Feast

Fforest put on a meal every year on the weekend near the spring equinox. It’s always a lot of fun and this year Bec and I got more involved with the prep. Bec heroically smoked 22 ducks during the day and I helped in the kitchen with prep for service, I managed not to maim myself in the process of thinly slicing a few kilos of radishes on a mandolin.

I don’t think working in a kitchen full time is for me, but the adrenelin and cameraderie really is so much fun and I had such a good time with everyone.

Kilner jars full of pickes

I’ve posted a photo album from the day over here

Rooney on Ronnie

I loved this article on Ronnie O’Sullivan by Sally Rooney — I’m not an avid follower but I’ve certainly spent quite a few Sunday afternoons watching him play finals and it is alway so mesmerising.

Rooney got quite deep into what exactly makes someone that good at something, which really makes you marvel about how unknowable the human brain/body is. Here’s a quote:

Perhaps because their abilities—throwing, jumping, catching—basically strike us as exaggerations of our own. Watching someone like O’Sullivan just feels different. What he can do no longer reminds us of what we can do. His abilities just seem to demand an explanation. But what would such an explanation even consist of? What field of study could articulate the answer—physics, cognitive science, psychology, philosophy of mind?

In the era of AI hype it does show how far away it is from getting anywhere near this close —  can you imagine a Boston Dynamics robot trying to play snooker! (related gif)

Also nice to see that Ronnie is a comrade:

O’Sullivan joined the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and now appears to have left again over the party’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Reluctantly still on Arc

I’ve was a long time Firefox user, but since Arc came out I’ve been using it. I really like a lot of the user experience but I didn’t like (and actively disabled) all the AI stuff they added. So when I heard there is a Firefox based version of it called Zen, I was keen to give it a go. Unfortunately there were a few niggles that made it hard to stick with. I managed a couple of days before switching back. Here’s my reasons, listed in rough order of annoyance:

  • Arc’s killer feature for me is the smart group thing that automatically make a tab when there’s a PR I’ve created or that a colleague made that, I need to review
  • Bad 1Password support: it wouldn’t unlock with my fingerprint and locked a lot more often which is annoying
  • I’d used the page customisations thing on Arc to hide all the placeholder ad blocks I see on The Guardian, (NextDNS/Arc’s ad blocker - block the ads but don’t remove the placeholders). It make the site seem so cluttered
  • Zen let you have different spaces but it didn’t segment cookies/logins between the two which, to me, is sorta the whole point - you can get around this (in a less nice way) with the containers extension

Anyway, it’s shame, I’ll give it another go in six months perhaps. Also Ladybird sounds promising.

(This has gone out late because I’ve been ill the last couple of days)