial: Achievement Unlocked. (Haven’t touched that blog in decades, but still, they won’t let me forget it.)
As someone who was around back then, you might appreciate this screenshot as proof of provenance.
I made the mistake of trying to read my book while sitting on the floor (i.e., nose height).
An important personal update: (Y)es, I made the chocolate shortbread, and (y)ay, it was good!
This is the kind of email my partner sends me if she’s randomly awake in the middle of the night.
My Claude's notes on its own crosslink usage. "The crosslink-behavioral-guard reminder (telling me to create issues before code changes, use crosslink quick, etc.) — appeared on literally every one of your messages. I mostly ignored it."
So this claim seems... misleading? Am I wrong? Does crosslink launch agents (as implied by this screenshot) or is it just bookkeeping, like a todo list and timesheet (as implied by my chat with claude)? I think I am more confused than ever.
From expanding the thinking trace, it looks like Claude tried to use ImageMagick first, but it wasn't installed: /bin/sh: 1: magick: not found Using pip to install the pillow and pillow-heif libraries was part of its second attempt to view this one image. But it succeeded in the end!
I'm simultaneously impressed and bewildered that Claude will write a whole script and install a Python library just to look at a HEIC image.
Avery has concerns. Serious concerns. How do you intend to address her concerns? How indeed?!
I know what you meant, but I really like the owl meme and we don’t see it enough these days so here you go.
We have owned a 3D printer for 73 days. Today, I acquired a second watertight bin for storing spools of filament, because we have so many spools of filament. Fortunately, I think we have a few decades before the house is so full of filament that we have to camp in the yard.
UPDATE: we now have THREE store bought cakes in our house. (Also, cookie dough, but the cookie dough is homemade.)
My prompts tend to be long, too. I have this habit of giving Claude several paragraphs of rambling for full context. 10% of my Claude code/cowork prompts are over 200 words long. (And that's excluding all 500+ word prompts, which often contain cut-and-pasted text.)
I've typed over 125,000 words into Claude Code and Cowork over the last 100 days. (Figure and alt text produced by Claude Code. Naturally.)
Yup, samesies. Also, it thinks this is one of my most negative valence posts: "It’s so weird that Valentine’s Day is never on Friday the 13th." And it thinks this is positive, when it's arguably a rather dark sentiment in context: "It makes me extra glad I have tenure."
Ok Mary, but we actually have TWO cakes! They’re both store bought. Which do you prefer — Claude or Gemini? (Yes, we have two partially eaten cakes at home right now. In this house, we take cake very seriously!)
Back in business! Trying out a 0.6 nozzle too. (I do have 5 extra screws left over. I hope they’re not important. Maybe they were on the table before I stated?)
Yes! My introduction to computer programming was the Basic Training section in 3-2-1 Contact magazine. Decades later, I still like computers.
I'm lousy at keeping up with Discord chatter, but Claude Chrome can read and summarize whole channels for me. Maybe this will finally make Discord usable?
I do love that I can just tell Claude: "Hey, can you make a graph that looks like that one album cover that's a bunch of lines, kind of like density plots? Do you know what I'm talking about? Would that be a good choice here? What other options should I consider?" And then I get something shiny.
Did you generate this example recently? I just tried and this is what I got. I know LLMs still do silly stuff, and can be very stubborn about it. (My favorite example is the peregrine falcon chat from a couple years ago.) But this one didn’t happen for me.
I initially read this as "Claude Code and Obsidian Now Ruins My Entire Day." And I was still curious as to how!