Life as good as a cat’s

Hello!

Arthur is scarfing down his dinner, seated somewhat upright as he eats from a bowl elevated on a stand I built, modelled after one we saw in Japan. Oh, to live as richly as that cat.

Then again, maybe we do: this weekend’s been spent well, from meeting some new folks over board games to an impromptu ice cream outing with friends, a morning at the woodshop and a few hours in the garden. Tonight, it continues, as we head off to see a friend perform in a recital. No complaints.

• This afternoon, I caught up with some friends to discuss Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. T had recommended it for our book club, and it was a good read—I found the significance of language throughout the generations interesting, made particularly evident by the different tones and inflections used by the audiobook’s narrator, Dominic Hoffman.
• In “Toolmen”, Mandy Brown conceives of AI not as a technology but as an industry, and shares some thoughts on how we think of “intelligence”, sprinkled with a healthy dose of Ursula K. Le Guin.
• Mark Headd draws parallels between engineered tomatoes (robust, but tasteless) and the web being filled with LLM content that’s safe, but boring and average.
• Chris Given gave a quiet cheer for the open source release of IRS Direct File’s code. That was followed by a longer reflection on being part of the team that delivered the service, including the excellent “this could apply in so many situations” line: “It wasn’t Direct File’s first death. By my count it was the second, although there’s an argument for it being the third. Neither count includes all of the doomed attempts to tilt at this particular windmill over the two and a half decades before we took up the lance.” (via Sean)
• If you only intermittently (if ever) poke your head into discussions of Canadian federal government technology, Justin Ling has written a good accounting of the challenges the federal government faces with technology, how we build and deliver software (which is, increasingly, how we deliver government itself).
• Mike Monteiro, on the merits of decisions being cheap (and the many ways in which they no longer are).

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas