Hello, Joshua

Something of an existentialist crisis this weekend. I’m reading some papers in the (parked) car, while Maeryn is taking her afternoon nap. I feel like there’s some potential in ideas from one paper back to the LEAf work I was doing over Christmas, so I open Claude up to build a skeleton implementation. As it does this, it throws up this message as it’s thinking:

“But Doctor, I am Pagliacci”

(oddly, my skeet on that went semi-viral in the Bluesky AI community, which was fun. Given the other horrors of February 28th, it was a nice distraction)

It has been…a week. A month, yes, but oh, a week. Work by itself has been a rollercoaster of good news, bad news, indifferent news, news that changes as the hours tick by…that sort of thing. So, no, none of the things I thought I’d be writing about this month happened; I had a very early night on Thursday instead of going out, the house has remained in a state of disarray (including an awkwardly placed pork fat container which hung around like Chekov’s gun all week until it finally went off on Saturday)…and let’s just say we’re all glad to see the back of February.

So, March now. Maeryn’s birthday is almost upon us! I am still trying to work out just how to get her the “RED CAKE!” she has requested. What shape is it going to be? Do I just dye the batter red and leave it like that, or do we do something more involved? Should I do a big red cake and little red cakes? Could I use Alex Stupak’s encapsulation method for glazing? Or just reuse the one I did for the DIE cake a few years back? Oh, the decisions…