I recently read this divorce memoir, But You Seemed So Happy, and I found it both funny and insightful.

This one part keeps making me laugh when I think back on it. It's from a standalone essay, but I'm not sure how well the essay holds up without the context of her specific marriage. (Plus I'm pretty sure an editor gave it that miserably dumb title. I think the book chapter is just called How to Be Married.)

Step 6: Eat the Same Meals

You now eat meals together, the same meal. This is the expectation. Obviously you can snack on whatever you want. But snacking is different than meals, especially dinner meals. Did you always eat the same dinner as, say, your college roommates? No? Well that's over now. You and your favorite person eat the same thing almost every night, together. Because guess what, that's how this works. If you don't eat the same meal, people will write articles about the dangers of making different meals. Just watch. Yum-yum!

Laugh/cry.

Completely unrelated - and not actually based on Jammies in any way - I had a mini-debate with a friend on the phrase "Let's agree to disagree." I think anyone with a smidge of emotional awareness knows that when you deploy that phrase, you're provoking a surge of anger in the other person. Maybe you're a little pissed and doing so deliberately, but I don't think there's a way to convey that phrase with true neutrality. Maybe if you're almost wheedling/pleading?

My working theory is that KDrum must be descended from a long line of preachers, and he's ditched the Christian god, but kept the structures of thought, subbing artificial intelligence for the holy. Never say never, I suppose, but his version of artificial general intelligence is something that, deep down, I don't consider possible.

On the other hand, I am also (in the spirit of equity) wholly annoyed by people who play gotcha games with ChatGPT, or describe it as "just" something-or-other. This shit is amazing. A co-worker asked a moderately thorny database design question in Slack the other day, and some of the senior folks weighed in with suggestions of varying helpfulness. I fed the question, unaltered, to ChatGPT, and it gave us back tables with foreign keys, nullable fields, and relationships to other tables marked, and it also described how to handle add/remove/change operations with these constraints, and it explained why this approach was good. Another co-worker sent the answer to his database administrator father, who gave it a stamp of approval. If this is "just" guessing the next most likely word, then guessing the next most likely word is an incredibly powerful technique.

We're going to Enchanted Rock for a day trip today. It's a nice place to hike around, from what I remember 20 years ago, when I was last there. I expect it to be packed - we had to make a reservation a few weeks ago to secure entry.

There is an unsanctioned cave that people go in, and follow little spray-painted arrows, and come out 30 minutes later. I'm not entirely sure if I will feel up to leading whichever Geeblets are game into the cave or not. But I'm imagining if the park is crowded enough, there will be other people trying it out, too, and it would be possible to glom on to someone.

Sample review:

We climbed Enchanted Rock and traveled through the cave. It was $7/person to enter the park and there are trails to the summit (don't do the loop trail if you are want to go to the summit). Once you arrive at the summit continue to the top of the rock. You will walk down the back side where you will find the cave opening (see image below). Once you are in the cave someone has spray painted pink dots and arrows to help lead the way. You will need a headlamp once you are inside. Be prepared to get dirty and to squeeze through some tight spaces. Some rocks will be slippery if it has recently rained and hiking shoes will make your caving experience more enjoyable. Once you finish caving you will climb back over the rock to the summit or you must bushwhack down if it has been raining. We would not recommend if you are not in good shape, have a large body frame, you are afraid of tight spaces and don't have a sense of adventure. We had a great time only wish we had checked the weather since we bushwhacked through pouring rain, thunderstorms and lightening.

It's kind of wild in the age of lawsuits that something like this is still going strong. I always enjoy the giant gap between the type of risks we monitor most tightly for liability CYA reasons (ie signs telling you not to take a stroller on a moving sidewalk) vs the risks that we leave most available for individuals. This cave is a peculiar one where I'm vaguely surprised that the risk of a lawsuit hasn't shut the whole thing down yet.

The big downside is that it is absolutely packed with daddy longlegs. I did go in the cave the last time I was there, but I'm not particularly attached to doing it this time.

I'm wondering about college admissions after affirmative action is struck down, assuming that comes to pass. I think we all are clear that it will make things worse for access and opportunity, and make inequality generally go in the wrong direction.

I'm curious about how it could go, if you had a progressive administration at a campus who was dedicated to saying, "okay, let's figure out a way to improve admissions that still complies with the recent Supreme Court ruling." Is the answer to double-down on SES-based economic diversity?

Tell me if this is ludicrous wishful thinking: suppose you have a Venn diagram of racism and poverty, as obstacles to class mobility. If you can only structure your help to focus on the poverty side of the Venn diagram, how does that impact the communities of color? Here's the wishful/hopeful thinking part: could you make the case that the group in the intersection was already locked out of race-based affirmative action, and could possibly now have more access than before?

Here's the downer/bummer counterargument that I see: strictly by the numbers, if you're only allowed SES-based admissions, there are so many more poor white kids than anything else that they'll swamp the system, and the compounding effect of racial bias will mean that it still won't meaningfully get to the kids in the intersection.

Is there appetite for a dedicated thread? Otherwise I have a lot of frivolous topics lined up for posts.