Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington State and Wyoming are participating.
It’s a shame more aren’t participating but I can see the reasoning behind staged access and iterative improvement. The real pity is that data they’ve already got won’t be preloaded in this stage. It would have been the nail in the coffin for Intuit and other companies’ predatory practices on lower income folks, at least as they exist currently.
Part of me has been enjoying the recent finding out going on. Maybe it’s because properly linked and referenced sourcing is cool and saying where someone got an idea doesn’t devalue how they’re implementing it. Maybe it’s because the people who are working on projects similar to my own are colleagues and not competition, since we all do better when we all do better.
Power’s out - we’re seeing wind gusts over 50mph and have gotten a little over two inches of rain since last night. Currently waiting for the lowest-ranked-in-the-US power company to repair things. Two trees snapped off their trunks about eight feet off the ground and landed just a few feet from our duck yard, so at least I don’t have to fix any fencing.
Edit: power’s back! Met two nice folks from Canada who were down this way to do repairs and convinced them to take a tree off a line even though it wasn’t in their task list.
Everything I’ve seen about hyper-specific-specialty-data-trained, limited purpose AI - particularly for medical screenings - looks promising. The idea of a FOSS AI trained locally on my own collection of documents is intriguing, but I have a hard time believing that it will be useful beyond asking it to pull up any notes relevant to keywords of any given project I’m working on.
Conversely, nearly everything I’ve seen about general AI/LLMs, including my own (limited) experiences, provides little reason to believe the hype espoused by the folks promoting them.
Getting ready for more snow after spending a few days bucking and splitting some of next year’s wood from a tree that fell in the yard. Kinda hoping we get some decent coverage and that it sticks around for longer than a day, but that it doesn’t cause too much disruption for @Chris Remington and other folks in New England. My father found some back country skis as a christmas gift that should be better for getting around some of the hill on our property and I’m dying to try them.
It doesn’t sound like it was all your fault, nor was it all theirs. It sounds like two people who care very much for each other realized that the patterns they were reinforcing were not good for either of them, and took painful steps to keep the relationship they could. I’m really sorry you’re in this position now, but I’m also really hopeful that you see the good in your decision and that you were able to make it calmly despite the emotions of the situation. That’s a crappy consolation prize but maybe you’ll learn and grow your emotional toolkit to make the ability to handle situations like that even stronger.
Something that helped me to become better at communicating my feelings (and communicating when I couldn’t manage it well) was reading about mediating other people’s conflicts. Self help / self regulation books and the like weren’t helping me to navigate these situations but ones about mediation in the workplace or at home helped me to see the types of patterns that played out in my relationships. Discussing these techniques - like lots of “I feel” statements and no “you make me” statements - with my partner and agreeing to try them gave us the emotional space to really start practicing better management of ourselves.
I hope I’m not overstepping with this, but I am scared alongside you about starting anything else this quickly afterwards, and especially this intensely. It doesn’t sound like you’re being kind enough to yourself to give enough time to process, or to build up the emotional management skills you’re hoping to. Coming on so strongly to someone who’s just been through something like this doesn’t speak very highly of this guy’s character either, from where I’m sitting (just north of total ignorance, but still).
Whatever happens, I hope you find the space and peace to train those relationship and emotional skills you want for yourself, and the person or persons who help you to reinforce them.
We got some good snow overnight and I took the skis out to make some trails for myself. The skis were great but now I’ve got to go replace my boots. I still went and took pictures for you all because it was so lovely. Still, I’m a little sad that my time on the skis ended like this:
No one in the neighborhood set off midnight fireworks this year, so that was nice. Got a few last minute plant orders that I’ll be shipping out tomorrow, which feels like a great start for the year. My wife had to put in some wfh hours to process pre-authorizations for the new year so this morning was spent trying to finalize my GDQ prize submission (way too close to the deadline on this one).
more or less caused by extrapolating information incorrectly due to our high strung emotions
💕 the topics are different but the pattern is similar to some of the struggles my wife and I have faced together. In many cases, my own anxiety and hypervigilance tendencies have caused me to react to small things and turn them into big deals. It’s incredibly easy to just… be in those moments. “I feel” statements have helped me to give agency back to myself in those times, and I hope you discover the tools that best help you in those situations.
My knee-jerk reaction about the person is changed because of the complications; my hope for you to have the time and peace to choose how you decide to is not. Whatever you decide to do, use the opportunities you get to practice the skills that will help you be the person you want to be. If that involves him, I hope you do great. If it doesn’t, I hope you do great.
I’m really glad you’re in a better spot now. Definitely hoping you can keep that trajectory.
My eyes popped at 350/month. That’s… that’s a lot. Around us $750 gets you two cords and that’s enough to heat our space all winter (but the house is <1200 square feet so it doesn’t take much).