Weeknotes for week 18, 2023

The week of May 1st.

We booked a trip to Walt Disney World in Florida for early next year.

My partner is a huge Disney theme park fan. We used to go to some Disney park almost every year, but now it's been a decade.

There was an issue with their system butchering my partner's name, which can invalidate an airline ticket. The mismatch between Disney's glittery marketing and the profit-seeking reality is fascinating.

After they mentioned there might be an amendment fee and I expressed displeasure, they used phrases like "let's get everything back on the magical track" – instead of actually making it "magical" by silently eating that cost. Not to mention fixing their site. They did cover it in the end.

My partner is now going through hours and hours of Disney Food Blog videos in preparation. So many places to eat; so little time.

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Speaking of names, our name-handling code has been in production for a while and has worked great so far, which is a little disappointing. I was hoping for more interesting edge cases.

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I got stopped by the police for the first time in my life.

I saw flashing lights in my rear-view mirror and moved aside to let them pass, but they stayed behind me, so I pulled over.

They'd looked up the number plate on my car and saw it wasn't insured. Then they realised the number was for a motorcycle. Then they realised they got a letter wrong.

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ChatGPT wrote me a whole script at work for something and I was delighted at its biggest time savings yet.

Then it turned out those API endpoints did not exist, and the whole thing I wanted to do is in fact unsupported. This future is weird.

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I got an invite to Raycast AI.

Curious to see if I will use this tool more when it's right at my fingertips.

A cool feature is that you can highlight text in any app (a web page, a text editor, an email) and run it through one-off or predefinable prompts. You can make it summarise texts, or translate them, or change their writing style.

It seems theoretically very promising, but I'm realising I'm not sure what I would actually want to use it for.

I think summarising long texts might be genuinely useful, or explaining code, or finding bugs in code.

I made it remove the filler on an online recipe which was neat, but since it tends to hallucinate, I don't think I would follow a recipe that's been through an LLM. I could see it working with the right constraints – perhaps running in a browser and identifying the text to remove, but not modifying the remaining text.

Someone shared the PromptLab extension which lets you feed files, today's weather etc into the AI and also run scripts against its output. I am again wary, but it's a fascinating field.

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We rewatched Demolition Man (1993). Not quite as good as I remember, but it's an entertaining take on the future (the year 2032). Only 9 years until the seashells!

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I just pre-ordered the OnlyCat cat flap. It uses a camera to deny access if carrying prey.

I've been hesitant since our current "smart" cat flap started out not being too reliable and got better over time. But I'm willing to gamble on the chance of a life where we don't chase mice in the middle of the night or blot their remains out of the carpet.

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We ate in the garden yesterday and it was unusually quiet. We eventually realised it was because everyone was indoors watching the coronation. We watched a little.

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I enjoyed: