Jamie Thingelstad

I’m very happy with these Ukrainian Tryzub Trident pins that I ordered from ShopUA 1000. Made in Ukraine. 🇺🇦

I would like to create blog posts from some workouts. It seems like something that Shortcuts should make possible but I’ve not seen anything to make it easier to do. Is anyone familiar with something that does this? I’d like a map and statistics in the posts.

Months ago when I signed up to host the April IndieWeb Carnival I thought it was a great idea and now I’m finding myself atypically anxious about choosing a good topic! 😬

LEGO and Pokémon announced that they are launching a multi-year partnership in 2026. This is going to mint an incredible amount of revenue for both companies. 💰 Consider how many of these sets will be bought and never even opened for collectors. 😲

The LLM functions I’ve built for the Weekly Thing have worked really well. So well in fact that I’m redoing my Shortcuts to move from simple calls to the ChatGPT app to using the OpenAI API directly. This has the added benefit of additional fine tuning including optimized system messages. 👨‍💻

The new metal Loon sculpture at Allianz Field is impressive in person. Cool addition to the stadium.

The pizza at Boludo is so incredible. Delicious and unique!

I attended a public lecture hosted by Anselm House on Are We Merely Machines? tonight featuring Rosalind W. Picard of the MIT Media Lab. It was an interesting talk covering materialism, scientism, and ontology. Picard’s view is that we are not, and that we should not, attempt to blur the lines between machine and human, and that humans are always ontologically the maker.

I’m challenged to find the difference so stark.

One argument often asserted is that machines using artificial intelligence only know what they know because they have learned it from what people have done. However isn’t that equally true for people? Nobody is born a poet, they learn from poets. You are not born a Chess Grandmaster, you learn from chess players. AI and people do the same thing. The incremental small improvements in knowledge are mostly unmeasurable.

Another assertion is that LLMs are just statistical models of language and they put words together branching on simple math. How can we assert that people don’t do the same thing? The structure of language itself limits the structure, and isn’t our brain doing something somewhat similar to the LLM?

Which isn’t to say that I believe an AI is a person. I do not. I think it is likely more accurate to say I lack the philosophical depth to explore the points in detail.

While doing my blog gardening today I noticed that it was 16 years ago today that I was a guest on MPR’s Midmorning show talking about Twitter! I decided to give it a listen, and while I was at it I ran the audio through Whisper Transcription and added a transcript to the post. Listen or read! 😊

It all seems very quaint in retrospect. I had been on Twitter at that time for 27 months and as John Moe shares in the intro it had 8 million users at the time. Moe quotes Joe Sucheray saying Twitter was “the end of the world.” He was maybe seeing better than Julio Ojeda-Zapata, my fellow panelist and I. I had almost forgot that John Hodgman joined us on the phone and that one of the callers “Dave” who teaches “Greek and Latin” is a friend of mine!

Hashtags weren’t a thing. Moe even says “number sign”. The word “tweet” was only just forming. I refer to the “Twitterverse” at one point.

It did give me a big warm smile at the end though when I got a plug in for using RSS! As Tammy reflected, some things never change! 😁

We stopped into Microcenter today and they didn’t have a single Nvidia GPU in stock. Every case was empty. In fact they only had five individual GPUs of any brand!

Guinness Chocolate Cake from Lynette. Treat for completing tax work.

Tyler’s first time behind the wheel with basics in a parking lot.

My post on Using AI in the Weekly Thing was highlighted in Josh Spector’s For the Interested 456 this week! Thanks to CJ Chilvers for the heads up. 👋

Our family enjoys escape rooms and I have maintained a list of the rooms we had done on my website for a bit. I knew it was mostly complete and for sure it had gaps. We were talking to another Escape Room Enthusiast recently and I decided it was time to get our list right. How many rooms have we done? This needed to be answered. But how?

The list I had was created from blog posts I had of rooms which was good but not complete. These days I blog pretty much every room we do, but I didn’t early on. Then I realized I had four sources of good information:

1. My Blog: This was the source of my original list. I know these entries are accurate.
2. Photos: We almost always, if not always, get a photo at the end of an escape room — but not always with our camera. Either way, my photo collection should have most rooms.
3. YNAB: We use YNAB for personal finances and we’ve certainly paid for every escape room we’ve done. We’ve never paid in cash. Also, we have kept one YNAB file for a very long time so searches for rooms should match.
4. Calendar: We’ve kept the same Apple iCloud accounts and calendars for a very long time as well, and that old data is still there. And we are diligent about keeping our calendars accurate even on trips. This was particularly useful for entries found in YNAB where we almost never paid on the same day we did the room.

After a very thorough and comprehensive scouring of all of these sources we now have 50% more rooms. We previously identified 43 and after a thorough review we are now at 65 escape rooms!

I still want to improve the information in the list. I have a spreadsheet now that is my source of truth and I’m using an overly complex formula to produce the Markdown I can use to update the website. It could also be fun to do some blog pensieve posts for some of the older rooms where I have a photo.

So now, our full and complete List of Escape Rooms!