Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

“Why did they bring us menus, we already know what we want! We want sushi!”

Kids are cool sometimes. 😎

First verse of the version from Peru lacks variety, but that second verse takes an awesome turn:

Feliz Cumpleaños, a ti,
Feliz Cumpleaños, a ti,
Feliz Cumpleaños (name),
Feliz Cumpleaños a ti.

Que los cumpla feliz,
que los vuelva a cumplir,
que los cumpla bastante,
Hasta el año 3000.

Yes, Peru, I, too, chafe under the yoke of mortality, and yearn for the day that humanity finally breaks free from our limited lifespans. Vivan todos.

My son goes to a Spanish immersion daycare, and at pretty much every birthday party someone tries to start up a round of “Cumpleaños Feliz” after “Happy Birthday”, which inevitably trails off into incoherence after “Cumpleaños feliz, Cumpleaños feliz…”

I thought it was because the majority of the parents are American English-speakers, but when I tried to find the proper lyrics, I found out that it’s basically a free-for-all out there: https://www.cancionfeliz.com/letra_cumpleanos_feliz.php

Try searching for youtube videos and you’ll find a bunch of 2-3 minute songs with a lot more lyrics, too.

@markwalker dateutil got hit by this, but to be fair, the only reason we are failing is that we’re importing TestCommand for the explicit purpose of failing the test suite if you execute setup.py test.

Anthropic has a pretty solid language model, but other aspects of their user experience leave something to be desired.

Been trying to test out their API for several days now and I’m stuck in some situation where it seems to think that my “organization already has a verified phone number” (which is great and all, but it’s also asking me for a phone number in order to claim the trial credits?)

To their credit, they seem to have a support line! To their discredit, queries to it have gone unanswered for 2 days now.

@itamarst I had the same impression when I read those. They seemed very influential, had decent world-building, but they were a bit boring.

Major takeaways from today’s Spanish conversation lesson:

1. There are a lot of words to describe cheese and various types of cheese.
2. I know very few of them in Spanish.

I just bought some e-readers for my niece and nephew, and I’d like to get them started by loading them with some high quality books. Anyone have recommendations for engaging books for teens/preteens?

Nephew is 14 and he’s really into tech. I think he mostly wants the e-reader because it’s an e-ink screen that he can hack on, so that archetype should be easy for the kind of crowd that follows me. He was also asking a lot of questions about physics when I was there, so high quality explainers for stuff like relativity and quantum mechanics aimed at a young teen level would probably be good.

Niece is 12 and insists that she will not use the e-reader. My wife thinks that she will like anything that says boys are stupid (this makes her sound vapid, but she is quite sharp). Tougher nut to crack, obviously.

Fiction and non-fiction recommendations are fine.

#books #recommendations #ya

@adamchainz Immediately after it happened, it felt tight and swollen, like when you have a twisted ankle (without the pain from the soft tissue damage, obviously). I couldn’t really bend it or straighten it all the way out for a few hours, and it is still pretty stiff.

Now it is a lot better but not all the way. The needle site is still sore and it looks horrible, but it looks worse than it is.