Once again, dealing with email shenanigans and bumped into this, which someone put a lot of time into…

<https:www.learndmarc.com>

Some notes on mlx-whisper - it's now really easy to run transcriptions through an Apple Silicon (and GPU) optimized Whisper model using Python on macOS <https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/13/mlx-whisper/>

AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps.

Installing an application distributes many files throughout your System using space of your Hard Drive unnecessarily.
AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them.

Simply drop an application onto the AppCleaner window. It will find for the related files and you can delete them by clicking the delete button.

An AI thing I'm watching play out at another org:

1: Expert A, with a deep understanding of a nuanced and difficult problem answers a question they've been given, offering several options.

2: Director B, recipient, uses an AI to summarize it and then runs it up to leadership saying, "A says this." That generated summary is subtly and very wrong.

3: A is now being held responsible for plans made based on B's AI-generated and very wrong rewriting of his recommendations.

Fun times.

Study (N=806 orgs; 1971-2015) finds some DEI practices increase managerial diversity while others decrease it:
Increase: hiring chief diversity officer, mentoring, childcare, flextime, parental leave, empowering training, targeted recruitment, diversity goals increase diversity
Decrease: Perf evals, harassment training, grievance procedures, job tests
Mixed results: Cross-training, employee resource groups, self-managed teams, skills training
<https:hbr.org/2024/06/research-the-most-common-dei-practices-actually-undermine-diversity>

One thing really worth addressing from the post that I don't think author accepted, and I see this a lot with engineers:

> "That did introduce tension for our team because we were supposed to be taking experimental bets for the platform’s future. These bets couldn’t be baked into product without hacks or shortcuts in the typical quarter as was the expectation."
If I can pump one learning into engineers' and PMs' heads it's this: intermediate deliverables are not optional no matter how cutting-edge your team is.
You will never succeed if your pitch to leadership is "give us a budget for the next N years and expect no shippable products until the end of N years". Even if you get approved somehow at the beginning, there's a 99.5% chance your team/project will be killed before you get to N years.
Again, once again for the audience in the back: there is no such thing as a multi-year project without convincing, meaningful intermediate deliverables.
To clarify, that doesn't mean "don't have multi-year roadmaps", it means "your multi-year roadmaps must deliver wins at a consistent cadence".
Understanding this will carry you a lot further in the industry.
As a fairly cutting-edge R&D team part of your job is to figure out what slice of this is shippable (and worth shipping). If you're coming up empty you are not ready to pitch this to execs.

[#SilentSunday](https://mstdn.social/tags/SilentSunday) [#birdsOfMastodon](https://mstdn.social/tags/birdsOfMastodon)
Red winged Blackbird harassing a Great Blue Heron June 2024

I just watched Perfect Days (2023). I haven't yet fully understood the
effect it's had on me. But I think it's one of the best films I've ever seen. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Days>

“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>

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>

Numbat (<https://numbat.dev/>) is a calculator thing that understands units. They recently added some date and time support, which I'm hoping will satisfy my need for easy to use date math. [#Rust](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/Rust) [#cli](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/cli)

[@jonafato](https://mastodon.social/@jonafato) [@glyph](https://mastodon.social/@glyph) Paperless-ngx might do the trick. I think it’s more targeted for mail, but I came to know about it from someone who used it to store manuals. It does OCR, the correspondant can be the product manufacturer, and it has tags. I run it in Docker on my Synology and I love it.

<https:docs.paperless-ngx.com/>

[@gedeonm](https://mastodon.social/@gedeonm) Having just watched Showtime’s “Billions” show and saw the storyline of Ax’s failure to organize a bank, I’d wager Apple would have a very rough time of it, if they even wanted to.

Got Thunderbolt Migration Assistant working!

Had to do half of this: <https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253658404>

- connect Thunderbolt cable to both

On source Mac:
- create Thunderbolt Bridge interface
- assign it a 10.0.0.x IP
- enable Internet Sharing from Wi-Fi to the Thunderbolt Bridge
- run Migration Assistant

On destination Mac, never set up Wi-Fi. It’ll activate over that Thunderbolt shared-internet connection and never ask for a Wi-Fi network.

(This used to be as easy as “connect them with a cable”.)

My first proper album is released today! It's called Melodic Guitar Music.

Recommended if you like melodies, or guitars, or music. Now available on Bandcamp and streaming services:

<https:www.holovaty.com/melodic-guitar-music/>

This thread is now available as a blog post:
<https:innig.net/teaching/liberal-arts-manifesto>

–––

In college, I took a class called The Letters of Paul. I took it for two very good reasons:

1. I was (and am) named Paul.
2. The prof, Cal Roetzel, was (and is) cool.

I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.

WHAT LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION IS FOR: A THREAD

1/

My wife has been asking me to make Toum (Lebanese garlic sauce) for a while. Today I finally took the plunge & boy I shoulda listened to her long long ago.

If you’ve never eaten it before it’s hard to describe just how good it is. It’s light and fluffy (it quadrupled in volume as I was making it!!) and so garlicky and yummie.

Awesome as a dip, on chicken or fish, in pitas and on and on. Really easy to make, lasts for months in the fridge. Highly recommended!! 🧄👍 Recipe: <https://feelgoodfoodie.net/recipe/lebanese-garlic-sauce/>