only way to regain sanity

Spectacular timelapse capturing an entire night from sunset to sunrise over the ALMA Observatory on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Atacama Desert.

Video Credit: ESO/C. Malin (christophmalin.com)

Timeline cleanse.

[#birdphotography](https://fediscience.org/tags/birdphotography)

When I think about what has happened with camera technology over the past quarter-century, I can't get my head around how it's possible to shoot a chestnut-backed chickadee at twilight at 1/100th second with a handheld 800mm lens.

[#birdwatching](https://fediscience.org/tags/birdwatching) [#birdphotography](https://fediscience.org/tags/birdphotography)

This cutesy feature popover in Slack is easy to dismiss until you discover that “precise customization" is the ability to disable the fricken’ gradients that make the navigation area such an unreadable mess.

Settings > Themes > Custom Theme > Window gradient — and you have to do it for every Slack you're in because of course you do.

Golden hour is for rabbits too.

Bought some Italian butter cookies this morning. Asked for an assortment.

Clerk: Any allergies?

Me (being silly): Just cats.

Clerk nods and made a show of putting back one of the cookies.

School tuck shop (aka canteen, cafeteria) menu from 1978, at the [#Australian](https://mastodon.social/tags/Australian) [#school](https://mastodon.social/tags/school) I attended as a kid. Older Aussies might find this interesting.

“Of course I like to read nontechnical books, although I read very slowly. Here are some that I heartily recommend.”—Don Knuth

😳

<https:www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html>

Another great tool is skhd (<https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd>), which is a hotkey daemon for Mac. It's especially great for controlling things like yabai. Here's my keybinds for moving focus to different spaces, and also moving applications between spaces.

I’m never really a fan of covers, but Royel Otis' cover of Linger by The Cranberries is incredible. Feels like going back to the 90s/00s. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGUVB19e13s>

For once this bushtit held still long enough for me to squeeze off a couple of frames.

[#birding](https://fediscience.org/tags/birding) [#birdphotography](https://fediscience.org/tags/birdphotography)

I upgraded the llm-gpt4all plugin to support running Llama 3 8B Instruct (thanks, Nomic AI):

llm install --upgrade llm-gpt4all  
llm -m Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct 'Write Python code to print 5 great names for a pet pelican'  

The quantized model is a 4.34GB download and should run on machine with 8GB RAM - works great on my M2 MacBook Pro

<https:github.com/simonw/llm-gpt4all/releases/tag/0.4>

I'm losing my mind watching this. The people involved need to either be given a massive Netflix contract or institutionalised <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jky5ZXI0axc>

Today I found a TUI frontend for curl! 🔥

🌀**cute**: TUI HTTP client with API/auth key management and request history/storage.

🌐 Supports importing Postman collections!

🦀 Written in Rust & built with [@ratatui_rs](https://fosstodon.org/@ratatui_rs)

⭐ GitHub: <https://github.com/PThorpe92/CuTE>

[#rustlang](https://fosstodon.org/tags/rustlang) [#ratatui](https://fosstodon.org/tags/ratatui) [#tui](https://fosstodon.org/tags/tui) [#curl](https://fosstodon.org/tags/curl) [#http](https://fosstodon.org/tags/http) [#request](https://fosstodon.org/tags/request) [#api](https://fosstodon.org/tags/api) [#auth](https://fosstodon.org/tags/auth)

Trying out the new Gemini 1.5 Pro model <https://developers.googleblog.com/2024/04/gemini-15-pro-in-public-preview-with-new-features.html>

Can run it online in Google AI Studio, but very easy to use it on the command line on a linux server with python modules llm & llm-gemini by [@simon](https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon) after getting the free API key in AI Studio. Took me 5 minutes to set up.

<https:github.com/simonw/llm-gemini>

Datasette Extract is a new Datasette plugin that uses GPT-4 (and the new GPT-4 Vision) to extract structured data from unstructured text and images and insert it into a SQLite database table. Here's a video demonstrating the plugin:

<https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3NtJatmQR0>

yall ever seen a shaved alpaca before?