Jane Austen was a notable gap in my reading knowledge that I finally filled in the past month. Erin got me a Barnes and Noble collection of her works for Christmas, and so far, I’ve read Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.1The book has seven novels and is huge. I got both of these as ebooks from the library. Once I picked up on Austen’s voice and tone—a few pages into Sense and Sensibility, I had to search “Is Jane Austen satirical?”—I was sold. I adore Austen’s sass and snark and social satire. These two books are self-aware romance novels that are still relevant today, particularly Pride and Prejudice.
Eephus is a new independent film by Carson Lund, and I had the pleasure of seeing it on Saturday at Cinestudio in Hartford.1This was the perfect venue: a one-theater, non-profit cinema on a college campus in New England. The movie is superb and deserves all the praise it’s received. I’d liken it to an alternative take on The Sandlot, where instead of reliving the magic of youthful summers and dynamic friendships of boys, it’s a funny and somber reflection on the twilight years of adult baseball and the particularities of male relationships that rely entirely on weekend activities. I’d love to have it as a double feature against The Sandlot and force the emotional whiplash.
The film is a beautiful and reflective portrayal of a single autumn day at a local baseball field that means everything to the men there and nothing to everybody else. It has every character you would expect to comprise two haggard recreational teams and is a perfectly exaggerated version of my experience playing in similar leagues over the last several years.
I already want to watch it again. It’s a triumph of independent filmmaking and a unique love letter to baseball.
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This was the perfect venue: a one-theater, non-profit cinema on a college campus in New England.
I initially drafted this story as part of a broader writing effort related to The Last Question. All the idiocy happening in the US government and in the world of large corporations encouraged me to finish it.
Last month, I finished going through Nathan Braun’s Coding with Baseball, a book I purchased around four years ago. If you’re at all interested in baseball statistics and want to build a quick foundation for exploring them, I highly recommend the book. It doesn’t hold your hand—it’s not a reference text, and you’ll need documentation for pandas, seaborn, and scikitlearn for the exercises—but it’s an excellent, concise overview that teaches exactly what you need with a straightforward style and relevant examples. It encouraged me to set up the Lahman Baseball Database on my computer and led me down a few rabbit holes, one of which I’ll explain here.
I gave Claude (3.7 Sonnet) the same prompt I provided ChatGPT two years ago: Write a short article in the satirical style of The Onion, titled “Optimistic AI Just Happy to Be Here”.
I also went back to ChatGPT to see how it has improved.
Claude’s attempt.ChatGPT’s attempt.
This test encapsulates why I’ve stuck with Claude as the LLM I choose to pay for a few months at a time. It has an uncanny sense of style that ChatGPT entirely fails to capture. I found Claude’s article entirely believable and legitimately funny. It addresses my complaints from two years ago—it attributes quotes to individuals rather than nameless people with a title, and doesn’t hit us over the head with any of the jokes. It plays it straight, shares the story, and makes us laugh.
ChatGPT has slightly refined itself but still suffers from being too on the nose with its humor. SunnyBot-9000 is obviously an optimistic robot. That’s a case of nominative determinism if I’ve ever seen it. Compare that to Claude’s creation of IRIS-7, where the running gag is that nobody understands how this bot’s mien came to be. ChatGPT also leans heavily into LLMs’ potential inaccuracies, making it feel like it was written two years ago. Hallucinations still occur, I’m sure, but it’s not what it was upon release. Claude focuses on the tasks’ relative drudgery, which I find more compelling. The happy idiot of ChatGPT’s creation could be refined, but on a first pass, it’s rather dull.
Interestingly, they both used the same rough setup about deleting/resetting the LLM, which it then took in stride. While the punchlines were different, they both landed.
I talked about the characteristic ending of articles from The Onion in my post two years ago, and ChatGPT failed spectacularly yet again. It at least puts the sentiment in a direct quote from the bot, similar to Claude, but hoo-boy, is it objectively not a funny ending. It has the trappings of something that could be funny, but there’s no flair or subversion of expectations. It keeps pounding the same nail of “Live, Laugh, Love” with no unique edge.
ChatGPT has certainly improved compared to two years ago, but it’s impressive what Claude was able to churn out. Heck, Claude even got the rough formatting of “CAPITALIZED CITY NAME—” that begins every Onion article. ChatGPT couldn’t be bothered.
As this post is going up, and ideally not while I’m writing it, I recently had three wisdom teeth removed. It’s mushtown for my meals, and that reminded me of two nearly identical lunches I started making in the last couple of months. They differ only in their spices.
My website isn’t a recipe blog, so let’s start with the important information.
These are two essays by a couple of “guys on the Internet” whose work I enjoy. John Gruber created Markdown and now works in the Apple/tech media space. Merlin Mann used to be Merlin Mann, one of the first modern productivity gurus. Now, he’s essentially a comedic personality. Both are tremendous writers, and these two essays are supremely affecting and have unique styles that show the authors flexing their muscles.
Crankingby Merlin Mann, posted April 22, 2011. (About parenting and priorities.)
How It Went by John Gruber, posted November 8, 2024. (About the election, kind of.)
Erin got a record player for Christmas, so I also have access to one. We each picked out albums from our parents to bring back to Connecticut and stopped into a local record shop last month. Her dad’s copy of Elton John’s Honky Cat was hilariously warped—it sounded like the left and right speakers were playing a quarter-beat different from each other. At the shop, she found a copy of an original press of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours that the shop proprietor had forgotten about. It had a slight scratch, so he priced it at five dollars.
Vinyl is terrible, except for all the ways that it’s great. Most of those ways amount to coming full circle in an attention-starved economy where billionaires who thought Snow Crash had some pretty good ideas for the future are fighting for each second of our lives, fully aware that we’re near to bursting yet desperate for the next second to be the best second we’ve experienced that day. Beyond that, it’s about the vibe and process.
All this to say, putting a vinyl record on a turntable is an intentional act. Those records contain albums that are entire pieces of art, comprising individual songs that are each a bit of art but none of which capture the complete work. Experiencing art as a whole, accepting it as it’s provided, is powerful and often requires patience and an open mind. That becomes more important as the temporality of the art increases.
