Title says most of it. Something has clicked for me in the past new months and I've unlocked a level of enjoyment cycling I never had before. I've always ridden by bike since I was young, but only recently have I started doing it for health and fitness, and pure enjoyment. I'm addicted to seeing just how far (and how high) I'm able to go! What really did it for me was my first ride with decent elevation. I've always driven past cyclists chugging their way up in the hills and never understood how they did it, and never thought I'd be able to. Well, all it took was trying it one day to realize that while difficult, it was totally attainable, and since then I've been hooked. This has prompted me to also start following pro cycling, which I've done on and off before, but this year I'm very much looking forward to the Tour de France.

Anyone else into this as a hobby (either doing or watching)? Anyone training for big upcoming rides, and if so what? I mostly just want to chat about what people's weekly rides look like!

I'm running a nixos linux machine with Hyperland as my window manager and a few month back (likely after an update) I noticed that firefox started showing a emoji picker when I pressed ctrl+.. This was a bit annoying since the firefox extension for my password manager is activated by that key shortcut. I figured this was some update for firefox, but now that I dug into it to fix it it turns out that it is a gtk thing that apparently each app has to opt out of! I could disable it by flipping widget.gtk.native-emoji-dialog in about:config, but this seems like a really bad choice by gtk. Two gripes with this:

1. Them adding a global keyboard shortcut for all gtk apps that is ON by default (for a kind of niche usecase).
2. Overriding shortcuts on a desktop wide basis with no meaningful (afaict) way to disable it.

Anyone knows if this is intentional? Maybe it's already been reverted upstream and I just need to update... anyway end rant!

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

There's something small that you've been meaning to do but, for whatever reason, you haven't done it. Rather than just forgetting about it, however, your brain has decided to make it take up a minor amount of space in your awareness -- not enough to make it an immediate concern or something you plan to act on, but still just enough to be annoying.

Well, this is your call to address the issue head on! Pull that mental splinter out and get rid of it for good!

Maybe you need to...

• change an air filter
• tighten your showerhead
• go through that stack of mail
• box up a return
• put more air in your bike tires
• rearrange a bookshelf
• throw out some expired cans
• vacuum behind the couch
• clean the dust out of your computer fan
• etc.

Whatever it is, this topic is your call to GO DO THE THING.

And then, come back here and tell us what you did.

One minor annoyance solved for only one person? Not a big deal.

LOTS of minor annoyances solved for LOTS of different people? GIGANTIC DEAL!

This topic is our space to communally revel in the glorious shared feeling of being slightly more annoyance-free, together.

IMPORTANT: Clearing up multiple annoyances is explicitly allowed!

I have a friend that is lucky enough to have retired at 40. A year ago he was adamant he'd never work again, having been burnt out from his time at big tech. Back then he was also an absolute AI hater and wouldn't listen to anyone who claimed LLMs were useful for programming.

He finally tried LLMs when Claude Opus 4.6 released and immediately changed his mind in the face of the overwhelming evidence that LLMs can in fact program pretty well. And now with the release of Fable 5 he's giddily creating all sorts of things that would have taken far too long to make prior to AI-accelerated software development. He actually plans to try and found his own business now. He's a very smart guy, so I hope he can make something interesting that people want.

There are a lot of AI doomers and haters. In person I mostly see people doing the same thing they've always done, but now saving time on various tasks. But this is the first time I've seen someone go from grumpy and checked out to giddy and optimistic thanks to LLMs.

My daughter (11) is doing a week long Python class, which is not using LLMs.

It got me thinking about how I learned to program in the pre-internet days (laboriously, from books), and then what a marvel it was when you could just search for information, especially for troubleshooting. But for her, the first answer in the Google search is going to be the AI summary, and most of her search tools are going to be AI tools.

I wonder if it would be possible to make an LLM that has a didactic/socratic mode. So if you said, "help me write a program to do madlibs" maybe it would give you a skeleton of a function, then prompt you to come to with a plan, then critique that plan. Or if you said, "I'm getting this error", it wouldn't just fix it, it would explain what the error means and nudge you towards the answer.

Thinking in a larger sense, it could have a rubric of important concepts, even tiers of understanding. It could be using the interactions to track the user's understanding, which could let it then tune how it answers future questions, or even be used to customize assignments.

I recognize that this is potentially replacing a teacher with a machine, which wouldn't be my goal. Good teachers are more holistic in their teaching than a machine is ever likely to be. But for people who don't have access to good teachers, or need more directed support than is available from a teacher, or just want to self study, it seems like it could be a valuable addition.

Until they solve the obsequiousness problem, it would be vulnerable to prompt hacking, so really more of a tool for someone who recognizes the value of learning over just being given the answer.

What do folks think about using such a tool? What would you want it to do, or not do?

Aside: I forgot until I reached the end of this post, but this is also (somewhat) the plot of The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrates Primer by Neal Stephenson.

Now that we know everyone's favorites, I'd love to hear about games that are further down the list -- the ones that don't necessarily rise to the high heights of definitive favoritedom.

So, share your eleventh favorite game this time. You know, the one that doesn't quite make it into your top 10.

Feel free to share your top 10 if you like as well, but lead with your 11th, as those are the ones I'm interested in seeing highlighted.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

In a moment of distraction, I fell for a phishing phone call and compromised my Google account. It took me 13 minutes to realize how catastrophically stupid I am and begin frantically changing passwords. I've run the official Google "secure your account" process probably 10 times (though 9 of those times there was nothing to do). I've checked all my financial info, changed passwords on all sorts of things. As far as I can tell, other than gaining access to my Gmail, I don't think anything else was compromised.

How boned am I? I've got 2FA on basically anything remotely important, and I've had decent password hygiene (although I do use the Google password manager, so that's probably comprimised). Is there something else I should do or be on the lookout for?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?