Annoys me no end how with Todoist you can't manually sort tasks within a filter. You can manually sort within the Today view (but can't filter) or within individual projects, but not within filters. Any recs for alternatives that support manual sorting within filters?

This is also example of one reason I hate stereotyped view that ADHD = procrastination. My "time-management" 🤮 issues are often due to committing to tasks having spectacularly underestimated the time required that can't then back out of by time it's made painfully clear the actual time required.

Lovely example of how I fail to estimate time required for tasks. Decided this year to do a 'small' refresh of our quants lab workbook. Below is a visual overview of the changes for lab 9 after spending... 7 hours on the 'small' refresh. Effectively wrote 4,768 words for a 'small' refresh...

Why is it always whenever you are slightly later than usual uploading a recorded lecture that is the day the university servers decide it's going to take 60+ minutes rather than 10-20 to process it? Lecture uploaded on time, yet now technically late as still "processing".

OK after some initial research new side-project for Xmas break: "Using txtai framework to make a NotebookLM-like app without the bullshit" In other words, a local running app that focuses primarily around semantic search, with minimal - and optional - inclusion of a LLM, & none of the gimmicks.

This is what many of us have been saying. Part 3 of the Planning & Infrastructure Bill is based on a myth: that we don't have enough homes because wildlife and green spaces are protected. It will solve nothing, and inflict terrible harm on our remaining ecosystems www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

"The theory of monotropism frames the difference in cognitive functioning between autistic and non-autistic people in a value-neutral way. However, the broader autism literature has traditionally described focused interests in a negative light" @aimeespeaks.bsky.social & Sarah Dantas, Neurodiversity

Text embeddings still remain best general purpose example I've come across of way AI models can be used as a tool rather than delegate. Within Obsidian, I'm able to have a panel that surfaces any of my own notes that are similar to - but not already linked with - whichever note I have open.

NotebookLM stealthily released a non-gimmicky feature. When clicking on references it now opens the source at the referenced section. If that was its main feature, I wouldn't have many caveats recommending it to students.

Is there an easy way to figure out where I've messed up lua syntax in large files? Losing hours to misplaced curly braces and commas. I will never understand why people hate Python and YAML for having the good sense to design the language in a way that avoids such horrors.

New analysis with @ruthpatrick0.bsky.social and @kittyjstewart.bsky.social: If we are serious about trying to reduce child poverty we cannot rely on employment alone. We need serious investment in social security. largerfamilies.study/publications...

That bosses love AI despite it not living up to its promises isn't surprising. Before AI bosses were already trying to replace workers with shitty over-priced endlessly frustrating cloud 'solutions'; swooned by companies that spend vastly more on their marketing than programming team.

The International Criminal Court is ditching Microsoft Office, saying it’s too dependent on US tech, in favor of Open Desk, a German open source alternative. The move comes after Microsoft revoked ICC head Karim Khan’s email access when he was sanctioned by the US for the warrant against Netanyahu.

Continuing with genAI tells - the biggest data analysis tell was removed between 4o and 5, which was comments along the lines of "# Assuming your data is in a data frame named ...", but there remains other tells of copied/pasted ChatGPT code.

ChatGPT's love of rule of three - including in 2nd image a rule of three at the end of a rule of three. 3rd and 4th images are examples of bullet-point list rule of three.

Ah, it looks like it's "etc" if in brackets and "and so on" when not using brackets.

The switch-up between em-dash asides and bracket asides is more noticeable across whole response than paragraph by paragraph, but first image shows an example. Second image has em-dashed rule of three aside, this is within same response as first image that has bracketed rule of three aside.

Italics and bold variations. Can see in second image the new found fondness for brackets as well.

Colons are the new em-dashes.

From early testing, it looks like ChatGPT 5.1 uses em-dash significantly less. A lot of the usual tells someone has copied/pasted genAI text remain - such as obsessive rule of three - along with a few potential new ones.

Amazing title for this open letter: "Open letter: retract your unscientific AI hype" www.euractiv.com/news/stop-ov...

Grammarly's rapid descent into an outright plagiarism tool continues. Grammarly will now misleadingly report text rewritten by its AI 'humanize' feature as "Typed by a Human". www.plagiarismtoday.com/2025/11/06/h...

In NVivo training I always emphasise that with any issues encountered "It's not you, it's NVivo". Today an NVivo bug that is a perfect example of this - and I thought was long gone - came up at a training event today. This bug causes NVivo to crash because... NVivo doesn't like your printer...

How do folk survive commuting to work everyday? Had to leave house at 7am today and just got back 11 and half hours later and feeling half dead.

No idea why I slept on it for so long, but finally decided to give lazygit a go - and it has immediately surpassed my prior git workflow of relying on random aliases I created over the years & praying Control+R can find lesser used commands from my terminal history. github.com/jesseduffiel...

Impossible Challenge - Find a pro-genAI journal article that doesn't read like genAI was used at least in part to write it. There are some decent articles, yet they still have scattering of genAI phrases. Come across a few though that are questionable & won't be surprised if they end up retracted.

Very much enjoyed reading this. Perfectly timed since I'd assigned the ChatGPT short story as a reading for an AI lecture this week.

Initial work on visual refresh of the SGSSS NVivo Guidance pages now done. sgsssonline.github.io/nvivo-guidan...

There is disturbing number of journal articles promoting LLMs as making quantitative analysis 'more accessible', removing need for students to learn how to code, and similar arguments. My response - "Have you never heard of snippets?"

Amid misinformation, Wikipedia's volunteer community stands out. Editors uphold neutrality, verify sources, and log every edit.  Without corporate ads, its scale and transparent governance make it a beacon of trust. Learn more ➡️ w.wiki/7zfT

Proposal for new coding convention - a "slop" folder that is included within .gitignore and instructing LLMs via Agents-md file that it cannot edit the main code base but it can spit out example code & explanations into the "slop" folder.

Giving quickemu a try. Images for both downloaded OK, though macOS refused to work after installing so trying again. Windows couldn't find hard drive, but seems to be installing now after copy/paste of bash script from GitHub.

Linux folk - what is best option these days for running Windows and MacOS virtual machines. Was using VirtualBox, but MacOS image hasn't worked for couple years and now Windows image crashes randomly after 15-20 minutes.

Unexpected 'benefit' of being dyslexic - higher GitHub contribution stats due to any major commit being followed by "fixed typos", "fixed more typos", "yet more typos", etc commits. 273 contributions in 2025 so far, and at least half is fixing my horrendous spelling/grammar.

Progress on my first attempt at knitting.

GenAI coding is over-hyped & nowhere near as good as claimed. It's decent for short scripts - but only when the code quality doesn't matter that much. Screenshot is output from Python script to identify whether and when best to open windows to ventilate.

Are clothing sizes now done to make people feel better about themselves? Using tape measure I'm 31-32 inch waist, yet trouser waist size that best fits me is... "29" inch waist.

As well as randomly deciding to subject me to intense pain for no clear reason, my stomach also likes to punish me by holding onto and not digesting everything eaten. This creative torture method produces the delightful experience of being full yet shaky and weak from hunger at the same time.

Giving a 15 year old tea a try today. So heavily compacted gave up trying to break it apart and instead steeping whole tuo for *very* short amounts of time and slowly peeling it apart in layers after each steep.

22 items received so far and only things not going back is the Clarks shoes, which despite the decrease in quality over the years - especially for the price - at least you can depend on their sizing once find right size.

Ok this is getting ridiculous. Ordered 31 inch chinos. Arrived today and they are significantly larger in waist than my old 32 inch chinos and are even larger than my old 32 inch jeans. Have all clothes sizes inflated?

With another "small" jacket arriving that would need to be above average height to fit, it's looking like my only option is going to be buying a sowing machine... Can't end up looking any worse making my own clothes than look with mix of 10+ year old clothes and clothes that look 2 sizes too big...

Buying new clothes - or trying to - is reminder of why I never buy anything. Men's "small" jacket & it's a tent on me with sleeves nearly fully covering hands. "Small" seems to mean 5ft 10inch at the least. This is why I have a 25 year old jacket thats falling apart that I've been unable to replace.

We can build a people's railway for the 21st century 🛤️

My slides from today's AI Symposium CoSS Breakout Session: "Prompting Against the Grain - Generating Learning in AI Interactions" A polemic on critically engaging with genAI in teaching to deflate hype & challenge claims of an inevitable genAI future. sgsssonline.github.io/genai-guidan...

ChatGPT now has a 'use cases' page for students, where it is unsurprising to find the first is also the worst. If maintaining awareness of its flaws, genAI can be a semi-decent sounding board, but it gives some truly awful (and opinionated) advice on what to improve. chatgpt.com/use-cases/st...

Obsidian graph timelapse animation of my notes created and links made between them over past five years.

Hot take: Too many academics in their critiques of genAI share the same impoverished understanding of technology as the tech bros.

Worst aspect of GPT-5 in my opinion is the 'eagerness' to make assumptions and do work on the user's behalf is ridiculous. The "delegate-by-default" behaviour was always bad, but has reached whole new level of awfulness, especially with ChatGPT 5 Thinking,

Some tickets have been freed up by some attendees. Nearly my last promo post, I promise!