In general, we don't want our kids (10y, 8y) to hit each other. Learning to control your impulses is an important skill, and resorting to violence is usually a substitute for other skills we're prefer them to practice (understanding what the other person wants, negotiating). Also they could hurt each other.

On the other hand, sometimes the kids enjoy hitting each other. This is very different from hitting out of anger: they're both having fun, they're not trying to injure each other, it's more about force than impact, etc. Even calling both of these activities "hitting" is a bit misleading: a hit intended to inflict pain looks very different than one intended to knock the other off balance or push them farther away on the couch to gain a strategic advantage.

Lily recently asked me to help them with a song they'd written. They'd written out the lyrics and had a melody, but they wanted me to play backup and help them make a music video. Here's what we ended up with:

Lily started with a hand-written lyrics sheet, but I wanted to follow along which meant getting it typed up:

I often talk to people who don't find LLMs useful. Paraphrasing:

Why would I want to ask questions to a thing that might give me the right answer but might also make something up that fools me into thinking it's right? I've played with them, but they don't seem like they'd save me any time.

My experience with has been that there are some things LLMs are much better at than others and you need to learn where they're suitable, but overall I get a lot out of working with them. I went back over my recent history in Claude, the one I use most, and here are cases where I found it helpful:

In general I'd like to see a lot more of people writing about their failures in addition to their successes. If a bunch of people all try a thing and have mixed results, and only the people with good results write about it, people who don't know about this selection bias or don't realize its extent are going to end up with overly positive views. I've written about some of my mistakes, and I think it would be good if this were a higher fraction of my posts.

On the other hand, once other people are involved this isn't entirely up to me. One place this comes up a lot is parenting: I don't want to write things about my kids that they don't (or won't) want public. This is especially tricky if I write a post about something we've tried which worked well in part because the kids did a good job with it, and then later they stop doing a good job.

In 2021 one of the kids in Somerville started Elfland, a miniature community, in a vacant lot. There had been a gas station there which was demolished to build housing, but with construction delays there it was open for a while. When construction resumed there were calls to "defend Elfland", and while the original location closed it's now on the Somerville Community Path just west of Willow Ave.

My kids like it a lot, and Anna and I decided to build something for it. Anna wanted to make a house, and I sold her on making a triple decker. These are three-unit buildings, one on each of three floors, that are common in Somerville and other older Boston-area neighborhoods.

As I've been playing more gigs with Kingfisher I've been thinking about how to reduce the time I'm spending on setting up and tearing down. It usually takes me about 35 minutes to get everything plugged in, and 20 minutes to get it all packed away again. Cecilia's been pushing me to make a pedalboard; what would that look like?

I do have a lot of stuff by my feet: