Ooh good tips, thanks!

Awww!!!!

When I lived in LA we would head for Cottonwood Cove on Lake Mohave for long weekends, camping and water skiing. Fun.

As a kid my dad did not fish, but mom remembered her days riding so we went to dude ranches in the U.P. and in Wisconsin, or we went to visit relatives.

WTG, Janet's family had vacations much like yours, maybe even the same lakes.

😀😀😀

Yep, our camp lantern is LED. The other thing that's nice is that all of our rooms and bathrooms have light colored walls, so a little light goes a long way. Also, Mr SK said he's never letting the car's gas tank get that low again. Actually we were super careful during covid, but we've gotten away from that. And the supermarket, where we also get gas, is so close to our new house, I'm sure he didn't think of it. Oh, and this storm kind of came out of no where, usually we have warning a few days in advance, and then the morning of etc. This one, I happened to be at home (thank goodness!) and I got a notice on my phone and yelled down to Mr. SK "there's a storm warning" and then like 30 seconds after that, the wind smashed into the house, and then after about another minute, we lost power. Crazy.

The quiz was fun! I got 23 out of 30 correct, not bad I guess.

Last fall, I had my students do an AI activity in class, and this was one of the things I really drilled into them, that false information from AI is really hard to detect because it seems legit. Often, it’s plausible, which is part of it, but more than that, it’s because the language is so well-constructed, i.e., there are no grammatical mistakes, the word choice is not only good but natural, the response fits the query quite well etc. Oh, and one other thing: AI output in response to a query is almost always pretty long. Rather than one or two sentences, you often get several paragraphs, and the sheer amount of text can sometimes be overwhelming.

And because of all that, the user has a hard time approaching it with an appropriate degree of suspicion, which ends up making the user gullible and almost too easily convinced. And if your goal is to not be fooled by AI, there’s sort of an embedded catch 22 there, because the most reliable way to detect an AI hallucination is when the topic and content are things the user knows, but the catch 22 is that if you already know, you’re not going to be asking AI.

BTW here’s the activity we did: in the latter half of the semester, I had students work in groups to put together a set of essay type questions based on material covered in the first half of the semester. The idea was that this was all information and ideas that the students knew very well, because we’d spent the last 8-10 weeks talking about it. After crafting all the questions and creating rubrics with the kinds of info/content they’d want to see in the answers, each group asked two questions to AI and then evaluated and scored the answers.

Students were very critical of the quality of the answers. There weren’t a lot of flat-out wrong answers, but AI scored low across the board for things like lack of depth, missing the main point of the questions, and so on. The students pretty much felt that the AI answers seemed like something coming from someone who didn’t really know anything about the subject and was just trying fake it by throwing out a lot of commonly known tidbits.

I won’t teach that class again until Spring 2025, so it will be interesting to see if 1) this kind of exercise is still relevant, and 2) how well the AI performs if we do it.

Yes, I did notice a few places where the contrast could be better. But I almost never take my iPad outside, so not a huge prob for me.

There's also an "x" to close a window that's pretty much invisible until you roll a cursor over it on a laptop. And some other buttons that do the same . But overall it seems to be a good skin.

Anybody else experimented with the skins? Found anything you love?

Canine Lyme and leptospirosis vaccines have the highest rate of side effects. And the need for them tends to be regional, so they aren't included in the core vaccine protocols and they get bumped to non-core and are administered when the risk of the disease outweighs the risk of possible side effects. Almost no vets around here do Lyme, but some do lepto even though it's not a very good vaccine. But incidence of lepto is on the rise, so it's better than nothing.

I had Lyme in 2019 after a trip to our Door County house. Lots of deer in the area. Never saw a tick, but a few days after I got back I got the rash on my neck. My PCP thought I had some kind of heat or allergic rash and was going to send me off to the dermatologist, but I alerted him as to where I had recently traveled. He said he doubted it was Lyme but ordered the blood tests anyway. Came back positive big time (doc was pretty surprised at my immune response) and I went on doxycycline for three weeks. My rash subsided by half after the first dose of the antibiotic. Haven't had any problems since. Glad I didn't get chronic Lyme, which can be nasty.

@Jodi Thanks! What a lot of cookies in that list.

@wtg 😀😀😀

wow!!

I’m so sorry. 🙁♥️♥️

Thanks everyone! We’re both overjoyed.

@Quirt-Evans said in My experience w local piano movers:

That was when the intensity of the phone calls to arrange the disassemblers seemed to increase.

Good grief!! It's so frustrating when you have to push people to do their jobs right...