I've recently started using ChatGPT voice chat to practice Spanish, and it works surprisingly well. I don't know if I'll have the discipline to keep doing it after the novelty wears off, but I've already spoken more Spanish in the last week than in the last fifteen years combined.

I started learning Spanish in middle school, and by the end of high school could make myself understood. I might need some circuitous phrasing to work around missing vocabulary, and I certainly abused periphrastics to avoid tricky tenses, but if I was dropped into an unfamiliar environment and needed to communicate I could do that. [1]

With minimal Spanish in my daily life, my skills have atrophied a lot. Most of my utterances over the past decade have been trying to say something to Julia without the kids understanding: "quieres ir comprar helado?" This is a poor way to maintain language skills, because "actual Spanish" isn't actually a constraint: all that matters is that Julia can understand it and the kids can't. If I forget a word, taking the English equivalent, adding an "-o", and pronouncing it as if it's Spanish still works.

I've tried to practice Spanish with other English speakers, but not only is it easy to diverge from actual Spanish, it's also much less fun than speaking freely in our stronger language. I've considered matchmaking apps, pairing with someone looking to practice English, but I don't want to do the English component, don't want to schedule calls, and expect the tech would be annoying.

Recently I realized that ChatGPT's conversational mode, which is built into the standard app, does pretty much what I want. I turned it on, said "entiendes Espanol?" and we were off. I could play with it when I had a bit of spare time, and while it's not an especially interesting conversational partner, it gets the language flowing.

There are a lot of great musicians who don't live near you, and if you hold your dance on a Saturday it's much harder to put together a tour that brings them to you. Consider a Friday evening or Sunday afternoon, or even a weekly evening slot?

Looking at the 330 contra dances tracked by TryContra, which I think is just about all of them, there's a very clear scheduling pattern:

There are more dances on Saturdays than the rest of the week put together. This makes sense: people are mostly off, and they're mostly off the next morning too. If you consider each dance in isolation, Saturday is often going to be the best choice.

The picture changes, however, when you consider tours. I live in Boston, and it doesn't make sense for me to drive 8hr round trip to NYC or Belfast ME to play a single evening. If I can make the weekend of it, though, and play Fri-Sat-Sun, the ratio of driving to playing gets a lot better. Similarly, a 12hr round trip to Philly or 16hr round trip to DC don't work on their own, but they're possible as part of being able to play Wed-Thr-Fri-Sat-Sun in Princeton, Philly, DC, Bethlehem/Chatham/Lancaster, and NYC.

EDIT: this comparison is much less clean than I thought it was: the Union Sq building has 19 garage spaces reserved for affordable units. Combining these with the permits, it's 29% of parking-eligible units having a car instead of 8%.

In 2017 I wrote:

One of the major reasons existing residents often oppose adding more housing is that as more people move in it gets harder to find on-street parking. What if we added a new category of unit that didn't come with any rights to street parking?

My city (Somerville MA) included this in our 2019 zoning overhaul, but it does have some exceptions:

This policy exempts residents that may be 'choice limited', including:

• Persons with disabilities
• Occupants of affordable dwelling units
• Residents with extenuating circumstances

While this is a compassionate approach, it means we haven't fully disconnected housing construction from parking demand. For example, there's a proposal to build a 500-unit parking-ineligible building in Davis Sq (which would no longer be the end of the Burren). It's 25% affordable units, and opponents argue that if each has a driver this would be 125 additional cars competing for street parking. But would we really get that many?

A few years ago we got a similar parking-ineligible building in Union Sq, also a short walk from a subway station:

This is 450 units, of which 20% (90) are affordable. Ashish Shrestha submitted a records request to the city, and learned that only seven units have parking permits.

While the Davis project is a little bigger, this would suggest something in the range of 10 permits, much less than feared.

This makes sense: if you're in Union or Davis, with good public transit and bike options, living without a car is pretty practical. It also saves you a lot of money, especially for folks living in affordable units.

People are often pretty short-sighted, spending money today that they'll want tomorrow. Debt makes it possible to prioritize your current self even more highly: you can spend money you haven't even earned yet. This is a trap many people fall into, and one different communities have built social defenses against.

One of the more surprisingly successful approaches is the Financial Peace (Ramsey) system, popular in evangelical Christian communities. It has a series of rules, most prominently the seven baby steps:

A common source of friction within couples or between housemates is differing quality standards. Perhaps I hate the feeling of grit under my feet but my housemate who is responsible for sweeping doesn't mind it so much. If you do chores when you notice they need doing and stop when they seem done, this works poorly: the more fastidious get frustrated, and often stew in silence or nag. Even if it's talked about kindly and openly, doing a chore before it bothers you is harder and less satisfying.

When people set out to divide chores they're usually weighing duration and discomfort. These matter, but I think people should put more weight on the standards each person has, and generally try to give tasks to the person with the highest standards in that area.

We present and formally deprecate WoFBench, a novel test that compares the knowledge of Wings of Fire superfans to frontier AI models. The benchmark showed initial promise as a challenging evaluation, but unfortunately proved to be saturated on creation as AI models produced output that was, to the extent of our ability to score responses, statistically indistinguishable from entirely correct.

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in model capabilities, but they are struggling to keep up with LLM progress: frontier models now consistently achieve high scores on many popular benchmarks, raising questions about their continued ability to differentiate between models.

In response, we introduce WoFBench, an evaluation suite designed to test recall and knowledge synthesis in the domain of Tui T. Sutherland's Wings of Fire universe.

The superfans were identified via a careful search process, in which all members of the lead author's household were asked to complete a self-assessment of their knowledge of the Wings of Fire universe. The assessment consisted of a single question, with the text "do you think you know the Wings of Fire universe better than Gemini?" Two superfans were identified, who we keep anonymous to reduce the risk of panel poaching by competing benchmark efforts.