Good Morning Nostrides, Today my wife and I will go see Dungeons and Dragons. That should be fun. Meanwhile I am debugging some nasty little issues with websockets.

Good Evening Notrodimos, Today I got a lot done. * I paid my taxes (OUCH!) * I began planning a flight to DC. (fun!) * I picked up Tulip from the groomers. * I got all kinds of new features working in more-speech, including the users-window and all kinds of fun menu options for adding users to tabs etc. This will make more-speech much more friendly to noobs.

User window in more-speech works now. You can see all recent users and you can see all the users in your web-of-trust. You can trust and untrust users using simple buttons. Nice!

Good Morning Nostroids, I'm giving a talk in DC this Tuesday. I just did the research, and took the require course, to fly into the DC area. The weather looks good right now. If it holds, I'll fly over and back on the same day. Otherwise I'll fly commercial (yuk).

Got a lot of the user window working in more-speech. Now you can select from the web-of-trust users, or just the users who have posted something in the last day, and move them into your trusted contacts. Progress!

Good Morning Nostrdynes, Today I teach a class on Mocks and Testing patterns. Then I'll be able to work more on more-speech. I need to do the heart of the user page, which will allow users to find each other, trust each other, and follow each other. Since more-speech pulls events from a pretty wide funnel, it should be easy to find new users and follow them. Big storm just blew through our area. I opened my front door and stood on the porch to watch the slythy toves gyre and gimble in the wabe.

Looked at UTVs. We think the Polaris Ranger 570 (4-door) is the right one for us. Nasty weather. Got some more coding on more-speech done after all. Still working on user window. Fun. Another class tomorrow, but then I should have more time for more-speech.

Good Morning Nortricians, I've got a class to teach this morning, and I need to work out after that, and my lovely wife and I need to go look at UTVs to replace our old one up north. So work on more-speech is not in the cards for today. Perhaps tomorrow.

Meanwhile the database in more-speech has grown to 22GB. I shall soon have to come up with a means for periodically decanting the database into a newer, smaller, version; shedding the events and records that have gone out of date.

Good Morning Nostricans, Today my lovely wife and I depart our northwoods hideout and ply our way south back to our home in (cursed) Illinois. Once there I shall continue my work on the User window of more-speech. Much progress was made last night with that window; and in my dreams later that night I solved a number of technical problems (if only I could remember those solutions).

Urrggghh. I woke up at 2:30 AM. (Maybe it was the beer). So I did a little fiddling with more-speech and then went back to bed until nearly 9. Bleary and out of focus, I've managed to get a bit more done with the User-window today. I added a few new DB queries, and thought through a few more strategies. Steady progress. Day by day. It's quite something how software systems grow.

The sky has cleared. The temperature is warming. Tomorrow looks to be a very nice day. Perhaps I'll finally be able to get out on the lake and rescue my bouy. Anyway, I got a lot done on the User... page for more-speech today. More to come tomorrow. Fun stuff.

I spent a bit of time today getting the Users window layed out. It shows a scrolling list of all your trusted users, and another scrolling list of possible users. A [<-] button in the middle will move selections from the possible list into the trusted list. You can untrust a user by right clicking and selecting the untrust menu item. Or perhaps I should use a [->] button. There are a few checkboxes that decide what is in the possible users list. They are 'Web of Trust', 'Recent users', and Search. The Web of trust shows all the users who are trusted by your trusted users. The recent users shows all the users who have posted something in the last few hours or days. (Perhaps that should be a field). The search checkbox enables a field that allows you to enter a regular expression that will find users for whom we have metadata stored in the database. Suggestions?

I asked bing chat (gpt4) to compare "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to "The Powers of the Earth". The answer was pretty good, except it had a grammar error that only a human in the midst of editing could make: "...The Powers of the Earth is about an ungoverned lunar settlement whose economy developed while Earth’s economy declined under a command-and-control economy engages in a struggle to stay free from Earth’s meddling bureaucracy."

First question to Bing Chat (Chatgpt4) Write a PDP8 program that counts up to 20. Answer: Infinite loop. *0200 Main, CLA CLL TAD Count DCA Count TAD Limit SNA JMP Main HLT Count, 0 Limit, 20 END Main

Good Saturday Morning Nostroids. I woke up to snow this morning. Anything can happen in the North Woods! I tweeted (yes, I still use twitter) something today that I thought you'd enjoy: Wow, ChatGPT4 can play chess. It now has a capability approaching that of a 40 year old Atari TV game console. Wow. Watch out for your jobs!

I just love writing in Clojure -- even wading through all the Swing nonsense is much, much, easier with Clojure.

I know you've all been waiting for this but... More-speech now has a menu that allows you to manage your profile, including setting your private keys, etc. Oh, Happy Day!

Good Morning Nostrdaemons. Trump has been indicted, the IRS and Russua are intimidating journalists, Gwinneth Paltro won a dollar; and the world is descending into political chaos. Meanwhile I, and my lovely bride, are in the north woods of Wisconsin, looking out from our cabin windows over the placid waters of our lakland hideaway. It is raining, but warming. The buoy that marked the anchor to which we attach our warm weather raft has broken loose. I'll go retrieve it today and figure out what went wrong. I'll have to go buy a couple of concrete blocks and figure out a better attachment scheme. And, today, I'll finish up the profile page in more-speech.

Dear Elon, Woz, et. al. You're joking, right? I mean, really? We're not talking about HAL 9000 here. We're talking about an elaborate Markov chain. If you don't ask it a question, it's not doing anything. It's not sitting there and thinking. It's not devising anything. And when it answers a question, it simply steals from what others have written. Oh, I grant you that the programmers were pretty clever, and that the AI can do some fascinating data manipulations. But not one unique thought will ever cross the output.