Bonus happy goats: a neighbour dropped off a bucket of apple peels. The goats like the apple peels so much they mostly ignored the geese, who also really liked the apple peels (but you'll notice the goats gave the geese a wide berth: geese are jerks)

The forecast went back down to 0 for tonight, with an official frost advisory. So I'm glad we planned for frost tonight even though it was looking iffy earlier. There are no more frosty looking temperatures in the next week, so hopefully we'll keep getting garden produce a little bit longer, we'll see how much damage happens tonight.

Harvested the monster zucchinis, non-monster corn, the last of the shallots, most of the onions, and some potatoes, beets and carrots for good measure (they will be totally fine with a light frost, I just want to eat them).

Then we put straw hats on all the squash and pumpkins - the vines will die tonight, but the squash will be fine out in the field with just a little cover, it's not THAT cold yet. We also put row-cover over the tomatoes, maybe we can get a few more days of tomatoes.

Finally, one of these little thunderstorms is going to rain on us instead of disappearing! (I hope. I maybe just jinxed it. Gosh we need some rain...)

I've got family coming to visit today (YAY) but that means I need to do a whole bunch of cleaning and organizing, including freezing/dehydrating a bunch of veggies I picked yesterday, I need to send off 2 letters for review for the American Astronomical Society to officially comment on stupid things that are proposed to happen in orbit, do a little bit of writing, and the goats are insistent that I need to move the fence to new grass today.

Last time I was on a BBC podcast I tried to describe one of the pieces of debris that fell as about the size and shape of the hood of a semi truck. The very proper hosts with very proper British accents paused for a few seconds and then very politely asked "...a what?" And I stammered something like "uhhh... a lorry? Is that a lorry?"

And then they cut in me saying "lorry" in a different tone of voice over "semi truck" and it doesn't even make sense. Wish me luck with my English words today!

Today's only(?) media interview is for the BBC Rethink podcast. There's construction going on outside my office on campus, so this'll be another record-from-home-and-hope-my-non-Starlink-rural-internet-doesn't-crap-out.

@Strider_UK @sidereal There's a big difference between spellcheck and LLMs that are built on stolen IP. You know that.

RE: https://raggedfeathers.com/@lilithsaintcrow/117020904859904785

The book contract I signed a few days ago has a "no genAI" clause. Neither I, the author, nor the editor/publisher are allowed to use genAI. I am extremely happy about having that written officially in the document!

The astronomy cloud computing system is down. Again.

(It is down a lot, but I don't use it that often lately. Otherwise I would complain a lot more)

Always makes me so sad that there's just buttloads of money being dumped into AI data centers so people can make awful slop no one wants, but the science computing infrastructure is held together with hope, duct tape, and someone's leftover grant money from 5 years ago.