I needed a wetlands permit to put a pipe in a ditch because it had a 4 inch trickle of water flowing through it. The federal government made me pay for an archeologist to search the ditch for shipwrecks. Fortunately there weren't any. Also needed an archeologist on site during all ground work because it was within 10 miles of a Civil War battlefield (all of Northern Virginia is within 10 miles of a battlefield - doesn't seem to bother the data centers).

The process took two years and cost $30,000. Good thing they didn't find any spotted owls.

I forget the terminology, but there's a classification where FEMA determines flood risk by a topographical map, and they overestimate. If you buy land in that category, you can pay for a boots-on-the-ground survey and typically get the flood zone size reduced somewhat.

Like the warbling all EVs do at low speeds. It's louder and more annoying than a regular car.

When I'm helping my kids with their homework, and there's a concept that I know well, but I just don't know how to teach it, I turn to ChatGPT.

"Tell me how to teach division by sharing to a 2nd grader."

I get back a simple, straightforward, step by step set of kid friendly instructions. It's really great! Use the tools!

My kids (in the US) have school laptops and the only thing they do with them is worksheets. Nothing interactive. It's just to save paper and check the box that they're using computers.

On the flip side, one of my kids had a paper take home test with some questions where the answers were drag and drop. The teacher just printed out an online test and didn't even read it first.

It's thought to be 80% hereditary. It's also thought there are from 2 to 4 distinct types of autism, like how ADHD has 2 types.

Lots of scientists and inventors throughout history had autistic traits and would probably meet the diagnostic criteria today. The book Neurotribes by Steve Silberman goes into great depth about the history. Good read.

I bought a new Windows 11 laptop for my kid and it came locked in "S Mode" and would only install software from Microsoft. I had to jump through flaming hoops to get it turned off. How do they get away with that?

I'm having a hard time helping my kids with their math homework because every concept has some weird trick to get to the answer and they have to repeat that trick on the tests to get credit. So first I have to go and learn the trick myself and then help them.

I do remember my own Dad having the same issue from time to time when I was a kid, but it's gone to an extreme today.

To be honest, the first thing I did was go to ChatGPT and ask it to list alternatives to Google heatmap. It gave a list of several and a chart comparing all of them. I picked one and had Sonnet implement it. It's like having a team of junior developers working for me that never complain about anything.

What AI can't do is to take a whole feature off the backlog and implement it. Yet.

This is an actual prompt I sent through VS Code Github Copilot to Claude Sonnet 4.5:

"This Angular component uses Google Maps API heatmap to render data. Google's heatmap has been deprecated. Change this component to use deck.gl heatmap instead."

IT DID IT. First time. No errors. No bugs. ~45 seconds. It even installed the packages.

How can you not find that amazing?!

I don't consider myself to be an important enough person for any corporation to care what I do online or IRL. I don't use any ad blockers or block any cookies, in the hopes that they'll harvest enough data to start serving me ads for things I want to buy. (They don't.)

I'm almost totally face blind. After long enough, I can figure it out, but context matters. I wouldn't recognize a co-worker at the grocery store. And ask me to describe what someone looks like? Nope.

When there are people in my dreams, they don't have faces. I know who the person is and can hear their voice, but the face just isn't part of the dream.

Yeah, right. Kind of like all the federal employees who just got a 41 day paid vacation.

My kids school just shut down. They got a packet of worksheets each Monday and a one hour zoom meeting each Friday for two years.

I think that comment was very relevant.

High school is a place to learn work skills or to discover a subject that you might want to go to college for and turn into a career. They should teach the kids how to make a Roblox game. If the logic and reasoning makes their brain tingle, then go deeper. P vs. NP? That's just going to turn kids off.

The only thing I learned from high school chemistry class is that I didn't want to be a chemist.